Christians believe themselves to be the aristocracy of heaven upon earth, they are admitted to the spiritual court, while millions of men in foreign lands have never been presented. They bow their knees and say they are 'miserable sinners,' and their hearts rankle with abominable pride. Poor infatuated fools! Their servility is real and their insolence is real but their king is a phantom and their palace is a dream.

Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all.

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

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

One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature - a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man.

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.

A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.