There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.

The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.

If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.