Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke Quotes
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The fire of my adversity has purged the mass of my acquaintance.
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Faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive. Party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties.
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Worry is the only insupportable misfortune of life.
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What a world is this, and how does fortune banter us!
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What Anacharsis said of the vine may aptly enough be said of prosperity. She bears the three grapes of drunkenness, pleasure, and sorrow; and happy is it if the last can cure the mischief which the former work. When afflictions fail to have their due effect, the case is desperate.
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No religion ever appeared in the world whose natural tendency was so much directed to promote the peace and happiness of mankind. It makes right reason a law in every possible definition of the word. And therefore, even supposing it to have been purely a human invention, it had been the most amiable and the most useful invention that was ever imposed on mankind for their good.
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God himself, with reverence be it spoken, is not an absolute but a limited monarch, limited by the rule which infinite wisdom prescribes to infinite power.
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A long novitiate of acquaintance should precede the vows of friendship.
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There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that it is hardly worth while to be here at all.
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It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.
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Our liberty cannot be taken away unless the people are themselves accomplices.
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Lawyers must pry into the recesses of the human heart, and become well acquainted with the whole moral world, that they may discover the abstract reason of all laws.
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Cunning pays no regard to virtue, and is but the low mimic of reason.
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The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.
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As well as might we say that a ship is built, loaded and manned for the sake of any particular pilot, instead of acknowledging that the pilot is made for the sake of the ship, her lading, and her crew, who are always the owners in the political vessel; as to say that kingdoms were instituted for kings, not kings for kingdoms.
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It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature's God; that is, he follows God in his works and in his word.
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History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning.
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The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age because they trifled away youth, others must labor on in a maze of error because they have wandered there too long to find their way out.
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Indifference must be a crime in us, to be ranked but one degree below treachery; for deserting the commonwealth is next to betraying it.
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I have read somewhere or other, - in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, - that history is philosophy teaching by examples.
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To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.
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I think it indisputable that the distance between the intellectual faculties of different men is greater than that between the same faculties in some men and some other animals.
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I have observed that in comedies the best actor plays the droll, while some scrub rogue is made the fine gentleman or hero. Thus it is in the farce of life. Wise men spend their time in mirth; it is only fools who are serious.
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Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness; and the knowledge we acquire by it only a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more.
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Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
- Born: September 16, 1678
- Died: December 12, 1751
- Occupation: Politician
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