Great Throughts Treasury

"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion."

"The true way to mourn the dead is to take care of the living who belong to them."

"The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own."

"The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice, and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man."

"The only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle."

"The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned into it), are the natural securities for this transmission."

"To innovate is not to reform."

"To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting."

"Tyrants seldom want pretexts."

"There is a courageous wisdom; there is also a false reptile prudence, the result, not of caution, but of fear."

"War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated. Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals; they pervert their natural taste and relish of equity and justice. By teaching us to consider our fellow-citizens in a hostile light, the whole body of our nation becomes gradually less dear to us. The very nature of affection and kindred, which were the bond of charity, whilst we agreed, become new incentives to hatred and rage, when the communion of our country is dissolved."

"War never leaves, where it found a nation."

"Whatever disunites man from God disunites man from man."

"When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

"Where mystery begins religion ends."

"You can never plan the future by the past."

"All Empires have been cemented in blood."

"Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver."

"He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper."

"As wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other."

"All happiness [is]… connected with the practice of virtue, which necessarily depends on the knowledge of truth."

"History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn."

"Man is to a great degree a creature of his own making and, when made as he ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place in the creation."

"Religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort."

"Peace implies reconciliation."

"In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority."

"Religious persecution may shield itself under the guides of a mistaken and over-zealous piety."

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

"Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together."

"Society is indeed a contract . . . it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

"The greatest joy in nature is the absence of man."

"The first accounts we have of mankind are but accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood."

"The heart of the art of diplomacy is to grant graciously what you no longer have the power to withhold."

"The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice."

"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."

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

"There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom."

"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."

"Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none."

"Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combination of skill and force, can do in his favor."

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

"We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt."

"A nation without the means of reform is without the means of survival."

"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing."

"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."

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

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

"Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair."

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."

"Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant."