Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil — in its worst state an intolerable one — for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Maskwell: Cynthia, let thy Beauty gild my Crimes; and whatsoever I commit of Treachery or Deceit, shall be imputed to me as a Merit — Treachery, what Treachery? Love cancels all the Bonds of Friendship, and sets Men right upon their first Foundations.

Because fear and conspiracy play no part in your daily relations with each other, you imagine that the same thing is true of your allies, and you fail to see that when you allow them to persuade you to make a mistaken decision and when you give way to your own feelings of compassion, you are being guilty of a kind of weakness that is dangerous to you and that will not make them love you any more. What you do not realize is that your empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and who are always plotting against you; you will not make them obey you by injuring your own interests in order to do them a favor; your leadership depends on superior strength and not on any goodwill of theirs.

When standing in a hotel ballroom or when seated in a television studio, it is the duty of the tribunes of the people to insist that the drug traffic be stopped, the budget balanced, the schools improved, paradise regained. Off camera, they bootleg the distribution of the nation’s wealth to the gentry at whose feet they dance for coins.

Brisk: I confess I write but seldom, but when I do — keen iambicks I’gad.

While Fichte was delivering his Addresses in Berlin, a group of Königsberg professors formed a society known as the Tugendbund, or League of Virtue, which hoped to regenerate Germany by fostering “morality, religion, serious taste, and public spirit,” and whose anti-French ravings Stein qualified as “the rage of dreaming sheep.” Another peculiar manifestation of the patriotic upsurge was the gymnastic association founded in Berlin by a school teacher, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, known as Turnvater — a term that can be rendered only approximately as “Father of Calisthenics.” Turnvater Jahn believed in patriotism through physical fitness and made his lads disport themselves athletically to be ready for the hour of revenge. The idea was unquestionably sound, but Jahn’s importance has been overrated by chauvinistic historians. The folklore known as classroom history has attributed a greater role to the Königsberg moralists and the Berlin gymnasts in the overthrow of Napoleon than they dese5rve; but for the reform of the Prussian army and Napoleons debacle in Russia they might still be there, practicing virtue and kneebends, without ever having slain a single Frenchman.

Lord Froth: But there is nothing more unbecoming a Man of Quality, than to Laugh; ‘tis such a vulgar Expression of the Passion! every Body can laugh.

Failure is less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labour, than to a confused understanding of a thing actually to be done; and therefore, while it is properly a subject of ridicule, and sometimes of blame, that men propose to themselves a perfection of any kind, which reason, temperately consulted, might have shown to be impossible with the means at their command, it is a more dangerous error to permit the consideration of means to interfere with our conception, or, as is not impossible, even hinder our acknowledgment of goodness and perfection in themselves.