But, especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don’t trust anybody with your real emotions: if you’ve got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.
The honour of parents is a fair and noble treasure to their posterity, but to have the use of a treasure of wealth and honour, and to leave none to your successors, because you have neither money nor reputation of your own, is alike base and dishonourable.
One would have thought that it was even more necessary to limit population than property; and that the limit should be fixed by calculating the chances of mortality in the children, and of sterility in married persons. The neglect of this subject, which in existing states is so common, is a never-failing cause of poverty among the citizens; and poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
My parents offered me the idea of ceilinglessness. There was no limit in terms of what was possible; no messages sent to me to say that I couldn't do anything.
The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit.
My parents have raised me with a sense of what's really important and have given me decent values, and I'm comfortable, but I haven't lived an excessive lifestyle in the least. And I've kept my expenses to a minimum so that I have the freedom to wait.
Legislatively, the thing I'm most proud of is healthcare, and I will continue to be most proud of it because not only do we have 30 million people who are going to get healthcare, we've got six million young people who are able to stay on their parents' plan until they're 26.
What does not wasting time change! The age of our parents, worse than that of our grandsires, has brought us forth more impious still, and we shall produce a more vicious progeny.
If a man withdraws his mind from the love of beauty, and applies it as sincerely to the love of the virtuous; if, in serving his parents, he can exert his utmost strength; if, in serving his prince, he can devote his life; if in his intercourse with his friends, his words are sincere - although men say that he has not learned, I will certainly say that he has.
It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak fairly late, so that they even consulted a doctor. I can't say how old I was - but surely not less than three.