Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.

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.

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.

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

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

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.