It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it’s a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
Individual misfortunes give rise to the general good; so that the more individual misfortunes exist, the more all is fine.
An infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade before you instruct.
Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.
Nothing is more annoying than to be obscurely hanged.
He is lifeless that is faultless.
If mankind were born tomorrow it would divide into groups; each would scramble to invent their one and only god, and set about butchering each-other.
We adore, we invoke, we seek to appease, only that which we fear.
It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force than the minds of a single village.
The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech.
Liberty, then, about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting.
The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force.
I know of no great men except those who have rendered great service to the human race.
Work is often the father of pleasure.
Exaggeration, the inseparable companion of greatness.
The darkness is at its deepest. Just before the sunrise.
The Pride of every Jew finds cause to believe that the cause of their down fall is not their detestable politics, or ignorance of social graces, but the raft of God. They believe it took a miracle to undo them.
The Jews have always been waiting for a Messiah, but their Messiah is for them only, not for us, a Messiah ho will give them mastery over the Christians.
Everything can be borne except contempt.
The first clergyman was the first rascal who met the first fool.