Men will commit atrocities as long as they believe absurdities.

Love truth, and pardon error.

What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them.

So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.

Men, generally going with the stream, seldom judge for themselves, and purity of taste is almost as rare as talent.

Being unable to make people more reasonable, I preferred to be happy away from them

If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero.