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

There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.

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.

You can’t live the Christian life without a band of Christian friends, without a family of believers in which you find a place.

Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion.

If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshipping an idealized version of yourself.

Christianity does not provide the reason for each experience of pain, but it does provide deep resources for actually facing suffering with hope and courage rather than bitterness and despair

God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.

…Singles, too, must see the penultimate status of marriage. If single Christians don’t develop a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Jesus, they will put too much pressure on their DREAM of marriage, and that will create pathology in their lives as well.

Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.

The office of president requires the constitution of an athlete, the patience of a mother, the endurance of an early Christian.