“If the ministers of the Church have often permitted nations to revolt for Heaven’s cause, they never allowed them to revolt against real evils or known violencess. It is from Heaven that the chains have come to fetter the minds of mortals.”

It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.

These principles, universally recognized, are at fault when the question of the existence of God is considered; what has been said of Him is either unintelligible or perfectly contradictory; and for this reason must appear impossible to every man.

Only to finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example preventing others from committing crimes.

The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power.

All religious notions are uniformly founded on authority; all the religions of the world forbid examination, and are not disposed that men should reason upon them.

You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?

How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears?

In Nature nothing; is mean or contemptible, and it is only pride, originating in a false idea of our superiority, which causes our contempt for some of her productions. In the eyes of Nature, however, the oyster that vegetates at the bottom of the sea is as dear and perfect as the proud biped who devours it.

Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty.

It is very strange that men should deny a Creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.

The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation, nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects.

Men always fool themselves when they give up experience for systems born of the imagination.

If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.

Man is the work of nature, he exists in nature, he is subject to its laws, he can not break free, he can not leave even in thought; it is in vain that his spirit wants to soar beyond the bounds of the visible world, he is always forced to return.

All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.

People give me money and I don’t know why, my real collection plate is an empty cup held by a homeless guy.

Hillary Clinton has been portrayed as robotic, someone who is trying to approximate real human emotion.

From here on out, I am only interested in what is real. Real people, real feelings, that’s it. That’s all I’m interested in.

The hope is they would like to bring it to Broadway next year, so we’ll see that’s to come in the end of the finance year and everybody else and also real estate and what theaters are available at the time but I would like to come back with it.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been a real deep thinker and stuff.

Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there’s nothing real about it; it’s an adult using a kid’s body as a mouthpiece.

A hug is like a boomerang – you get it back right away.

I don’t think college is for everyone. School is awesome, but for me, I was learning a lot more outside the classroom in the real world than I was in school.