Voltaire Quotes

War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.

I find that whoever you are as a person is how you're gonna fight, and every basic instinct kind of comes out at that moment.

Nations, like individuals in a state of nature, are equal and independent, possessing certain rights and owing certain duties to each other.

The point of departure of the process to which we wish to contribute is the fact that war is the natural reaction of human nature in the savage state, while peace is the result of acquired characteristics.

You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.

Nature creates while destroying, and doesn't care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn't extinguished, as long as death doesn't lose its rights.

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

I'm acting for the same reasons I wanted to become a diplomat. I've thought about it a lot and concluded that I wanted to become a diplomat because it was a way to explore human nature. For the same reason that at one point in college, I wanted to be a sociologist.

Custom, that is before all law; Nature, that is above all art.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.

Government … becomes the rational art of minimizing the inevitable conflicts of primal irrational wills against one another and against the forces of nature at large

If you want the human psyche, how we deal with humans in these situations, WWII is a very tangled place to go.

Nature is seldom in the wrong, custom always.

If Nature put not forth her power About the opening of the flower, Who is it that could live an hour?

Nature has with a Motherly Tenderness observed this, that the Action she has enjoyned us for our Necessity should be also pleasant to us, and invites us to them, not only by Reason, but also by Appetite: and ’tis Injustice to infringe her Laws.

The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

Every action done by nature is done in the shortest way.

I think humans are stupid. We fight and kill each other. I think that's dumb. Aliens would be smarter than that and wouldn't approach things on that level. I can't really fathom it being a negative thing for aliens to visit.

Anything that's natural can't be sinful-it may be inconvenient, but it's not sinful.

Nature hath no goal though she hath law.

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be.

If nature does not ratify law, then all the virtues may lose their sway.