As we jogg on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short do any thing—only keep your temper. - Laurence Sterne

I wish my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me;

The desire of life and health is implanted in man’s nature; — the love of liberty and enlargement is a sister-passion to it:

It is by the finest tints, and most insensible gradations, that nature descends from the fairest face about St. James’s, to the sootiest complexion in Africa: at which tint of these, is it, that the ties of blood are to cease? and how many shades must we descend lower still in the scale, ’ere mercy is to vanish with them? — but ’tis no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, & then endeavor to make ’em so.

(Excerpt from letter to Ignatius Sancho)