But in almost every province of the Roman world, an army of fanatics, without authority and without discipline, invaded the peaceful inhabitants; and the ruin of the fairest structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of those barbarians who alone had time and inclination to execute such laborious destruction.

A Locrian, who proposed any new law, stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.

It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly twenty years of my life.

It is impossible to reduce, or, at least, to hold a distant country against the wishes and efforts of its inhabitants.

[Peace] cannot be honorable or secure, if the sovereign betrays a pusillanimous aversion to war.

Flattery is a foolish suicide; she destroys herself with her own hands.

But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature . . .