Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke Quotes
Our liberty cannot be taken away unless the people are themselves accomplices.
History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning.
Faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive. Party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties.
A long novitiate of acquaintance should precede the vows of friendship.
The fire of my adversity has purged the mass of my acquaintance.
God himself, with reverence be it spoken, is not an absolute but a limited monarch, limited by the rule which infinite wisdom prescribes to infinite power.
To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.
Cunning pays no regard to virtue, and is but the low mimic of reason.
Indifference must be a crime in us, to be ranked but one degree below treachery; for deserting the commonwealth is next to betraying it.
I think it indisputable that the distance between the intellectual faculties of different men is greater than that between the same faculties in some men and some other animals.
There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that it is hardly worth while to be here at all.
The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.
I have read somewhere or other, - in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, - that history is philosophy teaching by examples.
Lawyers must pry into the recesses of the human heart, and become well acquainted with the whole moral world, that they may discover the abstract reason of all laws.