Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.