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

Ever since the invention of gunpowder.. I continually tremble lest men should, in the end, uncover some secret which would provide a short way of abolishing mankind, of annihilating peoples and nations in their entirety.

The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.

In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.

If you run after wit, you will succeed in catching folly.

I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars: but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced these wars; it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.

Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit.

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.

Success in the majority of circumstances depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.

This punishment of death is the remedy, as it were, of a sick society.

Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied.

[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread… and a thousand other things of the same kind.

If triangles had a god, he would have three sides.

Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.

Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.

The state is the association of men, and not men themselves; the citizen may perish, and the man remain.

The harshest tyranny is that which acts under the protection of legality and the banner of justice.

The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

That good disposition which boasts of being most tender is often stifled by the least urging of self-interest.

It is the nature of the human disposition to hate him whom you have injured.

It is a principle of human nature to hate those whom we have injured.

Rulers always hate and suspect the next in succession. [Lat., Suspectum semper invisumque dominantibus qui proximus destinaretur.]