249 quotes
Strange incongruities must ever perplex those, who confound the unhappiness of civil dissensions with the crime of treason.
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)
Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
Frugality is founded on the principle that all riches have limits.
Speech on the Independence of Parliament (1780)
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
To the Deity must be left the task of infinite perfection, while to us poor, weak, incapable mortals, there was no rule of conduct so safe as experience.
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Contempt is not a thing to be despised.
Dangers by being despised grow great.
The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections.
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
This moral levelling is a servile principle. It leads to practical passive obedience far better, than all the doctrines, which the pliant accommodation of theology to power has ever produced.
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)
Virtue will catch as well as vice by contact; and the public stock of honest manly principle will daily accumulate. We are not too nicely to scrutinize motives as long as action is irreproachable.
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)
Kings are ambitious; the nobility haughty; and the populace tumultuous and ungovernable.
A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
You have theories enough concerning the Rights of Men. It may not be amiss to add a small degree of attention to their Nature and disposition.
It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.
When we speak of the commerce with our [American] colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
Custom reconciles us to every thing.
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
The march of the human mind is slow.
Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils.
A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
I have in general no very exalted opinion of the virtue of paper government.
He was one of those who wished for the abolition of the Slave Trade. He thought it ought to be abolished on principles of humanity and justice.