Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.

Learn to shrink yourself to the size of the company you are in. Take their tone, whatever it may be, and excell in it if you can;but never pretend to give the tone. A free conversation will no more bear a dictator than a free government will.

Ties of blood are not always ties of friendship; but friendship founded on merit, on esteem, and on mutual trust, becomes more vital and more tender when strengthened by the ties of blood.

Women are all so far Machiavellians that they are never either good or bad by halves; their passions are too strong, and their reason too weak, to do anything with moderation.

Let your enemies be disarmed by the gentleness of your manner, but let them feel at the same time the steadiness of your just resentment for there is a great difference between bearing malice, which is always ungenerous, and a resolute self-defense which is ever prudent and justifiable.

Little secrets are commonly told again, but great ones generally kept.

A man who tells nothing, or who tells all, will equally have nothing told him.