Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality.

I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.

I like to see the people awake and alert.

The plough is to the farmer what the wand is to the sorcerer. Its effect is really like sorcery.

Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences.

It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one.