I can be free only to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority to the detriment of my liberty.

When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary; when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear.

There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.