“Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.’– Book 3, Chapter 16”

“Peter Blood judged her- as we are all prone to do- upon insufficient knowledge.”

“But I like my madness. There is a thrill in it unknown to such sanity as yours. ~ Book 1, Chapter 9,”

“To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. you must change man, not systems. Can you and our vapouring friends of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, or any other learned society of France, devise a system of government that has never yet been tried? Surely not. And can we say of any system tried that it proved other than failure in the end? My dear Philippe, the future is to be read with certainty only in the past. Ad actu ad posse valet consecutio. Man never changes. He is always greedy, always acquisitive, always vile. I am speaking of Man in the bulk.”

“We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose.”

“...it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.”

“Most of this world's misery is the fruit not as priests tell us of wickedness, but of stupidity....And we know that of all stupidities he considered anger the most deplorable.”