9 quotes
Never expecting to find perfection in men, and not looking for divine attributes in created beings, in my commerce with my contemporaries, I have found much human virtue.
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)
They, who raise suspicions on the good on account of the behaviour of ill men, are of the party of the latter.
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)
All who have ever written on government are unanimous, that among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)
A conscientious person would rather doubt his own judgment, than condenm his species.
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)
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)
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)
Liberty, if I understand it at all, is a general principle, and the clear right of all the subjects within the realm, or of none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery.
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)
In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature.
Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)