William Penn

I know no religion that destroys courtesy, civility, and kindness.

Sexes make no Difference; since in Souls there is none: And they are the Subjects of Friendship.

Have wholesome, but not costly Food, and be rather cleanly than dainty in ordering it.

Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them, and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But, if men be bad, let the government be ever so good, they will endeavor to warp and spoil it to their turn.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

If thou wouldst rule well, thou must rule for God; and to do that, thou must be ruled by him who has given to kings his grace to command themselves and their subjects, and to the people the grace to obey God and their kings.

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act despite our fears.

The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.

There is no one who does not exaggerate!

It is not where you start but how high you aim that matters for success.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.

All successful men have agreed in one thing – they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.