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Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because of all enemies it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource.
The spirit of proselytism attends this spirit of fanaticism.
Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance; her pride is in the use.
Your politicians do not understand their trade; and therefore they sell their tools.
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds;
They must take it for granted that we attend much to their reason, but not at all to their authority.
But eloquence may exist without a proportionable degree of wisdom.
Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves,
Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.
It is one of the excellences of a method in which time is amongst the assistants, that its operation is slow and in some cases almost imperceptible.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.
Old establishments are tried by their effects. If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest.
Hominem non sapiunt.
What is it we all seek for in an election?
founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility, and the people.
It is a poor service that is to be had from responsibility.
Such a machine as the latter is not worth the grease of its wheels.
They are to execute, without power; they are to be responsible, without discretion; they are to deliberate, without choice.
They composed permanent bodies politic, constituted to resist arbitrary innovation; and from that corporate constitution, and from most of their forms, they were well calculated to afford both certainty and stability to the laws. They had been a safe asylum to secure these laws in all the revolutions of humor and opinion. They had saved that sacred deposit of the country during the reigns of arbitrary princes and the struggles of arbitrary factions.
occasional decrees, psephismata.
The nature of things requires that the army should never act but as an instrument. The moment that, erecting itself into a deliberative body, it shall act according to its own resolutions, the government, be it what it may, will immediately degenerate into a military democracy — a species of political monster which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it.
absence of mutiny than the existence of discipline.
To prevent the mischiefs arising from conspiracies, irregular consultations, seditious committees, and monstrous democratic assemblies (comitia, comices) of the soldiers, and all the disorders arising from idleness, luxury, dissipation, and insubordination, I believe the most astonishing means have been used that ever occurred to men, even in all the inventions of this prolific age.
Every man has his own relish.
If the soldiers once come to mix for any time in the municipal clubs, cabals, and confederacies, an elective attraction will draw them to the lowest and most desperate part. With them will be their habits, affections, and sympathies.
There must be blood. The want of common judgment manifested in the construction of all their descriptions of forces and in all their kinds of civil and judicial authorities will make it flow.
king is not to be deposed by halves. If he is not everything in the command of an army, he is nothing.
In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master — the master (that is little) of your king, the
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you have industriously destroyed all the opinions and prejudices and, as far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government. Therefore, the moment any difference arises between your National Assembly and any part of the nation, you must have recourse to force. Nothing else is left to you, or rather you have left nothing else to yourselves.
You lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences, and then you attempt to limit logic by despotism.
But we find you pay more regard to their fancies than to our necessities.
The last reason of kings is always the first with your Assembly.
Having concluded my few remarks on the constitution of the supreme power, the executive, the judicature, the military, and on the reciprocal relation of all these establishments, I shall say something of the ability shown by your legislators with regard to the revenue.
The revenue of the state is the state.
Public virtue, being of a nature magnificent and splendid, instituted for great things and conversant about great concerns, requires abundant scope and room and cannot spread and grow under confinement and in circumstances straitened, narrow, and sordid. Through the revenue alone the body politic can act in its true genius and character, and, therefore, it will display just as much of its collective virtue, and as much of that virtue which may characterize those who move it and are, as it were, its life and guiding principle, as it is possessed of a just revenue.
The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample revenue, to impose it with judgment and equality, to employ it economically, and when necessity obliges him to make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, and forever, by the clearness and candor of his proceedings, the exactness of his calculations and the solidity of his funds.
Cedo qui vestram rempublicam tantam amisistis tam cito?
Come, tell me how you lost your Great State so quickly.
Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.
The deliberations of calamity are rarely wise.
The resources of public folly are soon exhausted.
In fact, it might be easily shown that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase it; instead of being a substitute for money, it only facilitates its entry, its exit, and its circulation; that it is the symbol of prosperity, and not the badge of distress. Never was a scarcity of cash and an exuberance of paper a subject of complaint in this nation.
These politicians have been cruel, not economical.
These gentlemen perhaps do not believe a great deal in the miracles of piety, but it cannot be questioned that they have an undoubting faith in the prodigies of sacrilege.
Mais si maladia, opiniatria, non vult se garire, quid illi facere?
If diseased opinion doesn’t wish to heal, what can be done?
They rob only to enable them to cheat, but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud by making out accounts for other purposes which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception.
Every honest mind, every true lover of liberty and humanity, must rejoice to find that injustice is not always good policy, nor rapine the high road to riches.
They cannot raise supplies, but they can raise mobs.
But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Neither do I wholly condemn the little arts and devices of popularity. They facilitate the carrying of many points of moment; they keep the people together; they refresh the mind in its exertions; and they diffuse occasional gaiety over the severe brow of moral freedom. Every politician ought to sacrifice to the graces, and to join compliance with reason.
