Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

A criminal may improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot improve. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. There is no way out for him.

To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.

All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate.

Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.

Such then is the human state, that to wish greatness for one’s country is to wish harm to one’s neighbors.

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

All of life is a foreign country.

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.

France has neither winter, summer, nor morals—apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.