Historical voices

If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.

If rare merit be the rarest of all rare things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation.

I do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course.

Everything ought to be open,--but not indifferently to every man.

Woe to that country, too, that, passing into the opposite extreme, considers a low education, a mean, contracted view of things, a sordid, mercenary occupation, as a preferable title to command!

Woe to the country which would madly and impiously reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil, military, or religious, that are given to grace and to serve it; and would condemn to obscurity everything formed to diffuse lustre…

There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive.

Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.

The levellers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things: they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.

Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level never equalize.

The next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters.

Every person in your country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honor, is disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life, except in a mortified and humiliated indignation.

But your present confusion, like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself.

A conscious dignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory and emulation, was not extinguished.

Because, among all their massacres, they had not slain the mind in their country.

I do not say, (God forbid!) I do not say that the virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes; but they were some corrective to their effects.

Their rising was to illuminate and beautify the world.

Other revolutions have been conducted by persons who, whilst they attempted or affected changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled.

When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition becomes low and base.

If any bounds are set to the rapacious demands of that sort of people, or that others are permitted to partake in the objects they would engross, revenge and envy soon fill up the craving void that is left in their avarice.

The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.

It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections.

One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they partake with others.