If you wish to be success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.

Nothing renders a nation so despicable as religious despotism.

The people excited by ambitious demagogues, sooner or later return into the hands of the Aristocracy.

There is no Nation however small which had the right to set itself free, that has not rescued itself from the dishonour of obeying the Prince imposed by an enemy in the hour of victory.

A people that is able to say everything, becomes able to do everything. The crowd which follows me with admiration, would run with the same eagerness were I marching to the Guillotine.

How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares 'God wills it thus.'