“Each citizen contributes to the revenues of the State a portion of his property in order that his tenure of the rest may be secure.”

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.

Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.

…when the laws have ceased to be executed, as this can only come from the corruption of the republic, the state is already lost.

The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.

Today, the Iraqi citizen sees that America is coming and wants to occupy his country and kill him, and he is willing to experience for himself what happened in Palestine.

The citizens of America expect more. They deserve and they want more than a recital of problems.

Let each person do his or her part. If one citizen is unwilling to participate, all of us are going to suffer. For the American idea, though it is shared by all of us, is realized in each one of us.

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.

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

An enlightened citizen is an indispensable ingredient of the infrastructure of democracy.

The combined efforts of millions of concerned citizens could do wonders to help the impoverished. The American people are ready for action!

Things which matter cost money, and we’ve got to spend the money if we do not want to have generations of parasites rather than generations of productive citizens.