All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.
Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom and a great empire and little minds go ill together.
Beauty is the promise of happiness.
A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.
Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
Your representative owes you not his industry only but his judgement and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
War never leaves where it found a nation.
You cannot plan the future by the past.
No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.
Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.
When bad men combine, the good must associate else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
History is a pact between the dead the living and the yet unborn.