FridayMay 15, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
The more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of the wisdom of Him who made it.
Never, no, never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another.
The wisdom of our ancestors.
All wealth is power, so power must infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other.
'War,' says Machiavelli, 'ought to be the only study of a prince;' and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. 'He ought,' says this great political doctor, 'to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans. 'A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.
I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.
And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.
My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron.
Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions; any bungler can add to the old; but is it altogether wise to have no other bounds to your impositions than the patience of those who are to bear them?
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
My vigour relents,I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.
The worthy gentleman who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of the contest, whilst his desires were as warm and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.
A wise and salutary neglect.
They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the Rights of Man.
Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,glittering like the morning star full of life and splendour and joy.... Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men,in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.
In their nomination to office they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function.
The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference, which is, at least, half infidelity.
By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.
Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.
In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed and the boldest staggered.
Illustrious predecessor.
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.
There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
He was not merely a chip of the old block, but the old block itself.
All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.
Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.
The men of England, the men, I mean, of light and leading in England.
Of this stamp is the cant of, Not men, but measures.
The march of the human mind is slow.
To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is not to be a king. However, a political executive magistracy, though merely such, is a great trust.
Vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
The true danger is, when liberty is nibbled away for expedients, and by parts.
The only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them.
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed.
Those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies some description must be uppermost. The levellers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.
It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equitythe law of nature, and of nations.
Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray, to not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone.
All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
Good order is the foundation of all things.
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
When a great man has some one object in view to be achieved in a given time, it may be absolutely necessary for him to walk out of all the common roads.
Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.
Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Falsehood is a perennial spring.
All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.
Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.
Custom reconciles us to everything.
There is a courageous wisdom; there is also a false reptile prudence, the result, not of caution, but of fear.
It has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.
Contempt is not a thing to be despised.
I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard than in the tomb of the Capulets.
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.
He was not merely a chip off the old block, but the old block itself.
That chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound.
Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.
There never was a bad man that had ability for good service.
Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security.
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
There is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners, yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.
Too much idleness, I have observed, fills up a man's time much more completely, and leaves him less his own master, than any other sort of employment whatsoever.
We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.
When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us, nor can we know distinctly to what port to steer.
The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does no remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.
To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them, are for the greater part ignorant of Both the character they leave and of the character they Assume.
You can never plan the future by the past.
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
An event... upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded: and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
As wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other.
The people are the masters.
The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse.
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security.
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.
Education is the cheap defense of nations.
Equity money is dynamic and debt money is static.
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.
The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blanches, the thought that never wanders, the purpose that never wavers - these are the masters of victory.
Let us only suffer any person to tell us his story morning And evening, but for twelve months, and he will become our master.
Mere parsimony is not economy....Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part of true economy.
Prudence is a quality incompatible with vice, And can never be effectively enlisted in its cause.
The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.
Good order is the foundation of all good things.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Terms of use and copyrights
