The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.

A dream...I was trying to explain to St. Peter, and was doing it in the German tongue, because I didn't want to be too explicit.

I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately.

There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.

All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.

I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else... I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.

I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.