“She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.”

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!

The debility to which Nature condemned women incontestably proves that her design is for man, who then more than ever enjoys his strength, to exercise it in all the violent forms that suit him best, by means of tortures, if he be so inclined, or worse.

What do I see in the God of that infamous sect if not an inconsistent and barbarous being, today the creator of a world of destruction he repents of tomorrow.

Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.

Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.

For the simple reason that the first will always put the law into the service of the second.

Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime?

It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.

Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.

Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders.

The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse’s breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages.

The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.

I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.

And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?

The recent evidence increasingly suggests that an economic expansion is already well under way, although an array of influences unique to this business cycle seems likely to moderate its speed.

Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it.

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.

When I climb a building, I’ve been there already, and carefully planned how to start the climb as well as how to do it.

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

I am in hell already. I am in Israel.

You have to reduce the essence of your brand to a single thought or attribute.