The passion for philosophy, like that for religion, involves a certain danger. Although it aims to correct our behaviour and wipe out our vices, it m… - David Hume

Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principles.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

[I]t must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence: and in those contests, which so often take place between the one and the other, the latter may, on that account, challenge the preference. Unless perhaps one may say (and it may be said with some reason) that a circumstance, which is essential to the existence of civil society, must always support itself, and needs be guarded with less jealousy, than one that contributes only to its perfection, which the indolence of men is so apt to neglect, or their ignorance to overlook.