To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

There is a native baseness in the ambition which seeks beyond its desert, that never shows more conspicuously than when, no matter how, it temporarily gains its object.

Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption, also.

Modesty is policy, no less than virtue.

What we call vice in our neighbor may be nothing less than a crude virtue. To him who knows nothing more of precious stones than he can learn from a daily contemplation of his breastpin, a diamond in the mine must be a very uncompromising sort of stone.

Distinction is an eminence that is attained but too frequently at the expense of a fireside.

But for that blindness which is inseparable from malice, what terrible powers of evil would it possess! Fortunately for the world, its venom, like that of the rattlesnake, when most poisonous, clouds the eye of the reptile, and defeats its aim.