Lead the ideas of your time and they will accompany and support you; fall behind them and they drag you along with them; oppose them and they will overwhelm you.
Promptly improve your accidents.
Conquest has made me what I am, only conquest can maintain me.
Rascality has limits; stupidity has not.
Nothing is so contrary to military rules as to make the strength of your army known, either in the orders of the day, in proclamations, or in the newspapers.
Obedience to public authority ought not to be based either on ignorance or stupidity.
All Italians are plunderers.
Soldiers, forty centuries are looking down upon you from these pyramids.
I am the signet which marks the page where the revolution has been stopped; but when I die it will turn the page and resume its course.
Posterity alone rightly judges kings. Posterity alone has the right to accord or withhold honors.
It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it.
One is more certain to influence men, to produce more effect on them, by absurdities than by sensible ideas.
Society cannot exist without inequality of fortunes and the inequality of fortunes could not subsist without religion. Whenever a half-starved person is near another who is glutted, it is impossible to reconcile the difference if there is not an authority who tells him to.
There is no real force without justice.
Good infantry is without doubt the sinews of an army; but if it has to fight a long time against very superior artillery, it will become demoralized and will be destroyed.
A cowardly act! What do I care about that? You may be sure that I should never fear to commit one if it were to my advantage.
I am a monarch of God’s creation, and you reptiles of the earth dare not oppose me. I render an account of my government to none save God and Jesus Christ.
Send me 300 francs; that sum will enable me to go to Paris. There, at least, one can cut a figure and surmount obstacles. Everything tells me I shall succeed. Will you prevent me from doing so for the want of 100 crowns?
What I have done up to this is nothing. I am only at the beginning of the course I must run. Do you imagine that I triumph in Italy in order to aggrandise the pack of lawyers who form the Directory, and men like Carnot and Barras? What an idea!
The conscience is the sacred haven of the liberty of man.