Surrender the body and its members, physical faculties, property, reputation, office, honours, children, siblings – repudiate them all.

It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.

Now we will throw these mediocre kitsch-mongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God.

They have had among themselves a complete despotism from the remotest antiquity; a despotism, the most remarkable for its power and duration that the world has ever seen. It has pervaded their government, their religions, and their laws. It has formed by its various ramifications the essentials of the character which they have always had, as far as the light of history goes, and which they still posess; that character, which has made them a prey to every invader, indifferent to all their rulers, and easy in the change of them; as a people, void of public spirit, honour, attachment; and in society, base, dishonest, and faithless. (1796:32)

The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence.

They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.

Europe’s elites are characterised by cultural self-loathing, combined with a heavy dose of cowardice.

Isolation always perverts; when a man lives only among his own sort, he soon begins to believe that his sort are the best sort. This attitude breeds both the arrogance of the conservative and the bitterness of the radical.

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

Those who cannot bravely face danger are
the slaves of their attackers.

Let the calumniators of the colored race despise themselves for their baseness and illiberality of spirit, and henceforth cease to talk of the natural inferiority of those who require nothing but time and opportunity to attain to the highest point of human excellence.

Men are naturally disposed to listen to, and believe those who make them hope for an end to their miseries. Misfortunes render them timorous and credulous, and lead them to superstition. A fanatic easily makes conquests among a wretched people. It is not then wonderful that Jesus should soon acquire partizans, especially among the populace who in every country are easily seduced.

Sovereigns will consider those who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people as subverters of their thrones, — as traitors who aim at their destruction, by leading their easy good-nature, under specious pretences, to admit combinations of bold and faithless men into a participation of their power. This alone (if there were nothing else) is an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind.