We are rarely proud when we are alone.
Everything can be borne except contempt.
Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.
Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.
Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.