 As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war. |
| When the body of the people is possessed of the supreme power, it is called a democracy. |
| Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer. |
| There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice. |
| When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner. |
| In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy. |
| Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit. |
| Not to be loved is a misfortune, but it is an insult to be loved no longer. |
| A man should be mourned at his birth, not at his death. |
| The object of war is victory; that of victory is conquest; and that of conquest preservation. |
| Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist. |
| Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature. |
| Power ought to serve as a check to power. |
| The state of slavery is in its own nature bad. |
| Happy the people whose annals are tiresome. |
| Weak minds exaggerate too much the wrong done to the Africans. |
| Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune. |
| Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people. |
| But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. |
| There are three species of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic. |
