Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751) was an English politician, government official and political philosopher..He was a leader of the Tories, and supported the Church of England politically despite his antireligious views and opposition to theology. In 1715 he supported the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 which sought to overthrow the new king George I. Escaping to France he became foreign minister for the Pretender. He was attainted for treason, but reversed course and was allowed to return to England in 1723. He is best known as the philosopher of the Country Party.
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Victory may be honorable to the arms, but shameful to the counsels of the nation.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Victory
Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness, and the knowledge we acquire by it only a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Study
It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Politics, Law, Laws, Politicians
It is the modest, not the presumptuous inquirer, who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths.—He follows God in his works and in his word.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Discovery
Cunning pays no regard to virtue, and is but the low mimic of wisdom.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Cunning
Experience is doubly defective; we are born too late to see the beginning, and we die too soon to see the end of many things.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Always to think the worst, I have ever found to be the mark of a mean spirit and a base soul.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
What Anacharsis said of the vine may aptly enough be said of prosperity. She bears the three grapes of drunkenness, pleasure, and sorrow; and happy is it if the last can cure the mischief which the former work. When afflictions fail to have their due effect, the case is desperate.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Prosperity
Bred to think as well as speak by vote, we furnish our minds, as we furnish our houses, with the fancies of others, and according to the mode and age of our country.—We pick up our ideas and notions in common conversation, as in schools.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Ideas
The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life, are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life: and as some must trifle away age, because they trifled away youth, others must labor on in a maze of error, because they have wandered there too long to find their way out.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Prejudice
The shortest and the surest way of arriving at real knowledge the lessons we have been taught, to remount the first principles, and take nobody’s word about them.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Knowledge
Doubt is the key of knowledge. He who never doubts never examines. He who never examines, never discovers anything. He who discovers nothing remains blind.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Worry is the only insupportable misfortune of life.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Worry, One liners
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Freedom, Health, Liberty
We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Philosophy, Reason
Pride often defeats its own end, by bringing the man who seeks esteem and reverence, into contempt.
—Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Topics: Pride
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