“Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice.”

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

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.

There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among madmen than in being sane all by oneself.

Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful.

The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive him crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum.

My ideas are my whores.

There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.

Which is the greater merit, to enlighten the human race, which remains forever, or to save one’s fatherland, which is perishable?

Passions destroy more prejudices than philosophy does.

The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.

First of all move me, surprise me, rend my heart; make me tremble, weep, shudder; outrage me; delight my eyes afterwards if you can.

I have not been more robust towards female rather than male assembly members and I do not believe I have been remotely sexist.

And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.

Every man needs to find a peak, a mountain top or a remote island of his own choosing that he reaches under his own power alone in his own good time.

You can leave a kid alone and it will learn to fend for itself, how to work the remote, a tin opener, and the microwave.

There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.

After all those years of doing remote detonations, where we just push a button and something explodes, to actually see a nice big fat line of black smoke heading toward something that will blow up is very satisfying.

I knew that even if I was able to call for help, I was in a place so remote that it wasn’t likely there would be anyone who could help me. And even if there were, it could take weeks.

But I will say this: In my humble opinion, knowing nothing about it, I do believe that they have remote viewers working on where Osama Bin Laden is. I absolutely, 100%, convinced of that.