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Utopia! such is the name with which ignorance, folly, and incredulity have always characterized the great conceptions, discoveries, enterprises, and ideas which have illustrated the ages, and marked eras in human progress.

— Émile de Girardin A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness (1902)

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Source: p. 73
Work: A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness, 1902
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

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No faith has triumphed without its martyrs.

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Illusions ruin all those whom they blind.

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A woman by whom we are loved is a vanity; a woman whom we love is a religion.

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Without the ideal, this inexhaustible source of all progress, what would man be? and what would society be?

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The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory, and to save an empire.

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Which is the best religion? The most tolerant.

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The woman who loves us is only a woman, but the woman we love is a celestial being whose defects disappear under the prism through which we see her.

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There is more poverty in the human heart than misery in life.

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Servility is to devotion what hypocrisy is to virtue.

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Whenever the good done to us does not touch and penetrate the heart, it wounds and irritates our vanity.

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Instruction is to the proletary what liberty is to the slave: the latter emancipates the body, the former emancipates the intelligence.

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Modesty is the chastity of merit, the virginity of noble souls.

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