
Joseph Addison: On Italy.    
  When a government flourishes in conquests, and is secure from foreign attacks, it naturally falls into all the pleasures of luxury; and as these pleasures are very expensive, they put those who are addicted to them upon raising fresh supplies of money, by all the methods of rapaciousness and corruption; so that avarice and luxury very often become one complicated principle of action, in those whose hearts are wholly set upon ease, magnificence, and pleasure. The most elegant and correct of all the Latin historians observes that in his time, when the most formidable states in the world were subdued by the Romans, the republic sunk into those two vices of a quite different nature, luxury and avarice; and accordingly describes Catiline as one who coveted the wealth of other men, at the same time that he squandered away his own. This observation on the commonwealth, when it was in the height of power and riches, holds good of all governments that are settled in a state of ease and prosperity. At such times men naturally endeavour to outshine one another in pomp and splendour, and, having no fears to alarm them from abroad, indulge themselves in the enjoyment of all the pleasures they can get into their possession; which naturally produce avarice, and an immoderate pursuit after wealth and riches.
Joseph Addison: Spectator, No. 55.    
  A very prosperous people, flushed with great victories and successes, are seldom so pious, so humble, so just, or so provident, as to perpetuate their happiness.
Francis Atterbury.    
  The multiplying of nobility brings a state to necessity; and in like manner when more are bred scholars than preferments can take off.
Francis Bacon.    
  It is a great error, and a narrowness of mind, to think that nations have nothing to do one with another except there be either an union in sovereignty, or a conjunction in pacts or leagues: there are other hands of society and implicit confederations.
Francis Bacon.    
  Let princes choose ministers such as love business rather upon conscience than upon bravery.
Francis Bacon.    
  In states, arms and learning have a concurrence or near sequence in time.
Francis Bacon.    
  The greatness of an estate, in bulk and territory, doth fall under measure; and the greatness of finances and revenue doth fall under computation. The population may appear by musters; and the number and greatness of cities and towns by cards and maps; but yet there is not anything, amongst civil affairs, more subject to error than the right valuation and true judgment concerning the power and forces of an estate…. Walled towns, stored arsenals and armouries, goodly races of horses, chariots of war, elephants, ordnance, artillery, and the like, all this is but a sheep in a lion’s skin, except the breed and disposition of the people be stout and warlike. Nay, number (itself) in armies importeth not much, where the people are of weak courage: for, as Virgil saith, “It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.”
Francis Bacon: Essay XXX., Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates.    
  No man can by care-taking (as the Scripture saith) “add a cubit to his stature,” in this little model of a man’s body; but in the great frame of kingdoms and commonwealths it is in the power of princes, or estates, to add amplitude and greatness to their kingdoms; for by introducing such ordinances, constitutions, and customs, as we have now touched, they may sow greatness to their posterity and succession: but these things are commonly not observed, but left to take their chance.
  Religion is not only useful to civil society, but fundamental to its very birth and constitution.
Richard Bentley.    
  Frugality of manners is the nourishment and strength of bodies politic; it is that by which they grow and subsist until they are corrupted by luxury, the natural cause of their decay and ruin.  11
Edmund Burke: Vindic. of Nat. Society.    
Edmund Burke: Vindic. of Nat. Society.    
Edmund Burke: Tract on the Popery Laws.    
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.    
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France.    
Edmund Burke.    
Edmund Burke.    
Edmund Burke.    
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.    
  Between the period of national honour and complete degeneracy there is usually an interval of national vanity, during which examples of virtue are recounted and admired without being imitated. The Romans were never more proud of their ancestors than when they ceased to resemble them. From being the freest and most high-spirited people in the world, they suddenly fell into the tamest and most abject submission.
Robert Hall: Apology for the Freedom of the Press, Sect. VI.    
  Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.
Henry Hallam.    
  Two foundations bear up all public societies: the one, inclination whereby all men desire sociable life; the other an order agreed upon touching the manner of their union in living together: the latter is that which we call the law of a commonweal.
Richard Hooker.    
  It is no impossible thing for states, by an oversight in some one act or treaty between them and their potent opposites, utterly to cast away themselves forever.
Richard Hooker.    
  I shall easily grant that notations in religion are a main cause of distempers in commonwealths.
Archbishop Laud.    
  These men came from neither of the classes which had, till then, almost exclusively furnished ministers of state. They were all laymen; yet they were all men of learning; and they were all men of peace. They were not members of the aristocracy. They inherited no titles, no large domains, no armies of retainers, no fortified castles. Yet they were not low men, such as those whom princes, jealous of the power of nobility, have sometimes raised from forges and cobblers’ stalls to the highest situations. They were all gentlemen by birth. They had all received a liberal education. It is a remarkable fact that they were all members of the same university. The two great national seats of learning had even then acquired the characters which they still retain. In intellectual activity, and in readiness to admit improvements, the superiority was then, as it has ever since been, on the side of the less ancient and splendid institution. Cambridge had the honour of educating those celebrated Protestant Bishops whom Oxford had the honour of burning; and at Cambridge were formed the minds of all those statesmen to whom chiefly is to be attributed the secure establishment of the reformed religion in the north of Europe.
Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay: Lord Bacon.    
  But Sir Nicholas was no ordinary man. He belonged to a set of men whom it is easier to describe collectively than separately, whose minds were formed by one system of discipline, who belonged to one rank in society, to one university, to one party, to one sect, to one administration, and who resembled each other so much in talents, in opinions, in habits, in fortunes, that one character, we had almost said one life, may, to a considerable extent, serve for them all.  38
  They were the first generation of statesmen by profession that England produced.
Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay: Lord Bacon, July, 1837.    
  Scotland by no means escaped the fate ordained for every country which is connected, but not incorporated, with another country of greater resources. Though in name an independent kingdom, she was, during more than a century, really treated in many respects as a subject province.
John Stuart Mill.    
  I shall believe that there cannot be a more ill-boding sign to a nation, than when the inhabitants, to avoid insufferable grievances at home, are enforced by heaps to forsake their native country.
John Milton.    
  A state would be happy where philosophers were kings or kings were philosophers.
  In states notoriously irreligious a secret and irresistible power countermands their deepest projects, splits their counsels, and smites their most refined policies with frustration and a curse.
Robert South.    
  When the corruption of men’s manners, by the habitual improvement of this vicious principle, comes, from personal, to be general and universal, so as to diffuse and spread itself over the whole community, it naturally and directly tends to the ruin and subversion of the government where it so prevails.
Robert South.    
  Though we cannot prolong the period of a commonwealth beyond the decree of heaven, or the date of its nature, any more than human life beyond the strength of the seminal virtue, yet we may manage a sickly constitution, and preserve a strong one.
Jonathan Swift.    
  Temperance, industry, and a public spirit, running through the whole body of the people in Holland, hath preserved an infant commonwealth of a sickly constitution, through so many dangers as a much more healthy one could never have struggled against without those advantages.
Jonathan Swift.    
  If we would suppose a ministry where every single person was of distinguished piety, and all great officers of state and law diligent in choosing persons who in their several subordinations would be obliged to follow the examples of their superiors, the empire of irreligion would be soon destroyed.
Jonathan Swift.    
  The ruin of a state is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners, and contempt of religion, which is entirely our case at present.
Jonathan Swift.    
  Revolutions of state, many times, make way for new institutions and forms; and often determine in either setting up some tyranny at home, or bringing in some conquest from abroad.
Sir William Temple.    
  Commonwealths were nothing more in their original but free cities; though sometimes, by force of order and discipline they have extended themselves into mighty dominions.
Sir William Temple.    
  The command in war is given to the strongest, or to the bravest; and in peace, taken up and exercised by the boldest.
Sir William Temple.    
  Without a humble imitation of the divine Author of our blessed religion, we can never hope to be a happy nation.
George Washington.    
Click here to shop the Bartleby Bookstore.
