The good-humor of a man elated with success often displays itself towards enemies.

The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.

That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.

I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.

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

A government cannot be wrong in punishing fraud or force, but it is almost certain to be wrong if, abandoning its legitimate function, it tells private individuals that it knows their business better than they know it themselves.

In the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched roofed hut stood on what was later the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.