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It is seldom that statesmen have the option of choosing between a good and an evil.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Good
Statesmanship
Statesmen
Option
Choosing
Seldom
Evil

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Novels may teach us as wholesome a moral as the pulpit. There are sermons in stones, in healthy books, and good in everything.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Opinions, like showers, are generated in high places, but they invariably descend into lower ones, and ultimately flow down to the people as rain unto the sea.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Sleep, the type of death, is also, like that which it typifies, restricted to the earth. It flies from hell and is excluded from heaven.
Charles Caleb Colton
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If once a woman breaks through the barriers of decency, her ease is desperate and if she goes greater lengths than the men, and leaves the pale of propriety farther behind her, it is because she is aware that all return is prohibited, and by none so strongly as by her own sex.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Literature has her quacks no less than medicine, and they are divided into two classes those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth we shall get second-hand sense from the one, and original nonsense from the other.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Fortune has been considered the guardian divinity of fools and, on this score, she has been accused of blindness but it should rather be adduced as a proof of her sagacity, when she helps those who cannot help themselves.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There are both dull correctness and piquant carelessness it is needless to say which will command the most readers and have the most influence.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A power above all human responsibility ought to be above all human attainment.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The sun should not set upon our anger, neither should he rise upon our confidence. We should forgive freely, but forget rarely. I will not be revenged, and this I owe to my enemy but I will remember, and this I owe to myself.
Charles Caleb Colton
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If you are under obligations to many, it is prudent to postpone the recompensing of one, until it be in your power to remunerate all otherwise you will make more enemies by what you give, than by what you withhold.
Charles Caleb Colton
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When certain persons abuse us, let us ask ourselves what description of characters it is that they admire we shall often find this a very consolatory question.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Antithesis may be the blossom of wit, but it will never arrive at maturity unless sound sense be the trunk and truth the root.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The temple of truth is built indeed of stones of crystal, but, inasmuch as men have been concerned in rearing it, it has been consolidated by a cement composed of baser materials.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Charles Caleb Colton
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To judge by the event is an error all commit: for in every instance courage, if crowned with success, is heroism if clouded by defeat, temerity. When Nelson fought his battle in the Sound, it was the result alone that decided whether he was to kiss a hand at court or a rod at a court-martial.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton
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War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.
Charles Caleb Colton