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His hands would plait the priest's guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings.

— Denis Diderot

Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre,
Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.

Original text (French)

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Source, in full

"Les Éleuthéromanes", Poésies Diverses (1875), p. 16. Another frequently cited version is, "Et des boyaux du dernier prêtre / Serrons le cou du dernier roi" (translation: "Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest"), attributed to Diderot by Jean-François de La Harpe, Cours de Littérature Ancienne et Moderne (1840), vol. 3, book 4, chapter 3, p. 415.

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Leadership

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It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.

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In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

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There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

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Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Denis Diderot (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.