Democratic institutions generally give men a lofty notion of their country and themselves.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

Military discipline is merely a perfection of social servitude.

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details, which must be attended to if rules have to be adapted to different men, instead of indiscriminately subjecting all men to the same rule.

Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort.

It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.

He [Napoleon] was as great as a man can be without morality.