Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

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...

To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.

Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at...

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the...

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...

We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Charles V. said that a man who knew four languages was worth four men; and Alexander the Great so valued learning, that he used to say he was more indebted to Aristotle for giving him...

Reform, that we may preserve.

She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

Such night in England ne’er had been, nor ne’er again shall be.

To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature...

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.

He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf… For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in...

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.

Time advances: facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch...

The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.

The English Bible — a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.