What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure

Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.

Despotism may be able to do without religion, but democracy cannot.

We need a new political science for a new world.

He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.

The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies.