A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile.

There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.

Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals.

What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?

The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.

Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.