“I like peasants-they are not sophisticated enough to reason speciously.”

Man, as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.

As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.

The coffee is prepared in such a way that it makes those who drink it witty: at least there is not a single soul who, on quitting the house, does not believe himself four times wittier that when he entered it.

Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments.

The reason the Romans built their great paved highways was because they had such inconvenient footwear.

There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.

Injustice towards others is a threat to everybody

I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.

The Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it.

In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.

The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.

Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.

Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

Coffee renders many foolish people temporarily capable of wise actions

The public business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick nor too slow.

The funniest novel you’ve never read. . . . Afternoon Men is a revelation to sophisticated readers of every stripe, but especially to a certain kind of artist manqu on the brink of discovering that life is a more difficult business than he ever had reason to expect. . . .

My mom has given me my sense of style. She has taught me how individual style is so beautiful, what you appreciate on someone else might not be good for you. For her, style is all about being comfortable, and she has an innate sense of sophisticated style.

Like most Chinese, I am basically a fatalist – too sophisticated for religion and too superstitious to deny the gods.

I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.

While a dramatized scene is a way of proving and guaranteeing an emotional experience for the reader, exposition assumes that the reader is sophisticated and can see the universal.

Also, I have to assume that readers are sophisticated enough to know that not every person in a community is the same, and so there are many people who would not force an abortion just because a fetus is female.

I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

I don’t want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of ‘Idiocracy’ and ‘Borat,’ without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.