How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms

Each human being is bred with a unique set of potentials that yearn to be fulfilled as surely as the acorn yearns to become the oak within it.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

To be angry is easy. But to be angry with the right man at the right time and in the right manner, that is not easy.

Governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and are therefore true forms; but those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms, for they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of freemen.

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

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.