“Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.”

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

There is no true sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people.

The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.

There’s a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.

Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.

Mankind have banned the Divinity from their presence; they have relegated him to a sanctuary; the walls of the temple restrict his view; he does not exist outside of it.

It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.

If there are one hundred thousand damned souls for one saved soul, the devil has always the advantage without having given up his son to death.

I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.

The bad gives rise to the good, the good inspires the better, the better produces the excellent, the excellent is followed by the bizarre

Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice.

What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.

Integrity is the evidence of all civil virtues.

First move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare, be enraged-only then regale my eyes.

If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the “enthusiasm for truth and justice” using this phrase in the good sense it was Diderot.

How is Hillary Clinton going to lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck? I was raised paycheck to paycheck.

If a tax on malt would raise the price of beer, a tax on bread must raise the price of bread.

ISIS are actively recruiting Americans. The attacker in San Bernardino was an American citizen, born and raised in this country. He was a health inspector; had a newborn child and left all that behind to kill 14 people.

My mum raised me on ‘On the Waterfront,’ ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘Rear Window.’

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.

Whoever raises a righteous child, it is as if he did not die.

The theory that the man who raises corn does a more important piece of work than the woman who makes it into bread is absurd.