- Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
- To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
- The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.
- The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.
- Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
- The march of the human mind is slow.
- Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.
- …A great empire and little minds go ill together.
- The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
- The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.
- To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.
- When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
- Tyrants seldom want pretexts.
- You can never plan the future by the past.
- Man is by his constitution a religious animal.
- It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
- A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
- Learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
- Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
- Good order is the foundation of all good things.
- Laws, like houses, lean on one another.
- The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
- Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
- Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed.
- If any ask me what a free government is, I answer, that for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so.
- Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.
- Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference, which is, at least, half infidelity.
- Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, can never willingly abandon it.
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