Nothing great has great beginnings. - Joseph de Maistre

Unhappily, history proves that war is, in a certain sense, the habitual state of mankind, which is to say that human blood must flow without interruption somewhere or other on the globe, and that for every nation, peace is only a respite.

By means of [the microscope and the telescope] man touched, one might say, the two infinities. With the aid of glass, he could contemplate at his leisure the mite and the ring of Saturn. […] Master of glass through fire, and master of light through glass, he had lenses and mirrors of all kinds, prisms, containers, beakers, tubes, and finally barometers and thermometers. However all this originally began with the astronomical lens, which honours glass; and physics is born in some manner from astronomy, as it was written that, even in a material and gross sense, all science must descend from heaven.

There is the same difference between political theory and constitutional laws as there is between poetics and poetry. The illustrious Montesquieu is to Lycurgus, in the intellectual hierarchy, what Batteux is to Homer or Racine. Moreover, these two talents positively exclude each other, as can be seen by the example of Locke, who fumbled badly when he presumed to give laws to the Americans.