I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people.

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

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart.

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.