“How are the faculties of man to be best developed and his happiness secured? The state of a king is not favorable to this, nor the state of the noble and rich men of the earth. All this is artificial life, the inventions of vanity and grasping ambition, by which we have spoiled the man of nature and of pure, simple, and undistorted impulses.”

“Justice is the sum of all moral duty.”

“Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.”

“There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.”

“There is nothing that human imagination can figure brilliant and enviable that human genius and skill do not aspire to realize.”

“There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.”

“Without imagination, there can be no genuine ardor in any pursuit or for any acquisition, and without imagination, there can be no genuine morality, no profound feeling of other men's sorrow, no ardent and persevering anxiety for their interests.”

“In the two novels I have published, it was my fortune at different times, and from different persons, to hear the most unqualified censure long before it was possible for me to hear the voice of the public. But my temper was not altered, nor my courage subdued.”

“I believe in this being, not because I have any proper or direct knowledge of His existence, but I am at a loss to account for the existence and arrangement of the visible universe, and, being left in the wide sea of conjecture without a clue from analogy or experience, I find the conjecture of a God easy, obvious, and irresistible.”

“Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.”

“Love conquers all difficulties, surmounts all obstacles, and effects what to any other power would be impossible.”