“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Relax. Nothing is under control.

To each thing belongs it’s measure. Occasion is best to know.

Let us be different in our homes.

Love is the only thing that can break us down as much as it can lift us up.

Poverty is a thorough instructress in all the arts.

Dreams grow holy put in action.

You look up to your parents and you want them to accept you,

Perhaps there is in that fact a parable for national statesmen, whose political horizons are all too often limited by national horizons.