Voltaire Quotes

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.

Unlike other vices, cruelty, alas, is never boring.

I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.

There will always be cheaters. It is human nature. It will never be 100 percent clean, in any sport.

Bad people are intriguing!

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.

The punters [gamblers] know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race.

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger at his death.

The most identifying trait of humanity is our abilty to be inhumane to one another.

Lying is a most disgraceful vice; it first despises God, and then fears men.

Fattened in vice, so callous and so gross, he sins and sees not, senseless of his loss.

It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.

What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness.

Were the life of man prolonged, he would become such a proficient in villainy, that it would become necessary again to drown or to burn the world. Earth would become an hell; for future rewards when put off to a great distance, would cease to encourage, and future punishments to alarm.

You have the effrontery to be squeamish, it thought at him. But we were dragons. We were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But this much I can tell you, you ape – the great face pressed even closer, so that Wonse was staring into the pitiless depths of his eyes – we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.

This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?

I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible and they show that there were times, and there probably are times, that it is human to be inhuman.

Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

The truth now.He was disappointed in human beings.He had seen too many betrayals,too many pitiful weaknesses,too much greed for money and fame.The falseness between lovers,husbands and wifes,fathers,sons,mothers,daughters

What they need is a little immorality in their lives. Then they wouldn't be so busy looking for it in other people's.