“Every man who has power is impelled to abuse it.”

Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.

The alms given to a naked man in the street do not fulfil the obligations of the state, which owes to every citizen a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health.

People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.

A rational army would run away.

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.