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

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

The most baleful mischiefs may be expected from the unmanly conduct of not daring to face truth because it is unpleasing.

The friend of the present order of things condemns all political speculations in the gross.

The labouring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving they seldom exercise it, but all that is beyond their present neccessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale house.

To estimate the value of Newton's discoveries, or the delight communicated by Shakespeare and Milton, by the price at which their works have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in which they have elevated and enchanted their country; nor would it be less grovelling and incongruous to estimate the benefit which the country has derived from the Revolution of 1688, by the pay of the soldiers, and all other payments concerned in effecting it.

The perpetual tendency of the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature, which we can have no reason to expect to change.