The finger that turns the dial rules the air.

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.

The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.