Perhaps here we have a clue to the reason why royal rule used to exist formerly, namely the difficulty of finding enough men of outstanding virtue.

Talent is culture with insolence.

The body is most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five years of age, the mind at about forty-nine.

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.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

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

Man, as an originator of action, is a union of desire and intellect.