Baron D'Holbach Quotes

#1. The atheist ... destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

Baron D'Holbach

#2. It is very strange that men should deny a Creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.

Baron D'Holbach

#3. Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.

Baron D'Holbach

#4. Don'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'Holbach

#5. All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.

Baron D'Holbach

#6. 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.

Baron D'Holbach

#7. The 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'Holbach

#8. The unhappiness of people is due to their ignorance of nature.

Baron D'Holbach

#9. 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.

Baron D'Holbach

#10. It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

Baron D'Holbach

#11. Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty.

Baron D'Holbach

#12. Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God. That is to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of a cause which you understand not at all.

Baron D'Holbach

#13. If God be an infinite being, there cannot be, either in the present or future world, any relative proportion between man and his God. Thus, the idea of God can never enter the human mind.

Baron D'Holbach

#14. Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.

Baron D'Holbach

#15. Religion unites man with God, or forms a communication between them; yet do they not say, 'God is infinite?' If God be infinite, no finite being can have communication or relation with him.

Baron D'Holbach

#16. All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.

Baron D'Holbach

#17. All 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

#18. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality.

Baron D'Holbach

#19. To discover the true principles of Morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods: They have need only of common sense.

Baron D'Holbach

#20. If the ministers of the Church have often permitted nations to revolt for Heaven's cause, they never allowed them to revolt against real evils or known violencess. It is from Heaven that the chains have come to fetter the minds of mortals.

Baron D'Holbach

#21. When 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'Holbach

#22. The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

Baron D'Holbach

#23. 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?

Baron D'Holbach