A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.

Death puts an end to rivalship and competition. The dead can boast no advantage over us, nor can we triumph over them.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.

Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.

People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.

Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.