If I believe in God and life after death and you do not, and if there is no God, we both lose when we die. However, if there is a God, you still lose and I gain everything.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be a judge in his own cause.

All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions.... This is the motive of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves.

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

It is dangerous to tell the people that the laws are unjust; for they obey them only because they think them just. Therefore it isnecessary to tell them at the same time that they must obey them because they are laws, just as they must obey superiors, not because they are just, but because they are superiors. In this way all sedition is prevented.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.