C est le tyran qui m outrage, et non pas celui qui exerce la tyrannie - Montesquieu

For myself, I would rather not write history than write it for the purpose of following the prejudices and passions of the times.

Here, someone makes the Capetians descend from the Merovingians; there, someone else has it that the name very Christian has always been applied to the {French} princes.

They don't form a system after reading history; they begin with the system and then search for the proofs.

A truly virtuous man would come to the aid of the most distant stranger as quickly as to his own friend.
If men were perfectly virtuous, they wouldn’t have friends.

One must give one power a ballast, so to speak, to put it in a position to resist another.