Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.
We never could clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing.
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.
Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school--its abstract doctrines for the initiated; its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.
History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.
The Saviour of mankind Himself, in whose blameless life malice could find no act to impeach, has been called in question for words spoken.
What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one,--and that is not only true, but identical,--that men always act from self-interest.
Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.
Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.
A man who should act, for one day, on the supposition that all the people about him were influenced by the religion which they professed would find himself ruined by night.
Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary.
The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.
As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.
Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.
The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.
Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.
This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.
Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.
History begins in novel and ends in essay.
Thus our democracy was from an early period the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic.
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