If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.

I am a good Protestant, and in the full sense of the term, for from the bottom of my soul, I protest against everything that is said, and everything that is done.

In matters of religion, it is very easy to deceive a man and very hard to undeceive him.

No nations are more warlike than those which profess Christianity.

It has been asserted, that a moral Atheist would be a monster beyond the power of nature to create: I reply, that it is not more strange for an Atheist to live virtuously, than for a Christian to abandon himself to crime! If we believe the last kind of monster, why dispute the existence of the first?

The antiquity and general acceptance of an opinion is not assurance of its truth.

It is thus tolerance that is the source of peace, and intolerance that is the source of disorder and squabbling.