Do you know what I admire most in the world? The inability of force to organize anything. There are only two powers in this world, the sword and the spirit … in the long run the sword is always beaten by the spirit.

in an 1808 conversation with Louis-Marcelin de Fontanes, quoted in Madame de Staël et Napoléon (1903) by Henri Guillemin, p. 185, as translated in Dictatorship and Political Police: The Technique of Control by Fear (1945) by Ernest Kohn Bramsted

Fontanes, do you know what I admire most in the world ? It is the powerlessness of force to organize anything. There are only two powers in the world, the sword and the mind .... In the long run the sword is always vanquished by the mind. | As quoted in "French Literature" by William Koren, in Modern Language Notes, Vol. XX, No. 3, (March 1905), p. 97 | The more I study the world, the more am I convinced of the inability of brute force to create anything durable. | As quoted by Charles Sumner, "War System of the Commonwealth of Nations" (1849), in The works of Charles Sumner (1870), Vol. 2, p. 224