Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

When none but the wealthy had watches, they were almost all very good ones; few are now made which are worth much, but everybody has one in his pocket.

What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.

Men will not receive the truth from their enemies, and it is seldom offered to them by their friends.

It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.

There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.

Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.