Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

If language had been the creation not of poetry but of logic, we should only have one.

Religion is the highest vanity.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

I'm not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation.

Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

Whoever wants to be a judge of human nature should study people's excuses.

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.

Reason is the substance of the universe. The design of the world is absolutely rational.