Baron d'Holbach quotes

Baron d'Holbach was a French-German philosopher, writer, and prominent figure of the Enlightenment. His works fiercely defended atheism, materialism, and rational thought, influencing revolutionary ideas across Europe. He played a key role in Parisian intellectual circles and promoted the critique of religion through his famous salon. Here are 13 of his quotes:

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

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

Baron d'Holbach

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

Baron d'Holbach

Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.

Baron d'Holbach

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

Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.

Baron d'Holbach

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

Baron d'Holbach

We are all just cogs in a machine, doing what we were always meant to do, with no actual volition.

Baron d'Holbach

Everything that passes in the world, proves to us, in the clearest manner, that it is not governed by an intelligent being.

Baron d'Holbach

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

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