In general the languages of most unpolished people have a great force and energy of expression; and this is but natural. Uncultivated people are but ordinary observers of things, and not critical in distinguishing them; but, for that reason, they admire more, and are more affected with what they see, and therefore express themselves in a warmer and more passionate manner.
War never leaves where it found a nation.
Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.
It is known that the taste--whatever it is--is improved exactly as we improve our judgment, by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise.
Restraint and discipline and examples of virtue and justice. These are the things that form the education of the world.
War is the matter which fills all history; and consequently the only, or almost the only, view in which we can see the external of political society is in a hostile shape: and the only actions to which we have always seen, and still see, all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another.
Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume.
Man is an animal that cooks his victuals.
Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition.
The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men to each govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience.
I find along with many virtues in my countrymen there is a jealousy, a soreness, and readiness to take offence, as if they were the most helpless and impotent of mankind, and yet a violence... and a boistrousness in their resentment, as if they had been puffed up with the highest prosperity and power. they will not only be served, but it must also be in their own way and on their own principles and even in words and language that they liked... which renders it very difficult for a plain unguarded man as I am to have anything to do with them or their affairs.
That cardinal virtue, temperance.
Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.
I dread our own power, and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded... We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing, and hitherto unheard-of-power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.
By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.
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.
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.
Unsociable humors are contracted in solitude, which will, in the end, not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them or ourselves better by flying from or quarreling with them.
No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy.
Beauty is the promise of happiness.
"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.
There ought to be system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.
An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.
Whenever government abandons law, it proclaims anarchy.
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