Voltaire made up his mind to destroy the superstition of his time. He fought with every weapon that genius could devise or use. He was the greatest of all caricaturists, and he used this wonderful gift without mercy.
— Robert Green Ingersoll
In France, the people were the sport of a king's caprice. Everywhere was the shadow of the Bastille. It fell upon the sunniest field, upon the happiest home.
Voltaire! A name that excites the admiration of men, the malignity of priests. Pronounce that name in the presence of a clergyman, and you will find that you have made a declaration of war.
A great man does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains, he gives to others.
No system of religion should go in partnership with barbarism. Neither should any Christian feel it his duty to defend the savagery of the past.
I regard the rights of men and women equal. In Love's fair realm, husband and wife are king and queen, sceptered and crowned alike, and seated on the self-same throne.
So far as I am concerned, I think more of reasons than of reputations, more of principles than of persons, more of nature than of names, more of facts than of faiths.
Suspicion is only another form of cowardice. The man who suspects constantly suspects because he is afraid. Whenever you find a man with a free, frank, generous, brave nature, you will find that man without suspicion.
A good character, like a Gibraltar, will stand against the testimony of all the rascals in the universe, no matter how they assail it. It will stand, and it will stand firmer and grander the more it is assaulted.
Every fact in the universe will fit every other fact in the universe. A lie never did, never will fit anything but another lie made to fit it. Never, never!
The religion that has to be supported by law is without value, not only, but a fraud and a curse. The religious argument that has to be supported by a musket is hardly worth making.
They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers.
Freedom believes in education - the salvation of slavery is ignorance.
You have to change men physically before you change them intellectually.
Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn to protect the rights of man, I am a rebel. Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn to give man liberty, to clothe him in all his just rights, I am on the side of that rebellion.
I believe in living for this world - that's my doctrine - to make everybody happy that you can.
In my judgment, the American people are too brave, too charitable, too generous, too magnanimous, to believe in the infamous dogma of an eternal hell.
Voltaire, as full of life as summer is full of blossoms, giving his ideas upon all subjects at the expense of prince and king, was exiled to England.
Liberty is the breath of progress.
The place does not make the man, nor the sceptre the king. Greatness is from within.
I find that in this day and generation, the meanest men have the lowest estimate of woman; that the greater the man is, the grander he is, the more he thinks of mother, wife and daughter.
If there is any God, there is only one way to please him, and that is by a conscientious discharge of your obligations to your fellow men.
The time to be happy is now, and the place to be happy is here.
The truth is that nearly everybody is right about some things and wrong about most things; and if a man's testimony is not to be taken until he is right on every subject, witnesses will be extremely scarce.
Fear, prejudice, malice, and the love of approbation bribe a thousand men where gold bribes one.
The walls of that grand edifice called a good character have to be worked at during life.
What is it that distinguishes you and me from the lower animals - from the beasts? More, I say, than anything else, human sympathy - human sympathy.
Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government - the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more.
There is no common sense in going to the field to fight and leaving a man at home to undo all that you accomplish.
Freedom has invented every useful machine, from the lowest to the highest, from the simplest to the most complex.
Religion is not theory - it is life. It is not intellectual conviction - it is divine humanity, and nothing else.
I will live by the standard of reason, and if thinking in accordance with reason takes me to perdition, then I will go to hell with my reason rather than to heaven without it.
Every religion in the world has denounced every other religion as a fraud. That proves to me that they all tell the truth - about others.
How poor this world would be without its graves, without the memories of its mighty dead. Only the voiceless speak forever.
This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries.
In order to appreciate a great man, we must know his surroundings. We must understand the scope of the drama in which he played - the part he acted - and we must also know his audience.
A great man is a torch in the darkness, a beacon in superstition's night, an inspiration and a prophecy.
You need not go back four thousand years for heroines. The world is filled with them today. They do not belong to any nation, nor to any religion, nor exclusively to any race. Wherever woman is found, they are found.
George Eliot tenderly carried in her heart the burdens of our race. She looked through pity's tears upon the faults and frailties of mankind.
Every man should be the intellectual proprietor of himself, honest with himself, and intellectually hospitable; and upon every brain, reason should be enthroned as king.
I think the man who eats the bread of idleness is under a certain obligation to speak well of labor.
As long as we can get redress in the courts, as long as the laws shall be honestly administered, as long as honesty and intelligence sit upon the bench, as long as intelligence sits in the chairs of jurors, this country will stand, the law will be enforced, and the law will be respected.
Perjury is the basest and meanest and most cowardly of crimes. What can it do? Perjury can change the common air that we breathe into the axe of an executioner.
A prayer that must have a cannon behind it better never be uttered. Forgiveness ought not to go in partnership with shot and shell. Love need not carry knives and revolvers.
The Catholics of Maryland were the first people on the new continent to declare universal religious toleration. Let this be remembered to their eternal honor.
Our fathers knew that the flag was never intended to protect any man who wanted to assail it.
I say that no man can be greater than the man who bravely and heroically sacrifices his life for the good of others. No man can be greater than the one who meets death face to face, and yet will not shrink from what he believes to be his highest duty.
All the punishment in the world will not reform a man, unless he knows that he who inflicts it upon him does it for the sake of reformation, and really and truly loves him, and has his good at heart. Punishment inflicted for gratifying the appetite makes man afraid but debases him.
Whether there is another life or not, if there is any being who gave me this, I shall thank him from the bottom of my heart, because, upon the whole, my life has been a joy.
Man never had an idea - man will never have an idea, except those supplied to him by his surroundings. Every idea in the world that man has came to him by nature.
