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On why I don't trust democracy without extremely powerful systems of accountability and recall What seems to be generosity is often only disguised ambition - which despises small interests to gain great ones.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Age: 66 †
Born: 1613
Born: September 15
Died: 1680
Died: March 17
Memoirist
Military Personnel
Writer
Paris
France
François VI
Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Prince de Marcillac
François
Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Seems
Ambition
Despise
Without
Ones
Generosity
Great
Trust
Systems
Despises
Democracy
Extremely
Disguised
Small
Gain
Recall
Powerful
Interests
Recalls
Interest
Gains
Accountability
Often
Election
Cynical

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Jealousy is always born with love, but does not die with it. In jealousy there is more of self-love than of love to another.
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Opportunity makes us known to others, but more to ourselves.
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Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrust himself.
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Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity.
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Few things are impossible in themselves: application to make them succeed fails us more often than the means.
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The duration of our passions is no more dependent on ourselves than the duration of our lives.
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There are certain people fated to be fools they not only commit follies by choice, but are even constrained to do so by fortune.
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The passions of youth are not more dangerous to health than is the lukewarmness of old age.
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The aversion to lying is often a hidden ambition to render our words credible and weighty, and to attach a religious aspect to our conversation.
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One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them. GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG, The Reflections of Lichtenberg We are often more agreeable through our faults than our good qualities.
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There are follies as catching as contagious disorders.
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The sicknesses of the soul have their ups and downs like those of the body what we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or change of disease.
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Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
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Youth is a perpetual intoxication it is a fever of the mind.
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We often bore others when we think we cannot possibly bore them.
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Sincerity is an openness of heart we find it in very few people what we usually see is only an artful dissimulation to win the confidence of others.
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In all aspects of life, we take on a part and an appearance to seem to be what we wish to be--and thus the world is merely composed of actors.
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Even the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which self-love always proposes to be the gainer one wayor another.
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Some follies are caught, like contagious diseases.
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The health of the soul is something we can be no more sure of than that of the body and though a man may seem far from the passions, yet he is in as much danger of falling into them as one in a perfect state of health of having a fit of sickness.
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