The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime - for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.

My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.

Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply.

And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

The primary and most beautiful of nature's qualities is motion