There's a Bible on the shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire-poison and antidote.

Never take the antidote before the poison

Are you expecting someone to poison you?" he said, somewhat taken aback.
"Not really. But it seems to me that if you wait around until you know you need an antidote, it's probably too late to pick one up.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?'
That is a hard question,' said Candide.