1. “Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.”
2. “Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.”
3. “Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.”
4. “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
5. ”Friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.”
6. ”How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.”
7. "I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise."
8. "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more luck I have."
9. “I cannot live without books.”
10. “If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.... The bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.”
11. “I live for books.”
12. “Is uniformity [of opinion] attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”
13. “It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”
14. “It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquillity and occupation, which give happiness.”
15. “Offices are as acceptable here as elsewhere, and whenever a man has cast a longing eye on them, a rottenness begins in his conduct.”
16. "Our greatest happiness in life does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits."
17. “Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.”
18. “Still one more thing, fellow citizens: a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
19. “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.”
20. “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
21. “The people are the only censors of their governors and even their errors will tend to keep them to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
22. “When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.”
23. “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
