It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. -Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)

— Anatole France

Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world.

— Anatole France

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

— Anatole France

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

— Anatole France

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

— Anatole France

Nature teaches us to devour each other and gives us the example of all the crimes and all the vices which the social state corrects or conceals. We should love virtue; but it is well to know that this is simply, and solely a convenient expedient invented by men in order to live comfortably together. What we call morality is merely a desperate enterprise, a forlorn hope, on the part of our fellow creatures to reverse the order of the universe, which is strife and murder, the blind interplay of hostile forces. She destroys herself, and the more I think of things, the more convinced I am that the universe is mad. Theologians and philosophers, who make God the author of Nature and the architect of the universe, show Him to us as illogical and ill-conditioned. They declare Him benevolent, because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit that His acts are atrocious. They attribute a malignity to him seldom to be found even in mankind. And that is how they get human beings to adore Him. For our miserable race would never lavish worship on just and benevolent deities from which they would have nothing to fear; they would feel only a barren gratitude for their benefits. Without purgatory and hell, your good God would be a mighty poor creature.

— Anatole France

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.

— Anatole France

Never lend books - nobody ever returns them the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.

— Anatole France

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

— Anatole France

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

— Anatole France