Quotes to inspire and reflect

Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs,

John Anderson my jo, John,

A man’s a man for a’ that.

Green grow the rashes, O,

Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,

The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,

Ye banks and braes o’ bonny Doon,

O saw ye bonnie Lesley,

Freedom and Whisky gang thegither!

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,

Then gently scan your brother man,

Address to the unco guid.

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.

It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

Not merely a chip of the old ‘block’, but the old block itself.

The people are the masters.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatsoever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Of this stamp is the cant of Not men, but measures; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honourable engagement.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.

Society is indeed a contract … it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.

The age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

This barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

I thought ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

Custom reconciles us to everything.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tells me I ought to do.

Every human benefit, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise.