Let France have good mothers, and she will have good sons.

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.

In tragedy great men are more truly great than in history. We see them only in the crises which unfold them.

Neglect of duty does not cease, by repetition, to be neglect of duty.

Men have their virtues and their vices, their heroisms and their perversities; men are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but possess and practice all that there is of good and bad here below. Such is the general rule. Temperament, education, the accidents of life, are modifying factors. Outside of this, everything is ordered arrangement, everything is chance. Such has been my rule of expectation and it has usually brought me success.

Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.