Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.

Feudalism, serfdom, slavery — all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kinds of rule, springing out of, and necessary to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is in all cases the same — less government.

Mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains.

Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.

Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.