--We can not know whether a
God really exists, or whether there is any difference between good and
evil, or vice and virtue--Nothing can be more absurd than to believe the
soul a spiritual being--The immortality of the soul, so far from
stimulating men to the practise of virtue, is nothing but a barbarous,
desperate, fatal tenet, and contrary to all legislation--All ideas of
justice and injustice, of virtue and vice, of glory and infamy, are
purely arbitrary, and dependent on custom--Conscience and remorse are
nothing but the foresight of those physical penalties to which crimes
expose us--The man who is above the law, can commit, without remorse,
the dishonest act that may serve his purpose--The fear of God, so far
from being the beginning of wisdom, should be the beginning of
folly--The command to love one's parents is more the work of education
than of nature--Modesty is only an invention of refined
voluptuousness--The law which condemns married people to live together,
becomes barbarous and cruel on the day they cease to love one another.

"Such were the atrocious sentiments, though sometimes artfully veiled,
which were disseminated in their books, and which, spreading all over
Europe, imperceptibly took possession of the public mind, and prepared
the way for the subversion of religion, morals, and government. As soon
as the sale of the works was sufficient to pay expenses, inferior
editions were printed and given away, or sold at a very low price;
circulating libraries of them were formed, and reading societies
instituted. While they constantly denied these productions to the world,
they contrived to give them a false celebrity through their confidential
agents and correspondents, who were not themselves always trusted with
the entire secret.

"By degrees they got possession nearly of all the reviews and periodical
publications; established a general intercourse, by means of hawkers and
pedlars, with the distant provinces; and instituted an office to supply
all schools with teachers; and thus did they acquire unprecedented
dominion over every species of literature, over the minds of all ranks
of people, and the education of the youth, without giving any alarm to
the world. The lovers of wit and polite literature were caught by
Voltaire; the men of science were perverted, and children corrupted in
the first rudiments of learning, by D'Alembert and Diderot; stronger
appetites were fed by the secret club of Baron Hol