He [Charles II] was utterly without ambition. He detested business, and would sooner have abdicated his crown than have undergone the trouble of really directing the administration.

Boswell is the first of biographers.

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.

In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.

To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.