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There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

Aristocracy is always cruel.

The danger chiefly lies in acting well; no crime's so great as daring to excel.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

To follow imperfect, uncertain, or corrupted traditions, in order to avoid erring in our own judgment, is but to exchange one danger for another.

Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.

The danger is not so much in the economic structure of a society but in its intellectual structure.