“Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations derived from the nature of things.”

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.

The brain is the highest of the organs in position, and it is protected by the vault of the head; it has no flesh or blood or refuse. It is the citadel of sense-perception.

Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual?

Always act in such a way as to secure the love of your neighbour.

I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

Every living creature is the son of the supreme Lord, and He does not tolerate even ants being killed

No hatred is so bitter as that of near relations.

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.