It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.

When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary; when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.

There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.

Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.

Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.