So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.

We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.

Fear not lest precautions and protective contrivances diminish your pleasure: mystery only adds thereto.

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.

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!

It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.

Evil is... a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world