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.

If you want to know the people of a nation, I am sure you can judge a great deal more about them from their cooking and eating traditions than you can from the words and actions of their public officials.

My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in, and he complained of feeling 'a dull pain in the brain'--a physical pain, as he used to say--when he was with people who cared only for small talk.

A national movement, which does not include in its platform the demand for an economical change advantageous to the masses has no chance of success unless supported by foreign aid.

The immense and ever increasing sums which the state wrings from the people are never enough for it; it mortgages the income of future generations, and steers resolutely toward bankruptcy.

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?

Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown.