The first business of philosophy is to account for things as they are; and till our theories will do this, they ought not to be the ground of any practical conclusion.

A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.

Whether the law of marriage be instituted or not, the dictate of nature and virtue seems to be an early attachment to one woman.

It may at first appear strange, but I believe it is true, that I cannot by means of money raise a poor man and enable him to live much better than he did before, without proportionably depressing others in the same class.

To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.

No move towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes has taken place in the five or six thousand years that the world has existed.

Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.