American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society.
Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.
We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?
The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.
People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!
Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.
There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours.
Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
