Voltaire

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

Every great movement must experience three stages ridicule, discussion, adoption.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

It is generally known, that he who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any effect other than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?

The key to every man is his thought. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world. Alas! it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear. Listen! No, listen carefully, I think I hear somethingyes, there it was quite clear. Dont you hear it? It is the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the paradegrounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million German soldiers and more than a million Italiansgoing on maneuversyes, only on maneuvers!

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks.