“If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.”

“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.”