Baron d'Holbach Quotes

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.

Belief is the death of intelligence.

All of us, whether we are ignorant of philosophy or professors of philosophy, find it easier to follow dogma than to think.

If you attach your mind to any ideology, you're going to be on a road, and that road may or may not lead you in a good direction. But you're gonna stay on that road because you are attached to an ideology. It could be a terrible road, but you stick with it regardless of rational thinking.

[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.

The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.

But I do think that when people say 'a learning curve,' they make a mistake. Learning to me always seems to go in a straight, ignorant line and then, every so often, takes a jump straight upward.

Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

How prone we are to come to the consideration of every question with heads and hearts pre-occupied! How prone to shrink from any opinion, however reasonable, if it be opposed to any, however unreasonable, of our own! How disposed are we to judge, in anger, those who call upon us to think, and encourage us to enquire! To question our prejudices seems nothing less than sacrilege; to break the chains of our ignorance, nothing short of impiety!

By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims supressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mindset of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.

When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.

Man's progress is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning.

a white person who claims to have no impediment of vision in this country is not, I think, telling the whole truth. And when it comes to race relations, not telling the whole truth about the fog one inhabits slows down the work of groping forward.

I think that's what finally stopped me. I slid right to the edge. My legs were hanging over. And I could feel it too. I don't know how. There was no wind, no sound, no change of temperature. There was just this terrible emptiness reaching up for me.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know.

I think he lives in such a rarified bubble these days, he doesn't understand what reality is any more.

I think you need a very strong mind to be on social media because people are mean and ignorant out there.

The biggest challenge is people thinking you know everything going on in your company, because you're at the top of it and you started it. But the thing is, nobody knows everything about anything.

I'm against ignorance. I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking. I'm against fashionable thinking. I am against the whole cliché of the moment.

The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?).

The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong.