"But now persecution is good, because it exists; every law which originated in ignorance and malice, and gratifies the passions from whence it sprang, we call the wisdom of our ancestors: when such laws are repealed, they will be cruelty and madness; till they are repealed, they are policy and caution."

"In his home-life Turgot remained most frugal and laborious, treating his servants with a benevolence then accounted contemptible, and working out his quiet schemes with an infinite patience and thoroughness. When he was offered the richer Intendancy of Lyons, he would not take it. Here, as he said of himself, though he was 'the compulsory instrument of great evil,' he was doing a little good. Only a little, it might be. But if every man did the little he could — what a different world!"

"Hopeless, filthy, degraded, superstitious with the craven superstition which made them the easy prey of their unscrupulous clergy and left them wholly sensual and stupid; as animals, without the animals' instinctive joy of life and fearlessness of the morrow ; with no ambitions for themselves or the children who turned to curse them for having brought them into such a world; with no time to dream or love, no time for the tenderness which makes life, life indeed — they toiled for a few cruel years because they feared to die, and died because they feared to live. Such were the people Turgot was sent to redeem."

"All men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot."

"'What a fuss about an omelette!' he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," was his attitude now."

"There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring."

"A Platonic friendship is perhaps only possible when one or other of the Platonists is in love with a third person."

"It is as the father of the Encyclopedia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul of his generation."

"If to be great means to be good, then Denis Diderot was a little man. But if to be great means to do great things in the teeth of great obstacles, then none can refuse him a place in the temple of the Immortals."

"It is by character and not by intellect the world is won."

"For the first time he looked into his heart and wrote, and thus for the first time he touched the hearts of others; the cold style took fire, and beneath the clumsy periods welled tears."

"He who has lost only those of whose faith and truth he is sure, has not yet reached the depth of human desolation."

"My wife is on a new diet. Coconuts and bananas. She hasn't lost weight, but can she climb a tree."

"My wife and I went to a hotel where we got a waterbed. My wife called it the Dead Sea."

"My wife told me the car wasn't running well. There was water in the carburetor. I asked where the car was, and she told me it was in the lake."

"We always hold hands. If I let go, she shops."

"My wife will buy anything marked down. Last year she bought an escalator."

"I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back."

"I was so ugly when I was born, the doctor slapped my mother,"

"My first Hollywood picture wasn't released, it escaped."

"Business was so bad the other night the orchestra was playing "Tea for One.""

"Take my wife - please!"

"The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret."

"His wildest extravagances, too, were often the vehicle of sound arguments, and his humour generally played over the surface of strong good sense. His exuberant fun did not imply scoffing. He was sensitive to the charge of indifference to the creed which he professed. He took pains to protest against any writing by his allies which might shock believers. He had strong religious convictions, and could utter them solemnly and impressively. It must, however, be admitted that his creed was such as fully to account for the suspicion. In theology he followed Paley, and was utterly averse to all mysticism in literature or religion. He ridiculed the ‘evangelicals,’ and attacked the methodists with a bitterness exceptional in his writings. He equally despised in later days the party then called ‘Puseyites.’ He was far more suspicious of an excess than of a defect of zeal. His writings upon the established church show a purely secular view of the questions at issue. He assumes that a clergyman is simply a human being in a surplice, and the church a branch of the civil service. He had apparently few clerical intimacies, and his chief friends of the Edinburgh Review and Holland House were anything but orthodox. Like other clergymen of similar tendencies, he was naturally regarded by his brethren as something of a traitor to their order. Nobody, however, could discharge the philanthropic duties of a parish clergyman more energetically, and his general goodness and the strength of his affections are as unmistakable as his sincerity and the masculine force of his mind."

"In March 1802 Smith proposed to his friends Jeffrey and Brougham to start the Edinburgh Review ... Smith's articles are among the best, and are now the most readable. Many of them are mere trifles, but nearly all show his characteristic style. He deserves the credit of vigorously defending doctrines then unpopular, and now generally accepted. Smith was a thorough whig of the more enlightened variety, and his attacks upon various abuses, though not in advance of the liberalism of the day, gave him a bad name among the dispensers of patronage at the time. His honesty and manliness are indisputable."

"His great delight was to produce a succession of ludicrous images: these followed each other with a rapidity that scarcely left time to laugh; he himself laughing louder and with more enjoyment than any one. This electric contact of mirth came and went with the occasion; it cannot be repeated or reproduced. Anything would give occasion to it. For instance, having seen in the newspapers that Sir Æneas Mackintosh was come to town, he drew such a ludicrous caricature of Sir Æneas and Lady Dido, for the amusement of their namesake, that Sir James Mackintosh rolled on the floor in fits of laughter, and Sydney Smith, striding across him, exclaimed, "Ruat Justitia!" His powers of fun were at the same time united with the strongest, and most practical common sense. So that while he laughed away seriousness at one minute, he destroyed in the next some rooted prejudice which had braved for a thousand years the battle of reason, and the breeze of ridicule."

"The ancient and amusing defender of our faith."

"Humour's pink primate Sydney Smith."

"I once dined with him (at Holland House), and a more profligate parson I never met."

"He is a very clever fellow, but he will never be a bishop."

"I never see Sydney Smith without thinking him too much of a buffoon."

"Sydney Smith was a clergyman of the eighteenth-century kind, devoted to good food, good wine and good society; he believed in rational religion and hated evangelical "enthusiasm"; he liked order and propriety and he was universally acclaimed the wittiest man of his time."

"The character which emerges from these letters is wholly admirable, possessing besides the qualities of cleverness and wit, which we suspect in England, the qualities we all admire: kindness, humility, industry, courage and tolerance—and how seldom it is that champions of toleration as public policy are tolerant men in private life!"

"Smith's reputation here then was the same as it has was throughout his life, that of a wise wit. Was there ever more sense combined with more hilarious jocularity? But he has been lost by being placed within the pale of holy orders. He has done his duty there decently well, and is an admirable preacher. But he ought to have been in some freer sphere; especially since wit and independence do not make bishops."

"He was an admirable joker; he had the art of placing ordinary things in an infinitely ludicrous point of view. I have seen him at dinner at Foston, (his living near York) drive the servants from the room with the tears running down their faces, in peals of inextinguishable laughter: but he was too much of a jack-pudding."

"A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience."

"Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up."

"I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave."

"What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?"

"I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland."

"If you could be alarmed into the semblance of modesty, you would charm everybody; but remember my joke against you about the Moon and the Solar System;—"Damn the solar system! bad light — planets too distant — pestered with comets — feeble contriviance; — could make a better with great ease.""

"We know nothing of tomorrow; our business is to be good and happy today."

"I am old, but I certainly have not that sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present."

"Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea."

"In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give your style."

"Ah! what you don't know would make a great book."

"You remember Thurlow's answer to some one complaining of the injustice of a company. "Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? they have neither a soul to lose, nor a body to kick.""

"Serenely full, the epicure would say, Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today."