Do you think... that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?

Slavery is also as ancient as war, and war as human nature.

If God did not exist, He would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing.