I shall be an autocrat that's my trade and the good Lord will forgive me that's his.

Happiness and unhappiness are in the heart and spirit of each one of us: If you feel unhappy, then place yourself above that and act so that your happiness does not get to be dependent on anything.

You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.

In politics a capable ruler must be guided by circumstances, conjectures and conjunctions.

The more a man knows, the more he forgives.

Nothing is more difficult, in my opinion, than to avoid something that fundamentally attracts you.

A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.

I sincerely want peace, not because I lack resources for war, but because I hate bloodshed.

One does not always do the best there is. One does the best one can.

it is better to inspire a reform than to enforce it.

Power without a nation's confidence is nothing.

It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,

Only a foolish woman would allow her man to earn his living as a moving target.

Because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical.

I think obsessions happen because you're trying to understand something or some urge.

Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.

People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.

We start dying when we have nothing worth living for. And we don't really start living until we find something worth dying for

You get steely nerves playing poker.

The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.

It's in the silence that your problems just dissolve. Try it. It really works.