The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
James Madison

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
James Anthony Froude

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?
E. O. Wilson

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.
Jane Addams

The essence of justice is mercy.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.
Denis Waitley

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
Richard Dawkins

The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.
Guy de Maupassant

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.
John Ruskin

The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.
Georg Cantor

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
Georges Bataille

The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The essence of our effort to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each an equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different-to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind and spirit he or she possesses.
John Fischer

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
Epictetus

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.
Germaine Greer

The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
Friedrich Schleiermacher

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.
Henry A. Kissinger

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
Anita Brookner

The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.
Hubert H. Humphrey