The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.

Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate. Ignorance and fear, you will repeat to them, ignorance and fear - those are the twin bases of every religion.

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

Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust.

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

The mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself; and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more energetic than the governed.

No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.