“Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments.”

Injustice towards others is a threat to everybody

I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.

The Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.

In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.

The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.

Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.

Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

Coffee renders many foolish people temporarily capable of wise actions

The public business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick nor too slow.

To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.

There is no one, says another, whom fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door, and flies out at the window.

Honor is unknown in despotic states.

Honor sets all the parts of the body politic in motion, and by its very action connects them; thus each individual advances the public good, while he only thinks of promoting his own interest.

The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.

There are bad examples which are worse than crimes; and more states have perished from the violation of morality than from the violation of law.

I cannot conceive of a politically feasible solution to this problem which will overdo cutting the deficit, where overdoing means harming the economy. It might be technically possible, but it is not realistic.

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

If you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries.

I don’t think there’s any one definition, but to do effective political work you have to have vision and practicality, and learn how to persuade people that what you feel needs to be done does need to be done.

And they seek out Border Patrol agents or Customs and Border Protection officials to surrender to them and request political asylum.

In that it placed the individual person first in the political scheme of things and made the legitimacy of governments and ruling classes contingent on their success at preserving individual rights.

If the country is to survive as a democracy it will depend on voters who understand how our political institutions have evolved and the events that went into their creation.

Political thriller? International thriller? Financial thriller? Whatever you call it, The Ascendant is smart, edgy, fast-paced storytelling at its best.