The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.

Mathematics is like draughts in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.

The greatest penalty of evil-doing is to grow into the likeness of bad men, and, growing like them, to fly from the conversation of the good, and be cut off from them, and cleave to and follow after the company of the bad.

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.

Democracy does not contain any force which will check the constant tendency to put more and more on the public payroll. The state is like a hive of bees in which the drones display, multiply and starve the workers so the idlers will consume the food and the workers will perish.

... Societies aren t made of sticks and stones, but of men whose individual characters, by turning the scale one way or another, determine the direction of the whole.

Then the lover, who is true and no counterfeit, must of necessity be loved by his love.