Jesus wept Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

Well there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other.

A jealous lover of human liberty deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity I reverse the phrase of Voltaire and say that if God really existed it would be necessary to abolish him.

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.

It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not we cling to.'