It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.

There is nothing so difficult or so dangerous as to undertake to change the order of things.

One never finds anything perfectly pure and ... exempt from danger.

Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.

Every little advantage is of great moment when men have to come to blows.

For one change always leaves a dovetail into which another will fit.

You do not know the unfathomable cowardice of humanity...servile in the face of force, pitiless in the face of weakness, implacable before blunders, indulgent before crimes...and patient to the point of martyrdom before all the violences of bold despotism.