What people say behind your back is your standing in the community in which you live.

Never believe anything bad about anybody unless you positively know it to be true; never tell even that unless you feel that it is absolutely necessary-and that God is listening while you tell it.

Leave the bad tale where you found it.

Whoever gossips to you will gossip of you.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?

Intelligence dies for want of nourishment under a machinery of government which leaves nothing to the initiative of the citizen.

Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you, or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert.

The trouble with military rule is that every colonel or general is soon full of ambition. The navy takes over today and the army tomorrow.

In the government of a semi-barbarous race ... a little despotism is absolutely necessary.

The fundamental difference between Islamic government, on the one hand, and constitutional monarchy and republics, on the other, is this: whereas the representatives of the people or the monarch in such regimes engage in legislation, in Islam the legislative power and competence to establish laws belong exclusively to God Almighty.