Baron d'Holbach Quotes

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

I do respect people's faith, but I don't respect their manipulation of that faith in order to create fear and control.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

God save us from religion.

Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Every major question in history is a religious question. It has more effect in molding life than nationalism or a common language.

I'm so incredibly tired of giving respect to a lot of delusions and crazy ideas just because they are regarded as religions.

Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

I took religion much too seriously, however, and its overall effect was depressing. I would have really liked to discard it, but somehow I couldn't.

For more than three thousand years men have quarreled concerning the formulas of their faith.

I'm not Catholic. I don't believe in God. But at the same time, I'm obsessed by the sacred, by spirituality. The question of redemption has been present well before Christianity, but as French people are a bit stupid, they see all that in religious terms.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

In the forefront of science, there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs. That's what happens when people believe something religiously.

It's one thing to be religious, but it's another thing to make religion your policy.

I think religion is a bunch of hooey, and I think that the holidays are an opportunity for people to get stressed out, getting their rush to shop. It's so conformist.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

The older I get, the more I realize that religion is not going to be easily marginalized by one of its wannabe successors - science, capitalism, consumerism.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.