Virtue debases itself in justifying itself.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

Virtue supposes liberty, as the carrying of a burden supposes active force. Under coercion there is no virtue, and without virtue there is no religion. Make a slave of me, and I shall be no better for it. Even the sovereign has no right to use coercion to lead men to religion, which by its nature supposes choice and liberty. My thought is no more subject to authority than is sickness or health.

Nothing is so common as to imitate one’s enemies, and to use their weapons.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you.

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

Love truth, but pardon error.

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.

What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

A witty saying proves nothing.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in.

But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him.

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

All men are equal; it is not their birth, But virtue itself that makes the difference.

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Man ought to be content, it is said; but with what?

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.

Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one’s country is to wish harm to one’s neighbors.

His reputation will go on increasing because scarcely anyone reads him.

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

“If God did not exist, He would have to be invented.” But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do.

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly — that is the first law of nature.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

Prejudice is an opinion without judgement.

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