Because you are a great gentleman, you believe yourself a great genius!...
Nobility, fortune, a rank, charges, it all turns one so arrogant! What you have done for (to deserve) so many things? You made the effort upon your birth, and nothing else. In every other way you are quite an ordinary man; whereas I, by God, lost in the anonymous mass, have had to draw upon greater wisdom and wiles just to survive than those necessary to govern the entire Spanish Empire in the last hundred years.—Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais (17321799)[653]
Whoever makes peaceful revolution impossible, makes violent revolution inevitable.— John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963)[654]
All revolutions fail that do not become part of customs and ideas.[655]—Francois Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848)