A healthy hatred of scoundrels.

I'd wish the government took honest people into consideration, it shows enough consideration for scoundrels.

Ordinary people, caught in the trap of their routine lives, are not villains any more than eccentrics or rebels are villains. Essentially, both kinds of people are struggling to be good, through a maze of conflicts and a haze of shadows.

I think you'll find ordinary people are nicer than you give them credit for being

Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

Ils etaient plus que rois; ils sont moindres qu'esclaves.

May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?

It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.

These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.

The ordinary people … are upright and honourable... They are faithful to their oaths and promises... In their behavior there is much gentleness and sweetness.

Not knaves, fools.

These people, scattered all over the country, a few of them on the continent, were much like normal people. To outsiders, their relationship was not apparent; they certainly never revealed it; they never met. They became traders, captains of ships that traded with the Indies, soldiers, parliamentarians, agriculturists; some plunged into, some avoided, the constitutional struggles that dogged most of the seventeenth century. But they were all — male or female — Franks. They had the inexpressible benefit of their progenitor's one hundred and seventy-odd years' experience, and not only of his, but of all the other Franks. It was small wonder that, with few exceptions, whatever they did they prospered.

One cannot now say, the priest is as the people, for the truth is that the people are not so bad as the priest.

Show me a people who don't have a bloody history.