"When a people is lazy, it attributes everything to fortune."

"It is not the young people that degenerate; they are only rather thoughtless: the old ones are corrupt."

"The law, in its most general signification, is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth; the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases …"

"The custom of exposing children was very frequent among the Greeks, because they had no families."

"To form a moderate government, it is necessary to combine the powers, to regulate them, to temper them, to set them in motion; to give, so to speak, a ballast to one, in order to enable it to resist a…"