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Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.

Richard Whately

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Richard Whately
Age: 76 †
Born: 1787
Born: February 1
Died: 1863
Died: October 8
Economist
Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
London
England
Nothing
Right
Expedient
Great
Expediency
Good
Sacrifice
Never
Since
Would
Less
True
Ever

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Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
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It may be worth noticing as a curious circumstance, when persons past forty before they were at all acquainted form together a very close intimacy of friendship. For grafts of old wood to take, there must be a wonderful congeniality between the trees.
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The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.
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The best security against revolution is in constant correction of abuses and the introduction of needed improvements. It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
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All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support.
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As the telescope is not a substitute for, but an aid to, our sight, so revelation is not designed to supersede the use of reason, but to supply its deficiencies.
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Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry gets the best of the argument.
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It is also important to guard against mistaking for good-nature what is properly good-humor,--a cheerful flow of spirits and easy temper not readily annoyed, which is compatible with great selfishness.
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When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages.
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Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
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It is worth noticing that those who assume an imposing demeanor and seek to pass themselves off for something beyond what they are, are not unfrequently as much underrated by some as overrated by others.
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Controversy, though always an evil in itself, is sometimes a necessary evil.
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No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.
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One way in which fools succeed where wise men fail is that through ignorance of the danger they sometimes go coolly about a hazardous business.
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He that is not open to conviction is not qualified for discussion.
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All gaming, since it implies a desire to profit at the expense of another, involves a breach of the tenth commandment.
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Women never reason, or, if they do, they either draw correct inferences from wrong premises, or wrong inferences from correct premises and they always poke the fire from the top.
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An instinct is a blind tendency to some mode of action, independent of any consideration, on the part of the agent, of the end to which the action leads.
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A fanatic, either, religious or political, is the subject of strong delusions.
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The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.
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