A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand.
Where power is absent we may find the robe of genius, but we miss the throne.
Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked. God sometimes sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the chastisement of mankind; none of them surely for our admiration.
Cats ask plainly for what they want.
The flame of anger, bright and brief, sharpens the barb of love.
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.