Part 39

As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church-steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.--George Eliot.

~Government.~--The proper function of a government is to make it easy for people to do good and difficult for them to do evil.--Gladstone.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.--Burke.

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

Government owes its birth to the necessity of preventing and repressing the injuries which the associated individuals had to fear from one another. It is the sentinel who watches, in order that the common laborer be not disturbed.--Abbé Raynal.

But I say to you, and to our whole country, and to all the crowned heads and aristocratic powers and feudal systems that exist, that it is to self-government, the great principle of popular representation and administration, the system that lets in all to participate in the counsels that are to assign the good or evil to all, that we may owe what we are and what we hope to be.--Daniel Webster.

The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.--Montesquieu.

Of governments, that of the mob is the most sanguinary, that of soldiers the most expensive, and that of civilians the most vexatious.--Colton.

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest, and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least.--Thomas Paine.

~Grace.~--As amber attracts a straw, so does beauty admiration, which only lasts while the warmth continues; but virtue, wisdom, goodness, and real worth, like the loadstone, never lose their power. These are the true graces, which, as Homer feigns, are linked and tied hand in hand, because it is by their influence that human hearts are so firmly united to each other.--Burton.

The king-becoming graces--devotion, patience, courage, fortitude.--Shakespeare.

Know you not, master, to some kind of men their graces serve them but as enemies? No more do yours; your virtues, gentle master, are sanctified and holy traitors to you. Oh, what a world is this, when what is comely envenoms him that bears it!--Shakespeare.

How inimitably graceful children are before they learn to dance!--Coleridge.

That word, grace, in an ungracious mouth, is but profane.--Shakespeare.

Grace comes as oft clad in the dusky robe of desolation as in white attire.--Sir J. Beaumont.

~Gratitude.~--Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.--Johnson.

God is pleased with no music below so much as the thanksgiving songs of relieved widows and supported orphans; of rejoicing, comforted, and thankful persons.--Jeremy Taylor.

No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.--Colton.

Thus love is the most easy and agreeable, and gratitude the most humiliating, affection of the mind: we never reflect on the man we love without exulting in our choice, while he who has bound us to him by benefits alone rises to our ideas as a person to whom we have in some measure forfeited our freedom.--Goldsmith.

Gratitude is the virtue most deified and most deserted. It is the ornament of rhetoric and the libel of practical life.--J. W. Forney.

~Grave.~--Since the silent shore awaits at last even those who longest miss the old Archer's arrow, perhaps the early grave which men weep over may be meant to save.--Byron.

The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors; and that equality the grave will perpetuate to the end of time.--Bulwer-Lytton.

The reconciling grave.--Southern.

The grave where even the great find rest.--Pope.

Oh, how small a portion of earth will hold us when we are dead, who ambitiously seek after the whole world while we are living!--Philip, King of Macedon.

The cradle of transformation.--Mazzini.

The graves of those we have loved and lost distress and console us.--Arsène Houssaye.

~Gravity.~--The very essence of gravity is design, and consequently deceit; a taught trick to gain credit with the world for more sense and knowledge than a man is worth.--Sterne.