Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.

The predominant teachings of this age are that there are no limits to man's capacity to govern others and that, therefore, no limitations ought to be imposed upon government. The older faith, born of long ages of suffering under man's dominion over man, was that the exercise of unlimited power by men with limited minds and self-regarding prejudices is soon oppressive, reactionary, and corrupt. The older faith taught that the very condition of progress was the limitation of power to the capacity and the virtue of rulers.

There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.

Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.