The Jesuits are a MILITARY organization, not a religious order. Their chief is a general of an army, not the mere father abbot of a monastery. And the aim of this organization is power - power in its most despotic exercise - absolute power, universal power, power to control the world by the volition of a single man. Jesuitism is the most absolute of despotisms - and at the same time the greatest and most enormous of abuses.
Surely in a matter of this kind we should endeavor to do something, that we may say that we have not lived in vain, that we may leave some impress of ourselves on the sands of time.
What is the future? What is the past? What are we? What is the magic fluid that surrounds us and conceals the things we most need to know? We live and die in the midst of marvels.
In war, as in politics, no evil - even if it is permissible under the rules - is excusable unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything beyond that is a crime.
Men have their virtues and their vices, their heroisms and their perversities; men are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but possess and practice all that there is of good and bad here below. Such is the general rule. Temperament, education, the accidents of life, are modifying factors. Outside of this, everything is ordered arrangement, everything is chance. Such has been my rule of expectation and it has usually brought me success.
This year has begun hopefully for right thinkers. After all these centuries of feudal barbarism and political slavery, it is surprising to see how the word of 'liberty' sets minds on fire.
There are only two forces that unite men - fear and interest. All great revolutions originate in fear, for the play of interests does not lead to accomplishment.
How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares 'God wills it thus.' Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
Each state claims the right to control interests foreign to itself when those interests are such that it can control them without putting its own interests in danger. ... other powers only recognize this right of intervening in proportion as the country doing it has the power to do it.