It is far more important to resist apathy than anarchy or despotism, for apathy can give rise, almost indifferently, to either one.

We need a new political science for a new world.

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.

The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.

This so-called tolerance, which, in my opinion, is nothing but a huge indifference.

In democracies, nothing is more great or more brilliant than commerce: it attracts the attention of the public, and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic passions are directed towards it.

A long war almost always places nations in this sad alternative: that their defeat delivers them to destruction and their triumph to despotism.