Reform, that we may preserve.

Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.

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.

The hearts of men are their books; events are their tutors; great actions are their eloquence.

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.

The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.