Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business. - Paul Valéry

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to … emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.

Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious.
But we must admit that criminals are not unlike our heroes in this respect.