A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.

Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.

Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!

To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.

Charles V. said that a man who knew four languages was worth four men; and Alexander the Great so valued learning, that he used to say he was more indebted to Aristotle for giving him knowledge that, than his father Philip for giving him life.

The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it [The Territory] is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little timely pruning.

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

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.