Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil.

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.

When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.

A government which does not trust its citizens to be armed is not itself to be trusted.

Change has no constituency.

There are three kinds of minds: first those that attain insight and understanding of things by their own means, then those that recognize what is right when others explain it to them, and finally those that are capable of neither one nor the other.

Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.