“When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.”

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.

In a republic there is no coercive force as in other governments, the laws must therefore endeavor to supply this defect.

What cowardice it is to be dismayed by the happiness of others and devastated by there good fortune.

In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.

There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.

There are countries where a man is worth nothing; there are others where he is worth less than nothing.

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.

When the State is corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied.

Corruptisima republica plurimae leges.

In a state where corruption abounds, laws must be very numerous.

Christianity … that musty old theology, which already has its grave clothes on, and is about to be buried… A wall of Bible, brimstone, church and corruption has hitherto hemmed women into nothingness.

It’s not that women are less corruptible than men are, it’s that women have had less chance to become corrupt.

Money is the worst currency that ever grew among mankind. This sacks cities, this drives men from their homes, this teaches and corrupts the worthiest minds to turn base deeds.

Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.