I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

By my physical constitution I am but an ordinary man ... Yet some great events, some cutting expressions, some mean hypocracies, have at times thrown this asse…

The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert thei…

Virtue is not always amiable.

[...] nicht das Amt die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukunftiger Jahre zu belehren, sondern blo? zu zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.

I have read somewhere or other,-in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think,-that history is philosophy teaching by examples.

Liberal learning is both a safeguard against false ideas of freedom and a source of true ones.