"The system of Descartes... seemed to give..." - Quote by Voltaire

“The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.”

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

“Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said.”

“Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.”

“Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.”

“We need not have the loftiest mind to understand that here is no lasting and real satisfaction, that our pleasures are only vanity, that our evils are infinite, and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.”

“To a rational being it is the same thing to act according to nature and according to reason.”

“Go wherever the facts lead.”

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free. Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls. Where words come out from the depth of truth, where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection. Where the clear stream of reason has not lost it's way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit. Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action. In to that heaven of freedom, my father, LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE!”