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Home  »  Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men  »  Aaron Burr

S.A. Bent, comp. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. 1887.

Aaron Burr

  • [An American politician, born at Newark, N.J., 1756; served in the expedition against Quebec; admitted to the bar of New York, 1782; elected to the United-States Senate, 1791; chosen Vice-president of the United States by the House of Representatives, 1800; tried on a charge of treason, and acquitted, 1807; lived many years in poverty in Europe; died in New York, 1836.]
  • Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.

  • Coke called law “the perfection of reason,” following Sir John Powell, who said in “Coggs v. Bernard” (“2 Lord Raymond, 911”), “For nothing is law that is not reason.” Hooker’s sublime personification naturally suggests itself: “Of Law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world.”—Ecclesiastical Polity, I.
  • Burr wrote to Pichon, the secretary of the French Legation at Washington: “The rule of my life is to make business a pleasure, and pleasure my business.”
  • He asserted that the maxim, “Never put off until to-morrow what can be done to-day,” was made for sluggards. “A better reading of it is, ‘Never do to-day what you can do as well to-morrow;’ because something may occur to make you regret your premature action.”