It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.
BARON D'HOLBACHIt is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.
BARON D'HOLBACHThe universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation, nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects.
BARON D'HOLBACHAll religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.
BARON D'HOLBACHThe source of man’s unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.
BARON D'HOLBACHThe inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power.
BARON D'HOLBACHMen always fool themselves when they give up experience for systems born of the imagination.
BARON D'HOLBACHYou think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?
BARON D'HOLBACHDon’t say anything about this to anybody. Any one would say that I am trying to play the good-natured philosopher. I am neither benefactor nor philosopher, but just a human being, and my charities are the pleasantest expense I have on these journeys.
BARON D'HOLBACHCan theology give to the mind the ineffable boon of conceiving that which no man is in a capacity to comprehend? Can it procure to its agents the marvellous faculty of having precise ideas of a god composed of so many contradictory qualities?
BARON D'HOLBACHThe atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.
BARON D'HOLBACHWhen we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.
BARON D'HOLBACHPeople have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn’t it be better to depend on blind matter… than a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent.
BARON D'HOLBACHIf we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.
BARON D'HOLBACHThe savage god of the Mexicans cannot be satisfied without thousands of mortals which are immolated to his sanguinary appetite.
BARON D'HOLBACHOnly to finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example preventing others from committing crimes.
BARON D'HOLBACHAll religious notions are uniformly founded on authority; all the religions of the world forbid examination, and are not disposed that men should reason upon them.
BARON D'HOLBACH