Obey; this may be right; but beware of reverence.... Government is nothing but regulated force; force is its appropriate claim upon your attention. It is the business of individuals to persuade; the tendency of concentrated strength, is only to give consistency and permanence to an influence more compendious than persuasion.

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

Books gratify and excite our curiosity in innumerable ways.

Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound ... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil.