“When we are understood, we always speak well, and then all your fine diction serves no purpose.”

Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty.

We are easily duped by those we love.

Innocence is not accustomed to blush.

Esteem must be founded on some sort of preference. Bestow it on everybody and it ceases to have any meaning at all.

Love is a great master. It teaches us to be what we never were.

No one is safe from slander. The best way is to pay no attention to it, but live in innocence and let the world talk.

It is a long road from conception to completion.

That must be fine, for I don’t understand a word.

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.

I prefer a pleasant vice to an annoying virtue.

I prefer an interesting vice to a virtue that bores.

The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.

Cover that bosom that I must not see: souls are wounded by such things.

Isn’t the greatest rule of all the rules simply to please?

Without dance, a man can do nothing.

The ancients, sir, are the ancients, and we are the people of today.

We came to serve God and to get rich, as all men wish to do.

Peace can come to both the giver and the receiver as we follow the promptings of the Spirit to serve one another.

Liberty is no longer the virgin, chaste and severe, to be fought for … we have buried the putrid corpse of liberty … the Italian people are a race of sheep.

The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.

[E]mpathy – not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance – is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.

To free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery.

I address you with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: to serve my country.

He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.