James Mackintosh quotes:
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Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations.
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Whatever is popular deserves attention.
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The powers of a man's mind are directly proportional to the quantity of coffee he drank.
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Those who preached faith, or in other words a pure mind, have always produced more popular virtue than those who preached good acts, or the mere regulation of outward works.
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The feminine graces of Madame de Sevigne's genius are exquisitely charming; but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Stael are above the distinction of sex.
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Every fiction since Homer has taught friendship, patriotism, generosity, contempt of death. These are the highest virtues; and the fictions which taught them were therefore of the highest, though not of unmixed, utility.
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The Commons, faithful to their system, remained in a wise and masterly inactivity.
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Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself.
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Men are never so good or so bad as their opinions.
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It is right to be contented with what we have, never with what we are.
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The wealth of society is its stock of productive labor.
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A vice utterly at variance with the happiness of him who harbors it, and, as such, condemned by self-love.
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Praise is the symbol which represents sympathy, and which the mind insensibly substitutes for its recollection and language.
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It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age.
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Those who differ most from the opinions of their fellow men are the most confident of the truth of their own.
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The frivolous work of polished idleness.
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It is right to be content with what we have, never with what we are.