Our possessions are wholly in our performances. He owns nothing to whom the world owes nothing.

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

I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.

We must calculate not on the weather, nor on fortune, but upon God and ourselves. He may fail us in the gratification of our wishes, but never in the encounter with our exigencies.

Genius is the very eye of intellect and the wing of thought; it is always in advance of its time, and is the pioneer for the generation which it precedes.

Revelation may not need the help of reason, but man does, even when in possession of revelation. Reason may be described as the candle in the man's hand, to which revelation brings the necessary flame.

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.