Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.

A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.

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

It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.

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.

We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.

To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.