“We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school-masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us.”

Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.

The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.

In constitutional states, liberty is compensation for heavy taxes; in dictatorships, the subsititue is light taxes.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.

Virtue is necessary to a republic.

Virtue has needs of limits.

The wickedness of mankind makes it necessary for the law to suppose them better than they really are.

The pagan religion, which prohibited only some of the grosser crimes, and which stopped the hand but meddled not with the heart, might have crimes that were inexplicable.

Peace is a natural effect of trade.

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

The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset nature on our behalf.

There are three species of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic.

There is as yet no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from legislative power and the executrix

Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.

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.

People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.

We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.

I think most of us are torn. We have at least two people at war in our body. One person wants to retire and grow fabulous tomatoes, and the other wants to stand up on a pedestal and be worshipped and get bigger and bigger and bigger until she explodes.

When I found out after that first successful exhibition that the gallery wanted me to do another show like the first one, I come out two years later with four 6-foot drawings of classical nudes masturbating. The gallery director flipped the freak out!

Modesty in women has two special advantages,–it enhances beauty and veils uncomeliness.

I could never have embraced this many people with two arms.

If you want to be original just try being yourself, because God has never made two people exactly alike.

Wilderness is two things-fact and feeling. It is a fund of knowledge and a spring of influence. It is the ultimate source of health-terrestrial and human.

The last and most painful irony is that the two longtime rival armies in the securitization market – the investment banks and the GSEs – would end up magnifying each other’s sins rather than keeping each other in check.