An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof. If you reject it you are unhappy, if you accept it you are undone.

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.

The highest price we can pay for anything; is to ask it.

If in argument we can make a man angry with us, we have drawn him from his vantage ground and overcome him.

We listen to those whom we know to be of the same opinion as ourselves, and we call them wise for being of it; but we avoid such as differ from us.

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for never is life so low or so little as when occupied with the present.

Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who thinks differently from him.