Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction, but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible.

Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends.

Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment

The habits we form from childhood make no small difference, but rather they make all the difference.

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

Laws, when good, should be supreme; and that the magistrate or magistrates should regulate those matters only on which the laws are unable to speak with precision owing to the difficulty of any general principle embracing all particulars.

No science ever defends its first principles.