Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

History, is made up of the bad actions of extraordinary men and woman. All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have been extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that have befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires.

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,-a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.