Now, since everything else is furnished with the exact amount of needle and thread required to maintain its being, it is in truth incredible that we alone should be brought into the world in a defective and indigent state, in a state such that we cannot maintain ourselves without external aid.

It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.

No wonder, said an Ancient, that chance has so much power over us, since it is by chance that we live.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

No pleasure has any savor for me without communication.

I am myself the matter of my book.

Peoples nurtured on freedom and self-government judge any other form of polity to be deformed and unnatural. Those who are used to monarchy do the same .