To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.

Genius is nothing but continued attention.

What makes men happy is liking what they have to do. This is a principle on which society is not founded

Discipline is simply the art of making the soldiers fear their officers more than the enemy.

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

When a miser contents himself with giving nothing, and saving what he has got, and is in other respects guilty of no injustice, he is, perhaps, of all bad men the least injurious to society; the evil he does is properly nothing more than the omission of the good he might do. If, of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested, it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers.

A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.