Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.
If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.