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

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbor, and to love your neighbor's wife

By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors

We must judge of a form of government by it's general tendency, not by happy accidents

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both

The voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve

Boswell is the first of biographers

Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action