Date: 1789
"Ah! hide for ever from my sight / The faithless flatterer Hope--whose pencil, gay, / Portrays some vision of delight, / Then bids the fairy tablet fade away; / While in dire contrast, to mine eyes / Thy phantoms, yet more hideous, rise, / And Memory draws, from Pleasure's wither'd flower, / Corr...
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)
Date: 1789
"You stupify them with stripes, and think it necessary to keep them in a state of ignorance; and yet you assert that they are incapable of learning; that their minds are such a barren soil or moor, that culture would be lost on them; and that they come from a climate, where nature, though prodiga...
preview | full record— Equiano, Olaudah [Gustavus Vasa] (c. 1745-1797)
Date: 1790
"I shall, perhaps, deserve censure for concealing a name which belongs to so much excellence, but I fear to offend the delicacy of your nature; true merit is ever modest, and your mind, like the sensitive plant at the touch, would shrink from the voice of public celebrity."
preview | full record— Anonymous
Date: 1790
"When they are habitually convinced that no evil can be acceptable, either in the act or the permission, to him whose essence is good, they will be better able to extirpate out of the minds of all magistrates, civil, ecclesiastical, or military, any thing that bears the least resemblance to a pro...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1790
"With these ideas rooted in their minds, the commons of Great Britain, in the national emergencies, will never seek their resource from the confiscation of the estates of the church and poor."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1790
"You would not secure men from tyranny and sedition, by rooting out of the mind the principles to which these fraudulent pretexts apply? If you did, you would root out every thing that is valuable in the human breast."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1790
"The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: December 1790
"The civilization which has taken place in Europe has been very partial, and, like every custom that an arbitrary point of honour has established, refines the manners at the expence of morals, by making sentiments and opinions current in conversation that have no root in the heart, or weight in t...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1791
The "buds of Virtue" may be blasted as they blow
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: 1791
"His mind resembled a fertile, but thin soil. There was a quick, but not a strong vegetation, of whatever chanced to be thrown upon it. No deep root could be struck. The oak of the forest did not grow there: but the elegant shrubbery and the fragrant parterre appeared in gay succession."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)