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There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.

Herman Melville

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Herman Melville
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: August 1
Died: 1891
Died: September 28
Art Collector
Essayist
Lecturer
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Sailor
Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Hermann Melville
Herman Melvill
Preserves
Inviolate
Laws
Winking
Law
Wink
Future
Transgression
Times
Potent
Order
Governor
Must
Governors
Even
Preserve

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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
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Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.
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The march of conquest through wild provinces, may be the march of Mind but not the march of Love.
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Thus it often is, that the constant friction of illiberal minds wears out at last the best resolves of the more generous.
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For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
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Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
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Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
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Poor fish of Rodondo! in your victimized confidence, you are of the number of those who inconsiderately trust, while they do not understand, human nature.
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God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.
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