Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.

The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.

My books are friends that never fail me.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

Literature is the thought of thinking souls.

O thou who art able to write a book which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner.

A fair day's wages for a fair day's work.