Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.

It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism.

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him.

No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.

Human cruelty took the form of a pact with the deity. A solemn oath was made to kill everything, in which people forbade themselves any display of reason or compassion. A city or a land was devoted to destruction and it was believed an insult to God if one did not observe the abominable oath.

None of the miracles with which ancient histories are filled, occurred under scientific conditions. Observation never once contradicted, teaches us that miracles occur only in periods and countries in which they are believed in and before persons disposed to believe in them.