Virtue is not hereditary.

Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information.

He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.

Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can forgive sins and you will have sins in abundance.

The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up.

The only idea man can affix to the name of God, is that of a first cause, the cause of all things. And, incomprehensibly difficult as it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it, from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it. It is difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end; but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time.

Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.