Politics are a smooth file, which cuts gradually, and attains its end by slow progression.

Virtue has needs of limits.

A really intelligent man feels what other men only know.

Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance... the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason.

Coffee renders many foolish people temporarily capable of wise actions

No tyranny is more cruel than the one practised in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice - when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves. And since a tyrant never lacks instruments for his tyranny, Tiberius always found judges ready to condemn as many people as he might suspect.

When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.