Michel Onfray Quotes

21 quotes in 484 categories

• The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the…
• How strange that excision – female circumcision, with several languages using the same term for both kinds of mutilation – of little girls should revolt…
• I have a big problem with Islam.
• I persist in preferring philosophers to rabbis priests imams ayatollahs and mullahs. Rather than trust their theological hocus-pocus I prefer to draw on alternatives to…
• I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don't constitute works of political philosophy but rather…
• Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants;…
• We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment - by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve.
• Religion is an irrational construct.
• Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy.
• We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God. But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to…
• By aiming for paradise, we lose sight of earth. Hope of a beyond and aspiration to an afterlife engender a sense of futility in the…
• You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition.
• I found it amazing people can think that art must be connected to religion. Religion may give art themes, but there would still be art…
• We can no more tolerate neutrality and benevolence toward every conceivable form of discourse, including that of magical thinking, than we can lump together executioner…
• If we include hedonistic philosophy in hospitals, the lives of patients suffering from cancer would be much, much better.
• Philosophy is best practised by people in general and not by philosophers alone. Philosophy is too often a luxury now, but in ancient Greece, carpenters,…
• God is a fiction invented by people so they do not have to face the reality of their condition.
• I believe in libertarian options because they allow an interesting management of the capital and are based on co-operation, reciprocity, contract, federation.
• Religion is like magic. It is all about tricks.
• For the establishment, philosophy is both an elitist and an idealist discipline: In high school, it is a compulsory subject; at university, they teach the…

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