Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

Men always love what is good or what they find good; it is in judging what is good that they go wrong.

The French, for example, are a contemptible nation.

Six well-spent years will pay off all the evil you have committed.

The vine that has been made to bear fruit in the spring, withers and dies before autumn.

Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.

Everything is perfect coming from the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man.

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.

It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful.

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct.