It is a great matter to be in authority over others; for authority, if it be rightly used, will make you feared beyond your actual resources.

To give vent now and then to his feelings, whether of pleasure or discontent, is a great ease to a man's heart.

Keep your eye fixed not so much on what they [people] ought in reason to do, as on what they are likely to do based on their disposition and habits.

We fight to great disadvantage when we fight with those who have nothing to lose.

Experience has always shown, and reason also, that affairs which depend on many seldom succeed.

Ambition is not in itself an evil; nor is he to be condemned whose spirit prompts him to seek fame by worthy and honourable ways.

To relinquish a present good through apprehension of a future evil is in most instances unwise ... from a fear which may afterwards turn out groundless, you lost the good that lay within your grasp.