None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.

I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake; and I can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God.

We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.

Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.

Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received.

Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school--its abstract doctrines for the initiated; its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.