Cities are the abyss of the human species.

Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

For, as I think I have said, I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.

Posterity is always just.

At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.

I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.