Baron d'Holbach Quotes

31 quotes in 650 categories

• All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.
• Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is by…
• It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.
• The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation, nothing but an immense,…
• What has been said of [God] is either unintelligible or perfectly contradictory; and for this reason must appear impossible to every man of common sense.
• Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God. That is to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of a…
• The atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.
• How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been…
• Can theology give to the mind the ineffable boon of conceiving that which no man is in a capacity to comprehend? Can it procure to…
• Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.
• When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to…
• Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty.
• God, we are told, is willing to render himself inconsistent and ridiculous, to confound the curiosity of those whom, we are at the same time…
• It is thus religion infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity and fanaticism: if he has a heated imagination it drives him on…
• The unhappiness of people is due to their ignorance of nature.
• Men always fool themselves when they give up experience for systems born of the imagination. Man is the work of nature, he exists in nature,…
• The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.
• If experience be consulted, it will be found there is no action, however abominable, that has not received the applause of some people. Parricide -…
• If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
• If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception…

Browse Baron d'Holbach Quotes by Category