Quotes by Joseph Priestley

“As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that thank Heaven nobody is reporting in this fashion on us”

“This is unfortunately a world in which things find it difficult, frequently impossible, to live up to their names”

“We pay when old for the excesses of youth.”

“To show a child what once delighted you, to find the childs delight added to your own - this is happiness.”

“Will is nothing more than a particular case of the general doctrine of association of ideas, and therefore a perfectly mechanical thing.”

“Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever”

“Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.”

In all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.

Orthodoxy my Lord said Bishop Warburton in a whisper - orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another mans doxy.

What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others.