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

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

Friendship is a contract in which we render small services in expectation of big ones.

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

In the state of nature... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.

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.

There are bad examples which are worse than crimes; and more states have perished from the violation of morality than from the violation of law.