If reason is a universal faculty, the decision of the common mind is the nearest criterion of truth.
Category Archive: 1800
To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
Truth is not exciting enough to those who depend on the characters and lives of their neighbors for all their amusement.
Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.
The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.
The great want of our race is perfect educators to train new-born minds, who are infallible teachers of what is right and true.
The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.