“Evil prevails when good men fail to act.”

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.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

This is the curse of an evil deed, that it incites and must bring forth more evil.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils.

You’ve got to change your evil ways, baby, before I start loving you.

All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure evil with evil.

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

There are evil spirits who suddenly fix their abode in man’s unguarded breast, causing us to commit devilish deeds, and then, hurrying back to their native hell, leave behind the stings of remorse in the poisoned bosom.

Whoever lives among many evils just as I, how can dying not be a source of gain?