Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful.

Which is the greater merit, to enlighten the human race, which remains forever, or to save one's fatherland, which is perishable?

This root [the potato], no matter how much you prepare it, is tasteless and floury. It cannot pass for an agreeable food, but it supplies a food sufficiently abundant and sufficiently healthy for men who ask only to sustain themselves. The potato is criticized with reason for being windy, but what matters windiness for the vigorous organisms of peasants and laborers?

The world is the house of the strong.

All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings... We must run roughshod over all these ancient puerilities, overturn the barriers that reason never erected, give back to the arts and sciences the liberty that is so precious to them.

All children are essentially criminal.

What has not been examined impartially has not been well examined. Skepticism is therefore the first step towards truth.