I read only to please myself, and enjoy only what suits my taste.

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?' That is a hard question,' said Candide.

Theology is to religion what poisons are to food.

My life is a struggle.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

Those who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities.