When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.

Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!

War is the usual condition of Europe. A thirty years' supply of causes of war is always on hand.

Any revolutionary agitation exacts enormous sacrifices, not so much in terms of prison sentences and years of incarceration - which have been raining down by the hundreds of years annually - as in terms of the manifold personal sacrifices sustained by those who commit themselves to revolutionary agitation.

The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.

Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for?

No evolution is accomplished in nature without revolution. Periods of very slow changes are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and succeed them.