The obscene and vulgar stories in the Bible are as repugnant to our ideas of the purity of a Divine Being, as the horrid cruelties and murders it ascribes to Him are repugnant to our ideas of His justice.
And this manner of speaking of the Almighty, as one would speak of a man, is consistent with nothing but the stupidity of the Bible.
The stupid texts of the Bible – from which, be the talents of the preacher what they may, only stupid sermons can be preached.
I do not believe in the creed professed by any church that I know of. Each of these churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my part, I disbelieve them all.
It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.
I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.
From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependant on His protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple?
As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith.
It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human.
When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument and good order.
It is the duty of every true Deist to vindicate the moral justice of God against the evils of the Bible.
The fate of Charles I has only made kings more subtle, not more just.
There now remain only a few books, which they call books of the lesser prophets; and as I have already shown that the greater are impostors, it would be cowardice to disturb the repose of the little ones. Let them sleep, then, in the arms of their nurses, the priests, and both be forgotten together.
Let them call me rebel, I feel no concern from it.
The more we bestow the richer we become.
Natural rights are those which always appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the rights of others.
The more men have to lose, the less willing are they to venture.
The protection of a man’s person is more sacred than the protection of his property.
It is easy to see that when republican virtue fails, slavery ensues.
Government is a necessary evil.