Voltaire

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

By indignities men come to dignities.

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large mattertis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence, whether a man be behind it or no.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.