It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier that other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are. you are comparing your lot with an ideal which is of course better and therefore you feel worse

The prejudices of superstition are superior to all others, and have the strongest influence on the human mind.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.

They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings.

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