Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.

The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.

Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.