The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.

Great is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property.

It is the activity of the intellect that constitutes complete human happiness - provided it be granted a complete span of life, for nothing that belongs to happiness can be incomplete.

It is the active exercise of our faculties in conformity with virtue that causes happiness, and the opposite activities its opposite.

Try is a noisy way of doing nothing.

Here and elsewhere we shall not obtain the best insight into things until we actually see them growing from the beginning.

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.