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The press is the foe of rhetoric, but the friend of reason.

Charles Caleb Colton

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Charles Caleb Colton
Died: 1832
Died: January 1
Priest
Writer
Charles Colton
Presses
Press
Friend
Reason
Foe
Rhetoric

More quotes by Charles Caleb Colton

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Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The integrity that lives only on opinion would starve without it.
Charles Caleb Colton
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A leveller has long ago been set down as a ridiculous and chimerical being, who, if he could finish his work to-day, would have to begin it again tomorrow.
Charles Caleb Colton
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It is sufficiently humiliating to our nature to reflect that our knowledge is but as she rivulet, our ignorance as the sea. On points of the highest interest, the moment we quit the light of revelation we shall find that Platonism itself is intimately connected with Pyrrhonism, and the deepest inquiry with the darkest doubt.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Some frauds succeed from the apparent candor, the open confidence, and the full blaze of ingenuousness that is thrown around them. The slightest mystery would excite suspicion and ruin all. Such stratagems may be compared to the stars they are discoverable by darkness and hidden only by light.
Charles Caleb Colton
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In its primary signification, all vice, that is, all excess, brings on its own punishment, even here. By certain fixed, settled and established laws of Him who is the God of nature, excess of every kind destroys that constitution which temperance would preserve. The debauchee offers up his body a living sacrifice to sin.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Attempts at reform, when they fail, strengthen despotism, as he that struggles tightens those cords he does not succeed in breaking.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Avarice has ruined more men than prodigality, and the blindest thoughtlessness of expenditure has not destroyed so many fortunes as the calculating but insatiable lust of accumulation.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Neutrality is no favorite with Providence, for we are so formed that it is scarcely possible for us to stand neuter in our hearts, although we may deem it prudent to appear so in our actions
Charles Caleb Colton
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The acquirements of science may be termed the armour of the mind but that armour would be worse than useless, that cost us all we had, and left us nothing to defend.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Repartee is perfect when it effects its purpose with a double edge. It is the highest order of wit, as it indicates the coolest yet quickest exercise of genius, at a moment when the passions are roused.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Heroism, self-denial, and magnanimity, in all instances where they do not spring from a principle of religion, are but splendid altars on which we sacrifice one kind of self-love to another.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There are two things that bestow consequence great possession, or great debts.
Charles Caleb Colton
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The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. The mistakes of the wise man are known to himself, but not to the world.
Charles Caleb Colton
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There is this difference between happiness and wisdom he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Temperate men drink the most, because they drink the longest.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.
Charles Caleb Colton
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We shall at all times chance upon men of recondite acquirements, but whose qualifications, from the incommunicative and inactive habits of their owners, are as utterly useless to others as though the possessors had them not.
Charles Caleb Colton