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

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.

To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall.

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

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

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.

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.