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

Political Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise.

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

Understanding arises through making

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

Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars.

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.