“With a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half.”

I consider even a victorious war as an evil, from which statesmanship must endeavor to spare nations.

Beware of sentimental alliances where the consciousness of good deeds is the only compensation for noble sacrifices.

What we learn from History is that no one learns from History.

Government is cancerous in head and limbs;only its belly is sound, and the laws it excretes are the most strightforward shit in the world.

Love is blind; friendship tries not to notice.

Laws are like medicine; they generally cure an evil by a lesser or a passing evil.

Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong: it is a geographical expression.

Hounds follow those who feed them.

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

A government must not waiver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward.

History is simply a piece of paper covered with print: the main thing is to make history, not to write it.

Nothing should be left to an invaded people except their eyes for weeping.

A generation that has taken a beating is always followed by a generation that deals one.

Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of always choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.

The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.

The main thing is to make history, not to write it.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.