Honorary Knight Commander
"Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities."
A man might be a brilliant physician, or an accomplished mathemetician, yet still believe that Mohammed keeps half half the moon up his sleeve.
The height of folly is to imagine that the infinite Being would intervene in the eternal operation of the vast machinery that moves the whole universe in favour of three or four hundred ants on this little heap of dirt.
The superstitious man is to the knave what the slave is to the tyrant. Moreover, he is governed by the fanatic and becomes a fanatic. The superstition that was born of paganism, and adopted by Judaism, infected the Christian church at the beginning.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
When they say God is a tender father, God is a just King; when they add the idea of infinity to that of love, that kindness, that justice which they observe in the best of this own species, they soon fall into the most palpable and dreadful contradictions. How could this sovereign, who possessed in infinite fulness the principle or quality of human justice; how could this father, entertaining an infinite affection for his children; how could this being, infinitely powerful, have formed creatures in His own likeness, to have them immediately afterwards tempted by a malignant demon, to make them yield to that temptation to inflict death on those whom He had created immortal and to overwhelm their posterity with calamities and crimes?
The Inquisition, as everybody knows, is an admirable and truly Christian invention to increase the power of the Pope and monks and to turn the population of a whole kingdom into hypocrites.
What concern to me are humanity, benevolence, modesty, temperance, gentleness, wisdom, piety, so long as half an ounce of lead shatters my body, and I die at twenty in torments unspeakable, surrounded by five or six thousand dead and dying while my eyes, opening for the last time, see the town I was born in delivered to fire and sword, and the last sounds that reach my ears are the shrieks of women and children expiring in the ruins � and the whole for the pretended interest of men that we do not know?
Go over the whole history of Christian assassins, and it is very long � and you will see that they all had the Bible in their pockets with their daggers...!
The son of God is the same as the son of man; the son of man is the same as the son of God. God, the father, is the same as Christ, the son; Christ, the son, is the same as God, the father. This language may appear confused to unbelievers, but Christians will readily understand it.
He who is involved with in ecstacies and visions, who takes dreams for reality, and his own imagination for prophesy, is a fanatical novice of great hope and promise, and will soon advance to the highest stage and kill men for the love of God.
Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the
power of reasoning.
Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
TRIBUTES TO VOLTAIRE
"Of all the intellectual weapons that have been wielded by man, the most terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. Bigots and tyrants who had never been moved by the wailings and cursing of millions, turned pale at his name."
Lord Macaulay
"If you wish depth, genius, imagination, taste, reason, sensibility, philosophy, elevation, originality, nature, intellect, fancy, rectitude, facility, flexibility, precision, art, abundance, variety, fertility, warmth, magic, charm, grace, force, an eagle sweep of vision, vast understanding, instruction, rich tone, excellent, urbanity, suavity, delicacy, correctness, purity, clearness, eloquence, harmony, brilliancy, rapidity, gaiety, pathos, sublimity and universality, perfection indeed, behold Voltaire."
Goethe
SUPERSTITION and TYRANNY
