"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 embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men."
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789 / System of Nature / 1770)
"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 its agents the marvellous faculty of having precise ideas of a god composed of so many contradictory qualities?"
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789 / System of Nature / 1770)
"The other world gives no motive for doing well to him who finds no motive for it here."
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789 / The Conscience of an Athiest)
"The Jehovah of the Jews is a suspicious tyrant, who breathes nothing but blood, murder, and carnage, and who demands that they should nourish him with the vapours of animals. The Jupiter of the Pagans is a lascivious monster. The Moloch of the Phoenicians is a cannibal. The pure mind of the Christians resolved, in order to appease his fury, to crucify his own son. The savage god of the Mexicans cannot be satisfied without thousands of mortals which are immolated to his sanguinary appetite."
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789)
"All children are atheists - they have no idea of God."
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789)
"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."
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789)
"Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism."
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789)
"All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies."
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789)
"All religious notions are uniformly founded on authority; all the religions the world forbid examination, and are not disposed that men should reason upon them."
(Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789)
