Catherine the Great Quotes

“The laws ought to be so framed as to secure the safety of every citizen as much as possible.”

“Political liberty does not consist in the notion that a man may do whatever he pleases; liberty is the right to do whatsoever the laws allow.”

“Happiness and unhappiness are in the heart and spirit of each one of us: If you feel unhappy, then place yourself above that and act so that your happiness does not get to be dependent on anything.”

“You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.”

“Nothing is more difficult, in my opinion, than to avoid something that fundamentally attracts you.”

“The more a man knows, the more he forgives.”

“In politics a capable ruler must be guided by circumstances, conjectures and conjunctions.”

“A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.”

“I sincerely want peace, not because I lack resources for war, but because I hate bloodshed.”

“One does not always do the best there is. One does the best one can.”

“It is better to inspire a reform than to enforce it.”

“Power without a nation's confidence is nothing.”

“She had been a bright child; her languages then were French and German, and she learned Russian. She began to read the great philosophers of the French Enlightenment. And in that way, she developed a philosophy of rule.”

“After the end of her liaison with Potemkin, who perhaps was her morganatic husband, the official favourite changed at least a dozen times; she chose handsome and insignificant young men, who were only, as one of them himself said, "kept girls.”

“Russians continue to admire Catherine, the German, the usurper and profligate, and regard her as a source of national pride. Non-Russian opinion of Catherine is less favourable. Because Russia under her rule grew strong enough to threaten the other great powers, she figured in the Western imagination as the incarnation of the immense, backward, yet forbidding country she ruled.”

“I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his.”

“You work only on paper, which endures all things. I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is irritable and ticklish to a different degree.”

“I did not care about Russia; what I did care about was the crown.”

“She was a woman of elemental energy and intellectual curiosity, desiring to create as well as to control.”