To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.

There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.

Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models; and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled.