"All human life must perish, were his principles to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease, and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an e…"

"It is an infallible maxim, that no man was ever attached to the present order of things, who did not hope to profit by it."

"I may venture to affirm, that there is nothing in itself more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sen…"

"The passions are the only causes of action, and reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions."

"The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies."