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Just as people are born, live a time, and die by diseases or old age, in the same way republics are formed, flower a few centuries, and perish finally by the audacity of a citizen, or by the weapons of their enemies. All has their period; all empires, and largest monarchies even, have only so much time: the republics feel continually that this time will arrive, and they look at any too-powerful family as the carriers of a disease which will give them the blow of death.

— Frederick II of Prussia

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More quotes by Frederick II of Prussia

A single Voltaire will do more honor to France than a thousand pedants, a thousand false wits, a thousand great men of inferior order.

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.

It is a fact that princes who try to raise other princes with violence, end up destroying themselves.

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.

The mountain is passed; now we shall get on better.

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