7 quotes
Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent persons, and superstition is the vice of fools.
Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
If there are atheists, whom must one blame if not the mercenary tyrants of souls, who, making us revolt against their knaveries, force a few weak minds to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?
Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
If God made us in His image we have certainly returned the compliment.
The atheists are for the most part impudent and misguided scholars who reason badly, and who, not being able to understand the creation, the origin of evil and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypotheses of the eternity of things and of inevitability.
Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
What conclusion shall we draw from all this? That atheism is a very pernicious monster in those who govern; that it is also pernicious in the persons around statesmen ...; that, if it is not so deadly as fanaticism, it is nearly always fatal to virtue.
Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
For entirely savage races,... one cannot count them among either the atheists or the theists. Asking them their belief would be like asking them if they are for Aristotle or Democritus: they know nothing; they are not atheists any more than they are Peripatetics.
Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. What is most repellent in the System of Nature [of d'Holbach] — after the recipe for making eels from flour — is the audacity with which it decides that there is no God, without even having tried to prove the impossibility.