How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

When there is peace in the country, the chief does not carry a shield.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression...

Perhaps a man's character was like a tree, and his reputation like its shadow; the shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

Fear mankind most when he fights with a consuming passion for what he perceives to be true.