“Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education.”

The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.

Monotheism occupies so large a space in the view of modern minds, that it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the preceding phases of the theological philosophy.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon’s time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics?

Mathematical Analysis is… the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced.

The dead govern the living.

Woman is the most moral element in all humanity.

The word right should be excluded from political language, as the word cause from the language of philosophy.

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

The universe displays no proof of an all-directing mind.

Humanity is always made up of more dead than living.

Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.

Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

Know yourself to improve yourself.

In many ways, constancy is an illusion.

Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.

Let us be under no illusion.

The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

Imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.

Democratic regimes may be defined as those in which, every now and then, the people are given the illusion of being sovereign, while the true sovereignty in actual fact resides in other forces which are sometimes irresponsible and secret.

If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.