The art of being sometimes audacious and sometimes very prudent is the secret of success.

A Constitution should be short and obscure.

When soldiers have been baptized in the fire of a battle-field, they have all one rank in my eyes.

You cannot drag a man's conscience before any tribunal, and no one is answerable for his religious opinions to any power on earth.

A nation recruits men more easily than it can retrieve its honour.

This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. I looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his own death.

Men take only their needs into consideration - never their abilities.