“An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.”

“You can never plan the future by the past.”

“Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.”

“Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.”

“It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.”

“Laws, like houses, lean on one another.”

“Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.”

“A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”

“Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.”

“Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.”

“Education is the cheap defense of nations.”