Great Throughts Treasury

"By persuading others, we convince ourselves."

"Even legal punishments lose all appearance of justice, when too strictly inflicted on men compelled by the last extremity of distress to incur them."

"Guilt is a poor, helpless, dependent being. Without the alliance of able, diligent, and let me add, fortunate fraud, it is inevitably undone. If the guilty culprit be obstinately silent, it forms a deadly presumption against him; if he speaks, talking tends only to his discovery, and his very defense often furnishes the materials for his conviction."

"How much easier it is to be generous than just! Men are sometimes bountiful who are not honest. "

"I hold myself indebted to any one from whose enlightened understanding another ray of knowledge communicates to mine. Really to inform the mind is to correct and enlarge the heart."

"The sequence of requests is obligation."

"One precedent creates another. They soon accumulate, and constitute law. What yesterday was fact, to-day is doctrine. Examples are supposed to justify the most dangerous measures; and where they; do not suit exactly the defect is supplied by analogy."

"No reasonable man would be eager to possess himself of the invidious power of inflicting punishment, if he were not predetermined to make use of it. "

"To attack vices in the abstract, without touching persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with shadows."

"Liberal minds are open to conviction. Liberal doctrines are capable of improvement. There are proselytes from atheism; but none from superstition."

"The vices operate like age, bring on disease before its time and in the prime of youth, leave the character broken and exhausted."

"Let all your views of life be directed to a solid, however moderate, independence; without it no man can be happy, nor even honest. "

"Injuries may be atoned for, and forgiven; but insults admit of no compensation. They degrade the mind in its own esteem, and force it to recover its level by revenge. "

"It is an eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that “where one member suffers, all the members suffer with it." "

"There is a wholly mistaken zeal in politics as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves."

"Vanity indeed is a venial error; for it usually carries its own punishment with it. "