All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

What a miserable world!--trouble if we love, and trouble if we do not love.

All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.

Without doubt, God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. God directs angels, men, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things, but each according to its nature: and man having been created free, he is led freely.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.

What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.