“Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.”

Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offense.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.

Tardiness often robs us opportunity, and the dispatch of our forces.

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Whoever conquers a free town and does not demolish it commits a great error and may expect to be ruined himself.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.

For among other evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible; which is one of those disgraceful things which a prince must guard against.

I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.

The wish to acquire more is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.

When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.

I understand Being in all and over all, as there is nothing without participation in Being, and there is no being without Essence. Thus nothing can be free of the Divine Presence.

If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.

Time takes all and gives all

It has perhaps always been the case that the waging of peace is the hardest form of leadership of all.

The single spirit doth simultaneously temper the whole together; this is the single soul of all things; all are filled with God .

Our toil must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength.

For me, it’s always been so obvious that the less we can edit our lives and more we show how normal we all are, the better.

This city, all they want us to be is ourselves. You love us how we are. We’re all a work in progress as men and you still love us and I thank you so much for embracing us.