Certain kinds of foolishness are such that a greater foolishness would be better.

Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half.

But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.

The public business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick nor too slow.

Power ought to serve as a check to power.

Ever since the invention of gunpowder.. I continually tremble lest men should, in the end, uncover some secret which would provide a short way of abolishing mankind, of annihilating peoples and nations in their entirety.

In vain do we seek tranquility in the desert; temptations are always with us; our passions, represented by the demons, never let us alone: those monsters created by the heart, those illusions produced by the mind, those vain specters that are our errors and our lies always appear before us to seduce us; they attack us even in our fasting or our mortifications, in other words, in our very strength.