“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”

“If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse.And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humoured these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.”

“The brutes do not admire each other. A horse does not admire his companion. Not that there is no rivalry between them in a race, but that is of no consequence; for, when in the stable, the heaviest and most ill-formed does not give up his oats to another as men would have others do to them. Their virtue is satisfied with itself.”

“All men naturally hate one another. They employ lust as far as possible in the service of the public weal. But this is only a pretence and a false image of love; for at bottom it is only hate.”

“Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.”

“I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.”

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”