It was the full conviction of this, and of what could be done, if every man were placed in the office for which he was fitted by nature and a proper education, which first suggested to me the plan of Illumination.

Morality will perform all this; and Morality is the fruit of Illumination.

G is Grace, the Flaming Star is the Torch of Reason. Those who possess this knowledge are indeed Illuminati.

And of all illumination which human reason can give, none is comparable to the discovery of what we are, our nature, our obligations, what happiness we are capable of, and what are the means of attaining it.

In another situation, and in an active station in life, I should have been keenly occupied, and the founding of an order would have never come into my head.

But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices; and they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.

The first task of the association must therefore be to form the young members.

Nothing would be more profitable to us than a right history of mankind.

I am proud to be known to the world as the founder of the Illuminati.

I did not bring Deism into Bavaria.

My general plan is good, though in the detail there may be faults.

It was the full conviction of this, and of what could be done, if every man were placed in the office for which he was fitted by nature and a proper education, which first suggested to me the plan of Illumination.

But I would have executed much greater things, had not government always opposed my exertions, and placed others in situations which would have suited my talents.

Let this circumstance of our constitution therefore be directed to this noble purpose, and then all the objections urged against it by jealous tyranny and affrighted superstition will vanish.

The head of every family will be what Abraham was, the patriarch, the priest and the unlettered lord of his family, and Reason will be the code of laws to all mankind.

Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?

This is the great object held out by this association; and the means of attaining it is illumination, enlightening the understanding by the sun of reason which will dispell the clouds of superstition and of prejudice.

When man lives under government, he is fallen, his worth is gone, and his nature tarnished.

Of all the means I know to lead men, the most effectual is a concealed mystery.

The human race will then become one family, and the world will be the dwelling of Rational Men.

The hankering of the mind is irresistible.

And their conviction is that if it is done with that kind of purity it will go somewhere. I believe that with all my heart, but I'm not responsible for its going somewhere.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Ronald Reagan's well documented final battles with Alzheimer's disease were fought with the same conviction and courage that his many public battles were fought.

Many hard comments have been made on my efforts in India from the side of the Congress party, yet I feel content in the deep conviction that the offer I traveled 22,000 miles to discuss with Indian leaders was a real contribution to a solution of our differences.

For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.

I was induced to establish several orders of merit, from conviction that emulation, well directed, becomes a useful servant; and, that the latent genius of some youth is more easily brought into action this way, than by the more sordid gratification of self-interest.

Music is a hobby, because I'm not making any money out of it, but I put just as much conviction into that as I do into my acting.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case it didn't work, then it would have been to no purpose.

Courage and conviction are powerful weapons against an enemy who depends only on fists or guns. Animals know when you are afraid; a coward knows when you are not.

I retired from public Business from a thorough Conviction that it was not in my Power to do any Good, and very much disgusted with Measures, which appeared to me inconsistent with common Policy and Justice.

And indeed this theme has been at the centre of all my research since 1943, both because of its intrinsic fascination and my conviction that a knowledge of sequences could contribute much to our understanding of living matter.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

There was an implicit conviction that the UN would be stronger than the sum of its constituent member-states.

A large part of the present anxiety to improve the education of girls and women is also due to the conviction that the political disabilities of women will not be maintained.

I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.

I tried to instill a different motivation, to give them the security and the conviction that they were doing something good, something necessary, something useful - if you want to use a grandiose expression, that they were doing something for peace.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time.

In examining the evidence of the Christian religion, it is essential to the discovery of truth that we bring to the investigation a mind freed, as far as possible, from existing prejudice, and open to conviction.

When you take a stand out of deep conviction, people know. They may not even agree, but they ask, 'Do I want someone who is willing to take a hard stand and someone I can trust to do that when the chips are down?' They want that.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

Honest conviction is my courage; the Constitution is my guide.