Nowadays, for the sake of the advantage which is to be gained from the public revenues and from office, men want to be always in office.

As the pleasures of the body are the ones which we most often meet with, and as all men are capable of these, these have usurped the family title; and some men think these are the only pleasures that exist, because they are the only ones which they know.

Law is order, and good law is good order.

Money originated with royalty and slavery, it has nothing to do with democracy or the struggle of the empoverished enslaved majority.

Music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young.

Plants, again, inasmuch as they are without locomotion, present no great variety in their heterogeneous pacts. For, when the functions are but few, few also are the organs required to effect them. ... Animals, however, that not only live but perceive, present a great multiformity of pacts, and this diversity is greater in some animals than in others, being most varied in those to whose share has fallen not mere life but life of high degree. Now such an animal is man.

For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.