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

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

I confess that my stomach does not take to this style of cooking. I cannot accept calves sweetbreads swimming in a salty sauce, nor can I eat mince consisting of turkey, hare, and rabbit, which they try to persuade me comes from a single animal... As for the cooks, I really cannot be expected to put up with this ham essence, nor the excessive quantity of morels and other mushrooms, pepper, and nutmeg with which they disguise perfectly good food.

Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.