A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.
We ought to be very cautious and circumspect in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty.
An injustice committed against anyone is a threat to everyone.
The public business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick nor too slow.
The crime against nature will never make any great progress in society unless people are prompted to it by some particular custom.
It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink and have a sense of humour.
You have to study a great deal to know a little.
Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
Solemnity is the shield of idiots
The less men think, the more they talk.
Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.
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.
Law should be like death, which spares no one.
Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half.
Vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous. To be convinced of this we need only represent, on the one hand,the numberless benefits which result from vanity, as industry, the arts, fashions, politeness, and taste; and on the other, the infinite evils which spring from the pride of certain nations, a laziness, poverty, a total neglect of everything.
Brutes are deprived of the high advantages which we have; but they have some which we have not. They have not our hopes, but theyare without our fears; they are subject like us to death, but without knowing it; even most of them are more attentive than we to self-preservation, and do not make so bad a use of their passions.
Slowness is frequently the cause of much greater slowness.
They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings.
The law of nations is naturally founded on this principle, that different nations ought in time of peace to do one another all the good they can, and in time of war as little injury as possible, without prejudicing their real interests.
In the birth of societies it is the chiefs of states who give it its special character; and afterward it is this special character that forms the chiefs of state.