“My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet the common fate.”

“And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—
it's born with us the day that we are born.”

“Man provides his own goods and his own evils, neither God nor the Devil has anything to do with it.”

“Man, fearfully and wonderfully made, is the workmanship of his all perfect Creator: A State; useful and valuable as the contrivance is, is the inferior contrivance of man; and from his native dignity derives all its acquired importance.”

“The contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office than are the most perfect production of human ingenuity.”

“The wisdom of man never yet contrived a system of taxation that would operate with perfect equality.”

“The nobly born must nobly meet his fate.”

“I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.”

“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”

“A good End cannot sanctifie evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it.”