Voltaire

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

It is proved…that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.

Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.

Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Man is God’s highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

Man is not weak; knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.