The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Of all the fools that pride can boast, A Coxcomb claims distinction most.

The seeming truth which cunning times put on To entrap the wisest. -The Merchant of Venice. Act iii. Sc. 2.

Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.

A bodily disease may be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual past.

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Contemplating this blighted and sinister career, the lesson is burnt in upon the conscience, that since Judas by transgression fell, no place in the Church of Christ can render any man secure. And since, falling, he was openly exposed, none may flatter himself that the cause of Christ is bound up with his reputation, that the mischief must needs be averted which his downfall would entail, that Providence must needs avert from him the natural penalties for evil-doing. Though one was as the signet upon the Lord's hand, yet was he plucked thence. There is no security for any soul except where love and trust repose, upon the bosom of Christ. Now if this be true, and if sin and scandal may conceivably penetrate even the inmost circle of the chosen, how great an error it is to break, because of these offenses, the unity of the Church, and institute some new communion, purer far than the Churches of Corinth and Galatia, which were not abandoned but reformed, and more impenetrable to corruption than the little group of those who ate and drank with Jesus.

Plan for this world as if you expect to live forever; but plan for the hereafter as if you expect to die tomorrow.

His talk was like a stream which runs With rapid change from rock to roses; It slipped from politics to puns; It passed from Mahomet to Moses; Beginning with the laws that keep The planets in the radiant courses, And ending with some precept deep For dressing eels or shoeing horses.

Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.

It is OK to let your mind go blank, but please turn off the sound.

Even a small star shines in the darkness.

... it's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

It is right to be contented with what we have, never with what we are.

The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work supremely well, without attending to appearance.

No animal is so inexhaustable as an excited infant.

Self-defense is the clearest of all laws, and for this reason: lawyers didn't make it.

Agriculture and Commerce

A joke's a very serious thing.