What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.
An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.
None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours.
Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?
To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.
A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.
The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.
I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.
People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.
To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.
I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.