The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed...
The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.
Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.
Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.
The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only...