This punishment of death is the remedy, as it were, of a sick society.

Power ought to serve as a check to power.

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.

False happiness renders men stern and proud, and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, and that happiness is always shared.

[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread... and a thousand other things of the same kind.

Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight.

If triangles had a god, he would have three sides.