The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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

Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.

Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.

There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain; there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.