“There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.”

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.

There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world.

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

Well behaved women do not make history.

The practical success of an idea, irrespective of its inherent merit, is dependent on the attitude of the contemporaries.

Be as you wish to seem.

When we change our daily lives – the way we think, speak and act – we change the world.

I may not be perfect, but i’m always me.

My persistence is the measure of the belief I have in myself.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are.