The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all theabstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called "Sympathetic Nature.

It is true that men themselves made this world of nations... but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves.

Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.

Governments must be conformable to the nature of the governed; governments are even a result of that nature.

Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.