Date: 1790
"In England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of superstition, with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in an hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1790
"But while those ancient philosophers endeavoured in this manner to suggest every consideration which could, as Milton says, arm the obdured breast with stubborn patience, as with triple steel; they, at the same time, laboured above all to convince their followers that there neither was nor could...
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: January 19, 1791
"He must have a heart of adamant who could hear a set of traitors puffed up with unexpected and undeserved power, obtained by an ignoble, unmanly, and perfidious rebellion, treating their honest fellow-citizens as rebels, because they refused to bind themselves, through their conscience, against ...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1791
"I will venture to say, that in no writings whatever can be found more bark and steel for the mind, if I may use the expression; more that can brace and invigorate every manly and noble sentiment."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1793
"To solace mental fatigue by the amusements of fancy, is no loss of time. Students know how often the eye is busied in wandering over the page, while the mind lies in torpid inactivity; they therefore compute their time, not by the hours consumed in study, but by the real acquisitions they obtain...
preview | full record— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)
Date: w. 1788-93, 1796 (rev. 1815, 1827, 1837, 1897)
"Such hardships may steel the mind and body against the injuries of fortune; but my timid reserve was astonished by the crowd and tumult of the school; the want of strength and activity disqualified me for the sports of the play-field; nor have I forgotten how often in the year forty-six I was re...
preview | full record— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)
Date: 1796
"Low in a humble Preface authors kneel; / In vain, the wearied reader's heart is steel."
preview | full record— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)
Date: 1797
"I would neither corrupt my imagination with impurity, nor steel my heart by barbarous narratives and sanguinary persecutions."
preview | full record— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)
Date: 1797
"Remember that the Divine Agency is promised, 'to take away the heart of stone, and give a heart of flesh,' of which it is the natural property to be tender and susceptible."
preview | full record— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)