We offer up prayers to god only because we have made him after our own image. We treat him like a pasha, or a sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It does not behoove us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indians and Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden.

Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada.

The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech.

The passions are the winds which fill the sails of the vessel; they sink it at times, but without them it would be impossible to make way.