“Voltaire”      
1694-1778

“To hold a pen is to be at war.”

“A witty saying proves nothing.”

“The best is the enemy of the good.”

“I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it.”

“It is with books as with the fire in our hearths; we go to a neighbor to get the embers and light it when we return home, pass it on to others, and it belongs to everyone.”

“Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

“Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.”

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.”

“Love truth, but pardon error.”

“Voltaire lighted a torch and gave to others the sacred flame. The light still shines and will as long as man loves liberty and seeks for truth.”
    Robert G. Ingersoll

“His forte lay in exposing and ridiculing the superstitions which priestcraft united with statecraft had interwoven with governments.”
    Tom Paine

“But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him.”

“May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?”