Date: 1790
"But those who will stand upon that elevation of reason, which places centuries under our eye, and brings things to the true point of comparison, which obscures little names, and effaces the colours of little parties, and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral quality of human actio...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1791
"Dr. Goldsmith once said to Dr. Johnson, that he wished for some additional members to the LITERARY CLUB, to give it an agreeable variety; for (said he) there can now be nothing new among us: we have travelled over one another's minds."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1793
Corporal punishment closes all "wholsome avenues of mind ... and on every side we see them guarded with a train of disgraceful passions, hatred, revenge, despotism, cruelty, hypocrisy, conspiracy and cowardice."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1793
"Milton had perhaps wandered in the fields of fancy, and consoled his blindness with listening to the voice of his nation, that was to have resounded with his name."
preview | full record— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)
Date: November 19, 1793
"The mind, freed from her weighty companion, roams at large through the regions of fancy; and at once conceives and invents, beautifies and illustrates, amplifies and adorns."
preview | full record— Boyd, Hugh (1746-1794)
Date: 1798
"On the contrary, if, to entice him to enter the paths of knowledge, we strew them with flowers, how will he feel when he must force his way through thorns and briars?"
preview | full record— Edgeworth, Maria