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.

Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class.

On this waterlogged landscape....are scattered palaces and hovels....It is here that the human spirit becomes perfect, and at the same time brutalised, that civilisation produces its marvels and that civilised man returns to the savage.

Slavery...dishonors labor. It introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man.

Despotism can do without faith but freedom cannot.

The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

At the head of any new undertaking where in France you would find the government, or in England some great lord, in the United States you are sure to find an association.