Voltaire

Everything can be borne except contempt.

The Jews have always been waiting for a Messiah, but their Messiah is for them only, not for us, a Messiah ho will give them mastery over the Christians.

The Pride of every Jew finds cause to believe that the cause of their down fall is not their detestable politics, or ignorance of social graces, but the raft of God. They believe it took a miracle to undo them.

They are mad men (Jews), but you should not burn them for that.

The Jews are of all peoples the grosses, the most ferocious, the most fanatical, and the most absurd.

Opinion is called the queen of the world; it is so, for when reason opposes it, it is condemned to death. It must rise twenty times from its ashes to gradually drive away the usurper.

To make a vow for life is to make oneself a slave.

Let all the laws be clear, uniform and precise for interpreting laws is almost always to corrupt them.

Love has various lodgings; the same word does not always signify the same thing.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

An infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade before you instruct.

Individual misfortunes give rise to the general good; so that the more individual misfortunes exist, the more all is fine.

It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.

He is lifeless that is faultless.

If mankind were born tomorrow it would divide into groups; each would scramble to invent their one and only god, and set about butchering each-other.

We adore, we invoke, we seek to appease, only that which we fear.

Exaggeration, the inseparable companion of greatness.

Work is often the father of pleasure.

Liberty, then, about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting.

I also know that we should cultivate our gardens.

It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force than the minds of a single village.

The way to become boring is to say everything.

A long dispute means both parties are wrong.

The biggest reward for a thing well done is to have done it.

It is the first law of friendship that it has to be cultivated. The second is to be indulgent when the first law is neglected.

Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.

Another century and there will not be a Bible on earth!

The atheists are for the most part imprudent and misguided scholars who reason badly who, not being able to understand the Creation, the origin of evil, and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypothesis the eternity of things and of inevitability.

In this country we find it pays to shoot an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.