The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.

Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.

There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.