The assailant is often in the right; that the assailed is always.

There is a desire of property in the sanest and best men, which Nature seems to have implanted as conservative of her works, and which is necessary to encourage and keep alive the arts.

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language.

Ambition does not see the earth she treads on: The rock and the herbage are of one substance to her.

Cruelty, if we consider it as a crime, is the greatest of all; if we consider it as a madness, we are equally justifiable in applying to it the readiest and the surest means of oppression.

I would recommend a free commerce both of matter and mind. I would let men enter their own churches with the same freedom as their own houses; and I would do it without a homily or graciousness or favor, for tyranny itself is to me a word less odious than toleration.

That which moveth the heart most is the best poetry; it comes nearest unto God, the source of all power.