For seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm.
As you know, the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention to make the pope and the monks more powerful and turn a whole kingdom into hypocrites.
It requires ages to destroy a popular opinion.
The monster, fanaticism, still exists, and whoever seeks after truth will run the risk of being persecuted.
In the matter of taxation, every privilege is an injustice.
To really enjoy pleasures, you must know how to leave them.
One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.
What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?
The famous physician Dumoulin said when dying, ‘I leave two great physicians behind me, simple food and pure water.’
You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.
All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.
He who dies before many witnesses always does so with courage.
Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself.
It is only through timidity that states are lost.
To announce truths is an infallible receipt for being persecuted.
There is no such thing as an accident. What we call by that name is the effect of some cause which we do not see.
All the arts are brothers; each one is a light to the others.
Antiquity is full of the praises of another antiquity still more remote.
All pleasantry should be short; and it might even be as well were the serious short also.
The multiplicity of facts and writings is become so great that every thing must soon be reduced to extracts and dictionaries.