Julien Offray de La Mettrie

“The human body is a machine which winds its own springs.”

“To be a machine, to feel, to think, to know how to distinguish good from evil, as well as blue from yellow, in a word, to be born with intelligence and a sure moral instinct, and to be only an animal, are therefore no more contradictory than to be an ape or a parrot and to be able to feel pleasure and pain.”

“The soul is but a vain term of which we have no idea, and which we ought to make use of only to signify the part in us that thinks.”