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It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.
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By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.
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[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
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Thus, then, stands the case. It is good, that authors should be remunerated and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
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There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.
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We must judge of a form of government by it's general tendency, not by happy accidents
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The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.
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Was none who would be foremost To lead such dire attack But those behind cried Forward! And those before cried Back!
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The end of government is the happiness of the people.
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A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
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The Orientals have another word for accident it is kismet,--fate.
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We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
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This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.
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As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.
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I am always nearest to myself, says the Latin proverb.
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All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.
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Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.
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The temple of silence and reconciliation.
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The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.
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A government cannot be wrong in punishing fraud or force, but it is almost certain to be wrong if, abandoning its legitimate function, it tells private individuals that it knows their business better than they know it themselves.
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