“When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.”

Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.

It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman… because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.

Talent is a gift which God has given us secretly, and which we reveal without perceiving it.

Trade is the best cure for prejudice.

It is difficult for the united states to be all of equal power and extent.

Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.

The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.

In constitutional states, liberty is compensation for heavy taxes; in dictatorships, the subsititue is light taxes.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.

Virtue is necessary to a republic.

Virtue has needs of limits.

The wickedness of mankind makes it necessary for the law to suppose them better than they really are.

The pagan religion, which prohibited only some of the grosser crimes, and which stopped the hand but meddled not with the heart, might have crimes that were inexplicable.

Peace is a natural effect of trade.

The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage.

I told the umpires to walk back at least thirty-five feet from home plate. That reduced the arguements.

Gilligan’s Island is wherever you want it to be in your mind.

I was never given a trial. I never went before any magistrate, nor did my parents. To this day, I do not know what the charges that were lodged against me or my deceased parents at this time.

I’ve had a wordless phase, and that’s still not entirely over: what I sing is not always literally meant that way, and you can hear that in the way it is sung.

It was hell to go through what I went through. I didn’t know I had so many friends. Many people gave a damn about my situation. They helped cure me.

The audience is the best judge of anything. They cannot be lied to. Truth brings them closer. A moment that lags – they’re gonna cough.

Do I believe in arbitration? I do. But not in arbitration between the lion and the lamb, in which the lamb is in the morning found inside the lion

Education for all seems to be the product of a type of distributive justice that is in no way related to the individual.