Voltaire

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

It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

Do what you love. Know you own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

In all debates let truth be thy aim; not victory or an unjust interest; and endeavor to gain rather than to expose thy antagonist.

The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.