I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

I join you therefore in branding as cowardly the idea that the human mind is incapable of further advances.

I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives... But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all of their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest.

Knowing that religion does not furnish grosser bigots than law, I expect little from old judges.

Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

You know well that government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the [government] ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.

No society is so precious as that of one’s own family.