Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be.

When couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.

One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect at the same time.

The structural unity of the parts is such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and dis­turbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference is not an organic part of the whole.

The greatest threat to the state is not faction but distraction

Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.