All government -- indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act -- is founded on compromise and barter.
You can never plan the future by the past.
Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time.
Fraud is the ready minister of injustice.
It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more efficiently, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives.
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security.