Quotes by George Bancroft

• Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.
• The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.
• Where the people possess no authority, their rights obtain no respect.
• Truth is not exciting enough to those who depend on the characters and lives of their neighbors for all their amusement.
• The public is wiser than the wisest critic.
• The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred.
• The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another.
• In nine times out of ten, the slanderous tongue belongs to a disappointed person.
• Avarice is the vice of declining years.
• Dishonesty is so grasping it would deceive God himself, were it possible.
• If reason is a universal faculty, the decision of the common mind is the nearest criterion of truth.
• By common consent gray hairs are a crown of glory; the only object of respect that can never excite envy.
• Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul.
• The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.