Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

No mans error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

Prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto.

Government is necessary, not because man is naturally bad... but because man is by nature more individualistic than social.

The Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

To speak impartially, both sayings are very true: that man to man is a kind of God; and that man to man is an arrant wolf. The first is true, if we compare citizens amongst themselves; and the second, if we compare cities.

The Imagination that is raised in man (or any other creature imbued with the faculty of imagining) by words, or other voluntary signs, is that we generally call Understanding; and is common to Man and Beasts.