Power, safely defied, touches its downfall.

A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.

Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.

Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting established systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd suppose.

No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

So true it is, that nature has caprices which art cannot imitate.

Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.