There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened.

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity.

Two things, almost incompatible, are united in me in a manner which I am unable to understand: a very ardent temperament, lively and tumultuous passions, and, at the same time, slowly developed and confused ideas, which never present themselves until it is too late. One might say that my heart and my mind do not belong to the same person.

People in their natural state are basically good. But this natural innocence,however, is corrupted by the evils of society.

Many men, seemingly impelled by fortune, hasten forward to meet misfortune half way.