If there were a people consisting of gods, they would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is not suitable to men.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.

Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.

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.

Social man lives constantly outside himself.

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