“I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.”

All that needs to be done for evil to prevail is good men doing nothing.

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

Those who attempt to level never equalize.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

You can never plan the future by the past.

Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.

Good company, lively conversation, and the endearments of friendship fill the mind with great pleasure.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

Silence is golden but when it threatens your freedom it’s yellow.

This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.

an assumption that has resulted in the rapid expansion of the real estate securitization business.

You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-things that you believe because you were taught or told they were true.

Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.

The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

Written with courage and passion, this is a book whose often counterintuitive clarity shakes entombed assumptions like an earthquake.

This profound book shatters that assumption, showing that the more vital skill is asking the right questions….