Impetuosity and audacity often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve.

Men are more ready to offend one who desires to be beloved than one who wishes to be feared.

War is a profession by which a man cannot live honorably; an employment by which the soldier, if he would reap any profit, is obliged to be false, rapacious, and cruel.

And when he is obliged to take the life of any one, to do so when there is a proper justification and manifest reason for it; but above all he must abstain from taking the property of others, for men forget more easily the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony.

Good order and discipline in any army are to be depended upon more than courage alone.

One can say this in general of men: they are ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and avid of profit...Love is a bond of obligation that these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes.

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.