Quand la religion et la royauté seront abattues, le peuple en viendra aux grands, après les grands il s'en prendra aux riches. - Honoré de Balzac

If you decide to join up with me, I want it to be because you're making a rational choice, not because you've been pushed by passion or despair.

A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.

Thinking is seeing, said he one day, carried away by some objection raised as to the first principles of our organisation. Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.