How many condemnations I have witnessed more criminal than the crime!

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

Socrates thought and so do I that the wisest theory about the gods is no theory at all.

The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.

I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

Eloquence is an engine invented to manage and wield at will the fierce democracy, and, like medicine to the sick, is only employed in the paroxysms of a disordered state.