The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.
DENIS DIDEROTWatch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.
More Denis Diderot Quotes
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There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
DENIS DIDEROT -
The man who first pronounced the barbarous word God ought to have been immediately destroyed.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.
DENIS DIDEROT -
You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious.
DENIS DIDEROT -
And his hands would plait the priest’s entrails, For want of a rope, to strangle kings.
DENIS DIDEROT -
It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.
DENIS DIDEROT -
A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.
DENIS DIDEROT -
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge, observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
DENIS DIDEROT -
If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the “enthusiasm for truth and justice” using this phrase in the good sense it was Diderot.
DENIS DIDEROT -
In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice.
DENIS DIDEROT -
To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.
DENIS DIDEROT -
You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.
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The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.
DENIS DIDEROT -
When we know to read our own hearts, we acquire wisdom of the heartsof others.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
DENIS DIDEROT -
No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.
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The world is the house of the strong.
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The enjoyment of freedom which could be exercised without any motivation would be the real hallmark of a maniac.
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Does not vanity itself cease to be blamable, is it not even ennobled, when it is directed to laudable objects, when it confines itself to prompting us to great and generous actions?
DENIS DIDEROT -
When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz , one is tempted to throw away one’s books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.
DENIS DIDEROT -
If there are one hundred thousand damned souls for one saved soul, the devil has always the advantage without having given up his son to death.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Integrity is the evidence of all civil virtues.
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Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.
DENIS DIDEROT -
You have to make it happen.
DENIS DIDEROT -
There are cats and cats.
DENIS DIDEROT -
Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.
DENIS DIDEROT