Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je d‚fendrai jusqu'... la mort le droit que vous avez de le dire/ I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it

People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines.... It appears to me, besides, that such people can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all.

The pursuit of pleasure must be the goal of every rational person.