VOLTAIRE

"God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh."

"Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well."

"One great use of words is to hide our thoughts."

"Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts."

"Is politics nothing other than the art of deliberately lying?"

"The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

"No opinion is worth burning your neighbor for."

"The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe."

"Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too."

"It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge."

"When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion."

"To hold a pen is to be at war."

"If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new."

"Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it."

"Being unable to make people more reasonable, I preferred to be happy away from them."

"I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life."

"What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on."

"Our labour preserves us from three great evils - weariness, vice, and want."

"Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road."

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

"Dare to think for yourself."

"Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours."

"To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid - one must also be polite."

"It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books."

"Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law."

"Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste."

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

"Prejudices are what fools use for reason."

"There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times."

"It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere."

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

"Liberty of thought is the life of the soul."

"Perfect is the enemy of good."

"The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us."

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."

"Sometimes we are less unhappy in being deceived by those we love, than in being undeceived by them."

"I would rather obey a fine lion, much stronger than myself, than two hundred rats of my own species."

"God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere."

"Let us cultivate our garden."

"He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked."

"Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace."

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

"Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one."

"Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively."

"The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important aims of philosophy."

"Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference."