It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.

For a country, everything will be lost when the jobs of an economist and a banker become highly respected professions.

Christians are beginning to lose the spirit of intolerance which animated them: experience has shown the error of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and of the persecution of those Christians in France whose belief differed a little from that of the king. They have realized that zeal for the advancement of religion is different from a due attachment to it; and that in order to love it and fulfil its behests, it is not necessary to hate and persecute those who are opposed to it.

In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.

Those who have few affairs to attend to are great speakers. The less men think, the more they talk.

The less men think, the more they talk.