Quotes from James Mackintosh

It is right to be content with what we have, never with what we are.

Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations.

Whatever is popular deserves attention.

Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself.

The wealth of society is its stock of productive labor.

Praise is the symbol which represents sympathy, and which the mind insensibly substitutes for its recollection and language.

A vice utterly at variance with the happiness of him who harbors it, and, as such, condemned by self-love.

Those who differ most from the opinions of their fellow men are the most confident of the truth of their own.

The powers of a man's mind are directly proportional to the quantity of coffee he drank.

Men are never so good or so bad as their opinions.

The frivolous work of polished idleness.

The Commons, faithful to their system, remained in a wise and masterly inactivity.

Those who preached faith, or in other words a pure mind, have always produced more popular virtue than those who preached good acts, or the mere regulation of outward works.

It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age.