Letter to James Warren (12 February 1779)
Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter I, Part III, p. 821.
“I am firmly persuaded that among nations, weakness will never be a foundation for security.”
Speech in the House of Commons (26 February 1816), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), pp. 11-12.
1810s
Context: I will venture to lay it down as a general principle, that there are no better means for securing the continuance of peace, than to have it known that the possessions in the neighbourhood of a foreign state are in a condition to repel attack. I am firmly persuaded that among nations, weakness will never be a foundation for security.
Source: The Doctrine of the Mean
as quoted in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 137
“Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another.”
Discourse V, pt. 9.
The Idea of a University (1873)
“Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world”
Sec. 70
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.
1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
Source: The Works Of John Adams, Second President Of The United States
Context: Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees, of the people; and if the cause, the interest, and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute other and better agents, attorneys and trustees.
