The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent. - Stendhal

Jean Jacques Rousseau, he answered, is nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey.... For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

Wit lasts no more than two centuries.