“They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings.”

Europe is a state with several provinces

One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.

As men are affected in all ages by the same passions, the occasions which bring about great changes are different, but the causes are always the same.

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.

A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.

Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.

Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight.

Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.

Countries are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty.

The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.

When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it and avarice possesses the whole community.

At our coming into the world we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.

Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.

It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman… because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.

Talent is a gift which God has given us secretly, and which we reveal without perceiving it.

We know that the Zanj (blacks) are the least intelligent and the least discerning of mankind.

Unlike so many Dylan-writer-wannabes and phony ‘encyclopedia’ compilers, Sean Wilentz makes me feel he was in the room when he chronicles events that I participated in.

Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.

Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.

whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.

We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.

How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.

The more gifted by nature is a man, the more is deplorable the abuse that he does by using them to shameful ends.