Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it.

Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.

Men are especially intolerant of serving and being ruled by, their equals.

Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character: for obedience is the constant will to execute what, by the general decree of the commonwealth, ought to be done.

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things. For if a man says that the lines which are drawn from the centre of the circle to the circumference are not equal, he understands by the circle, at all events for the time, something else than mathematicians understand by it.