Voltaire

Clever tyrants are never punished.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

My life is a struggle.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

Excess in Apparel is another costly Folly. The very Trimming of the vain World would cloath all the naked one.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

It’s the ones that stayed after the Exodus, that I knew were real and could handle the truth; that would stay with me on my journey, for better or worse.

It is a severe Rebuke upon us, that God makes us so many Allowances, and we make so few to our Neighbor: As if Charity had nothing to do with Religion; Or Love with Faith, that ought to work by it.