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The bad gives rise to the good, the good inspires the better, the better produces the excellent, the excellent is followed by the bizarre

Denis Diderot

Anyone who takes it upon himself, on his private authority, to break a bad law, thereby authorizes everyone else to break the good ones.
DENIS DIDEROT

Authority Break Goodness Oneself Privacy
The man who first pronounced the barbarous word God ought to have been immediately destroyed.
DENIS DIDEROT

Destroy Man Pronounce
When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
DENIS DIDEROT

Allow Music Painting Performance Poetry Superstitious
Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.
DENIS DIDEROT

Command Force Obedience Power Violence
To describe women, the pen should be dipped in the humid colors of the rainbow, and the paper dried with the dust gathered from the wings of a butterfly.
DENIS DIDEROT

Butterfly Color Pen Wings Woman
In order to get as much fame as one’s father one has to much more able than he.
DENIS DIDEROT

Fame Father Himself Order
Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.
DENIS DIDEROT

Poetry Savage Scale
Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.
DENIS DIDEROT

Build Distance Infinite Mad Plain Separate Tower
I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.
DENIS DIDEROT

Expectation Finding Myself Truth
Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.
DENIS DIDEROT

Anand Thakur
And his hands would plait the priest’s entrails, For want of a rope, to strangle kings.
DENIS DIDEROT

Hands King Priest
It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.
DENIS DIDEROT

Believe God Important
There is no true sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people.
DENIS DIDEROT

Anand Thakur
Only the bad man is alone.
DENIS DIDEROT

Alone Bad Man
We swallow with one gulp the lie that flatters us, and drink drop by drop the truth which is bitter to us.
DENIS DIDEROT

Bitter Lying Swallow Truth
The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.
DENIS DIDEROT

Children Father God Himself

The bad gives rise to the good, the good inspires the better, the better produces the excellent, the excellent is followed by the bizarre

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The bad gives rise to the good, the good inspires the better, the better produces the excellent, the excellent is followed by the bizarre

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