If there be gods we cannot help them, but we can assist our fellow men. We cannot love the inconceivable, but we can love wife and child and friend.

The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn-the less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything.

If I go to heaven I want to take my reason with me.

To know that the Bible is the literature of a barbarous people, to know that it is uninspired, to be certain that the supernatural does not and cannot exist - all this is but the beginning of wisdom.

Age after age, the strong have trampled upon the weak; the crafty and heartless have ensnared and enslaved the simple and innocent, and nowhere, in all the annals of mankind, has any god succored the oppressed

It is labor that has made the world a fit habitation for the human race.

Nothing is greater than to break the chains from the bodies of men, nothing nobler than to destroy the phantom of the soul.