No maxim can be more pernicious than that which would teach us to consult the temper of the times, and to tell only so much as we imagine our contemporaries will be able to bear.

Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason.

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.

There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.

Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions.

The diligent scholar is he that loves himself, and desires to have reason to applaud and love himself.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error, is not, by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.