Voltaire

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

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

Thus, by every device from the stick to the carrot, the emaciated Austrian donkey is made to pull the Nazi barrow up an ever-steepening hill.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?

There are no have-to’s, just choices.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.