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

Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.

Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.

Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime.

Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.

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.

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.