Friends should be preferred to kings.

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.

The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Earth is an insane asylum, to which the other planets deport their lunatics.

There are men who can think no deeper than a fact.

"I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want."