Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.

Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.

Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other things being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity.

Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order different from that which has in fact obtained.

Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it.

The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.