In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

Prudence is a quality incompatible with vice, and can never be effectively enlisted in its cause.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

Art is a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are dead and those who are yet to be born.

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

Silence is golden but when it threatens your freedom it's yellow.

All writers on the science of policy are agreed, and they agree with experience, that all governments must frequently infringe the rules of justice to support themselves; that truth must give way to dissimulation, honesty to convenience, and humanity itself to the reigning of interest. The whole of this mystery of iniquity is called the reason of state.