He who thinks himself wise, O heavens is a great fool.
He who is merely just is severe.
Work keeps us from three great evils, boredom, vice and need.
No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
The public is a ferocious beast one must either chain it up or flee from it.
I have no sceptre, but I have a pen.
Paradise is where I am.
Optimism, said Candide, is a mania for maintaining all that is well when things are going badly.
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue they support the laws before destroying them.
In this country England it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others. The reference is to Admiral John Byng, who was executed in 1757 for failing to prevent the French from taking Minorca.
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.
Doctors prescribe medicine of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing.
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one.
We must cultivate our garden.
Common sense is not so common.
In this best of possible worlds ... all is for the best.
If this is the best of possible worlds ... what then are the others
This is the happiest of mortals, for he is above everything he possesses.
Doubt is a not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
... it would be very singular that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.
It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
Presidential Quotes: Iconic Quotes from United States Presidents