Oh, how empty is praise when it reflects back to its origin!

With truths of a certain kind, it is not enough to make them appear convincing: one must also make them felt. Of such kind are moral truths.

Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.

I like peasants-they are not sophisticated enough to reason speciously.

There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.

Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.

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