When authors and critics talk of the sublime, they see not how nearly it borders on the ridiculous.

From such beginnings of governments, what could be expected, but a continual system of war and extortion?

Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state. The construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity.

It will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded.

It is not because a part of the government is elective, that makes it less a despotism, if the persons so elected, possess afterwards, as a parliament, unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.