Denis Diderot Quotes

The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls.

Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

Los lubi chodzić krętymi drogami. Obwiniamy go w pierwszej chwili, że skłamał, z czasem zaś okazuje się, że mówił prawdę.

How many wisely conceived projects have failed and will fail in the future! How many insane projects have succeeded and will succeed!

Tell me how it is that whoever wrote out the great scroll could have decreed that such would be the reward of a noble act? Why should I, who am merely a miserable compound of faults, take your defence while He calmly watched you being attacked, knocked down, manhandled and trampled underfoot, He who is supposed to be the embodiment of all perfection?

Yo os haría una pregunta, señor ¿por qué, entre todas ls ideas funestas que pasan por la cabeza de una religiosa desesperada, no está la de pegarle fuego a la casa?

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings.

Ömrünün dörtte üçünü okumakla geçiren muhakkak namuslu olur.

What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an ephemeral insect might judge of yours. The world is eternal for you, as you are eternal to the being that lives but for one instant. Yet the insect is the more reasonable of the two. For what a prodigious succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity! What an immeasurable tradition! Yet shall we all pass away, without the possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in space, or the precise time that we shall have endured. Time, matter, space — all, it may be, are no more than a point.

A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.

Good music is very close to primitive language.