Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.

The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.

Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.

The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.