There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.
Niccolo Machiavelli

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
James Madison

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
James Madison

The internal effects of a mutable policy poisons the blessings of liberty itself.
James Madison

Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.
Marcus Aurelius

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
Marcus Aurelius

There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
Meister Eckhart

There's no better book with which to defend the Bible than the Bible itself.
Dwight L. Moody

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
T. S. Eliot

The Negro revolution is controlled by foxy white liberals, by the Government itself. But the Black Revolution is controlled only by God.
Malcolm X

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
George Orwell

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
George Orwell

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.
Amelia Earhart

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
Thomas Merton

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.
Blaise Pascal

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.
Blaise Pascal

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
John Keats

One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other.
Lord Byron

For in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.
Lord Byron

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman