When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.

Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature.

It is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another.

Peace is a natural effect of trade.

Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.

There should be weeping at a man's birth, not at his death.

There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of Christ.