The way to transmute your iron duty into gold in everyone's eyes is this: always deliver more than you promise.

Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

It takes just such painful and terrible things to occur for the great emancipation to take place.

It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.

There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best ... Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their 'nature,' to their god... Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? ... Didn't people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves?

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.