Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.

We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.