Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.

The measure of any man's virtue is what he would do, if he had neither the laws nor public opinion, nor even his own prejudices, to control him.

Common sense, to most people, is nothing more than their own opinions.

Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.

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.

To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.