I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, I feel: therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.
There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.
In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.
Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.
Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
The attempt of Lavoisier to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than to have retarded the progress of science by a jargon, from the confusion of which time will be requisite to extricate us.
Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry…
If you want something you’ve never had
You must be willing to do something you’ve never done.
While the art of printing is left to us science can never be retrograde; what is once acquired of real knowledge can never be lost.
I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race.
I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.
But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
The more ignorant we become the less value we set on science, and the less inclination we shall have to seek it.
Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people.
I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.
It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.
Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.
The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man. . . . [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government.(A plaque with this quotation, with the first phrase omitted, is in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.)