“A long period of distress and anarchy, in which empire, and arts, and riches, had migrated from the banks of the Tiber, was incapable of restoring or adorning the city; and, as all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance, every successive age must have hastened the ruin of the works of antiquity.”

This quotation is useful for explanations of the period of art nouveau, and the causes of the art movement.
Confession d'un Enfant du Siécle (1836)(translation)

11 September 1813, ME 13:361
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)
Context: The question will be asked and ought to be looked at, what is to be the resource if loans cannot be obtained? There is but one, "Carthago delenda est." Bank paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs. It is the only fund on which they can rely for loans; it is the only resource which can never fail them, and it is an abundant one for every necessary purpose. Treasury bills, bottomed on taxes, bearing or not bearing interest, as may be found necessary, thrown into circulation will take the place of so much gold and silver, which last, when crowded, will find an efflux into other countries, and thus keep the quantum of medium at its salutary level. Let banks continue if they please, but let them discount for cash alone or for treasury notes.

Source: Popular Political Economy: Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827), p. 30

Reported in Proceedings in honor of Mr. Justice Frankfurter and distinguished alumni at the meeting of the Council, Harvard Law School Association in Cambridge, April 30, 1960.
Other writings

Source: History of Rome, Book XXXIV, sec. 4

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)
Context: There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.

Pico Della Mirandola
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

Source: Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658), Chapter V