Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature's God; that is, he follows God in his works and in his word.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Indifference must be a crime in us, to be ranked but one degree below treachery; for deserting the commonwealth is next to betraying it.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
They (Thucydides and Xenophon) maintained the dignity of history.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive. Party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
I think it indisputable that the distance between the intellectual faculties of different men is greater than that between the same faculties in some men and some other animals.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
No religion ever appeared in the world whose natural tendency was so much directed to promote the peace and happiness of mankind. It makes right reason a law in every possible definition of the word. And therefore, even supposing it to have been purely a human invention, it had been the most amiable and the most useful invention that was ever imposed on mankind for their good.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age because they trifled away youth, others must labor on in a maze of error because they have wandered there too long to find their way out.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Cunning pays no regard to virtue, and is but the low mimic of reason.

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke