Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

Like other amphibious animals, we must come occasionally on shore: but the water is more properly our element, and in it, like them, as we find our greatest security, so we exert our greatest force.

The French may improve their natural wealth and power by the improvement of trade and commerce. We can have no wealth, nor power by consequence, as Europe is now constituted, without the improvement of them, nor in any degree but …

My aim is to fix this principle, that limitations on a crown ought to be carried as far as it is necessary to secure the liberties of a people; and that all such limitations may subsist, without weakening or endangering monarchy.

There must be an absolute, unlimited, and uncontroulable power lodged somewhere in every government; but to constitute monarchy, or the government of a single person, it is not necessary that this power should be lodged in the monarch …

The obligation of submission to both, is discoverable by so clear and so simple an use of our intellectual faculties, that it may be said properly enough to be revealed to us by God; and tho both these laws cannot be said properly to be …

The minister [Robert Walpole] preaches corruption aloud and constantly, like an impudent missionary of vice.

I think, and every wise and honest man in generations yet unborn will think, if the history of [thi]s administration descends to blacken our annals, that the greatest iniquity of the minister [Robert Walpole], on whom the whole iniquity …

There have been periods when our government continued free, with strong appearances of becoming absolute. Let it be your glory, my Lord, and that of the new generation springing up with you, that this government do not become absolute at …

[N]o human institution can arrive at perfection, and the most that human wisdom can do, is to procure the same or greater good, at the expence of less evil.

To what higher station, to what greater glory can any mortal aspire, than to be, during the whole course of his life, the support of good, the controul of bad government, and the guardian of public liberty?

The service of our country is no chimerical, but a real duty. He who admits the proofs of any other moral duty, drawn from the constitution of human nature, or from the moral fitness and unfitness of things, must admit them in favour of …

The manners of our fore-fathers were, I believe, in many respects better: they had more probity perhaps, they had certainly more show of honour, and greater industry.

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.

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.

Our world seems to be, in many respects, the bedlam of every other system of intelligent creatures.

The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it.

They (Thucydides and Xenophon) maintained the dignity of history.

Nations, like men, have their infancy.

We are born too late to see the beginning, and we die too soon to see the end of many things.

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

[I]t is a pretty shocking observation that the Queen is to be the guarantee for a loan of this extraordinary nature made by the Dutch, and especially at a time, when under pretence of disability they directly refuse to furnish their quotas …

A peace must be had; and all mankind sees plainly now, in how vile a manner former opportunities were neglected of making a better than at this hour we have reason to expect.