By definition, sacred beings are separated beings. That which characterizes them is that there is a break of continuity between them and the profane beings.

Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.

Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.

If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.

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.

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.