Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?

Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.

What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep, when I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a distubance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt.

'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.

I am about to put foward some major ideas; they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will; in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content.

Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.