Frederick the Great Quotes
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But France's powerful armies, and a very large number of fortresses, ensure that the French Sovereign will possess the throne forever, and they do not have anything to fear now concerning internal wars or their neighbors invading France.
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Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.
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(About the battle of Kunersdorf) 'I shall not survive this cruel misfortune. The consequences will be worse than defeat itself. I have no resources left, and, to speak quite frankly I believe everything is lost. I shall not outlive the downfall of my country. Farewell, forever!'
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A crown is merely a hat that lets the rain in.
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He who defends everything defends nothing.
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Don't forget your great guns, which are the most respectable arguments of the rights of kings.
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'It is enough', this malicious man tells us, 'to extinguish the line of the defeated prince.' Can one read this without quivering in horror and indignation?
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If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army.
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As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to maintain the existence of Nothing.
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I think it better to keep a profound silence with regard to the Christian fables, which are canonized by their antiquity and the credulity of absurd and insipid people.
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Rogues, would you live forever?
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(About Cesare Borgia) What cruelties were not the result of his? Who could count all his crimes? Such was the man that Machiavel prefers to all the great geniuses of his time, and to the heroes of antiquity, and of which he finds the life and action make a good example for those that fortune favors.
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A single Voltaire will do more honor to France than a thousand pedants, a thousand false wits, a thousand great men of inferior order.
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We humans are foolish in many ways: we want to conquer all as if we had all time, as if our lives did not have any end. Thus, our real time passes too quickly, and often when one believes that they are working only for themselves, they are in fact working for unworthy or ungrateful successors.
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Neither antiquity nor any other nation has imagined a more atrocious and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating God. - This is how Christians treat the autocrat of the universe.
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What is the good of experience if you do not reflect?
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It has been said by a certain general, that the first object in the establishment of an army ought to be making provision for the belly, that being the basis and foundation of all operations.
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Every man has a wild beast within him.
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It does not pay a man to exist until the age of Methuselah by making his days indolent and useless. The more this is reflected upon, the more the reflector will desire to undertake meaningful and useful actions, the more they will have lived.
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It is a fact that princes who try to raise other princes with violence, end up destroying themselves.
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If the men were without passions, it would be forgivable to see Machiavel try to give some to them; he would be the new Prometheus bringing celestial fire to breathe life into robots. But no man is without passions. When they are moderated, they are the heart of the enterprise; but when the brake is stripped of them, they are its destruction.
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An educated people can be easily governed.
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I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right.
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My people and I have come to an agreement which satisfied us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.