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

Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.

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.

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.

The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.

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.

Honor is unknown in despotic states.