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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.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
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It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.
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Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school--its abstract doctrines for the initiated its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.
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The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it - The Territory is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little timely pruning.
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Even Holland and Spain have been positively, though not relatively, advancing.
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And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?
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Beards in olden times, were the emblems of wisdom and piety.
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A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
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It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
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The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.
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How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.
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A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.
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Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.
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The Orientals have another word for accident it is kismet,--fate.
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