“liberty, to define it, is nothing other than the absence of impediments to motion”

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

Power simply is no more, but the excess of the power of one above that of another.

For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.

A great leap in the dark.

For such is the nature of man, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.

For to accuse requires less eloquence, such is man’s nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution, more resembles justice.

Philosophy excludes the doctrine of angels, and all such things as are thought to be neither bodies nor properties of bodies.

Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.

It is not wisdom but authority that makes a Law.

Hell is truth seen too late.

All acquired power consists in command over some of the powers of other man.

I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power, that ceases only in death.

The first and fundamental law of Nature, which is, to seek peace and follow it.

Every part of the universe is ‘body’ and that which is not ‘body’ is no part of the universe, and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere.

What is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?

Some men’s desires are without limits.

Without Coretta Scott King, there would not have been a Martin Luther King, Jr. in the way that we know him.

The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man.

To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.

The absence of him is everywhere I look.

I know that the absence of my father in my life had its cost.

The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

When will I realize the absence of hate is not love?

Your absence is the loudest presence I have ever known.