Who is wiser: the man who plants flowers along life's way or the man who makes it bristle with thorns?

Attractions are proportional to destinies.

The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

We must, then, apply the principle of Doubt to Civilization we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence.

The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.

Civilization is a social plague on the planet, and vices are just as necessary to it as is a virus to disease.

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.

...commerce, which is mistakenly classified among the productive forms of work, ought to be ranked first among the parasitical professions like those of monk, soldier, lawyer etc.