Great Throughts Treasury

"Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings."

"Fellowship in treason is a bad ground of confidence."

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

"Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security."

"Custom reconciles us to everything."

"Comparisons are odious."

"A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman."

"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter."

"‘Tis the beginning of hell in this life, and a passion not to be excused. Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse: envy alone wants both."

"A vigorous mind is as necessarily accompanied with violent passions as a great fire with great heat."

"A state without some means of change is without the means of its conservation."

"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter....Man acts from motives relative to his interest; and not on metaphysical speculations."

"Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he love us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial."

"An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror."

"All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and founder of society."

"Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny."

"An enlightened self-interest, which, when well understood, they tell us will identify with an interest more enlarged and public."

"Curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections; it changes its object perpetually; it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied, and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness and anxiety."

"As those things which engage us merely by their novelty cannot attach us for any length of time, curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections."

"Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever; but, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure, that he may speak it the longer."

"Dangers, by being despised, grow great."

"Equity money is dynamic and debt money is static."

"Education is the cheap defense of nations."

"Fraud is the ready minister of injustice."

"Good order is the foundation of all good things."

"It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observation of time and place and of decency in general that what is called taste consists; and which is in reality no other that a more refined judgment. The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment."

"Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for, (including) the want of sufficient restraint upon their passions."

"He that wrestles us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skills. Our antagonist is our helper."

"He censures God who quarrels with the imperfections of men."

"Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises; for never intending to go beyond promises; it costs nothing."

"Great mischiefs happen more often from folly, meanness, and vanity, than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition."

"It becomes extremely hard to disentangle our idea of the cause from the effect by which we know it."

"If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear and hope will forward it; and they who persist in opposing this mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be so much resolute and firm as perverse and obstinate."

"If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed."

"It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more efficiently, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives."

"Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together."

"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors."

"Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle."

"Liberty, without wisdom, is license."

"Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue."

"Public calamity is a mighty leveler."

"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds."

"Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions that the art of painting."

"Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals; they supply them or they totally destroy them."

"Philosophical happiness is to want little; civil or vulgar happiness is to want much and enjoy much."

"The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is curiosity."

"The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blenches, the thought that never wanders - these are the masters of victory."

"The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience."

"The great difference between the real statesman and the pretender is, that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts on expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for immortality."

"The method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation, is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew."