Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest!

Attributed to Zola in Joseph Wheless, Forgery in Christianity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930) p. 406, and in Charles Bufe (ed.) The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations: Cutting Comments on Burning Issues (1992) p. 183. Compare Denis Diderot, as quoted in Will Durant, Voltaire and the French Enlightenment (1924) p. 59: "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest" and "Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest" — these are loosely derived from a statement Diderot actually did make: "his hands would plait the priest's entrails, for want of a rope, to strangle kings."

This quote appeared in soviet popular-scientific work "Satellite atheist" (Sputnik ateista) (1959), p. 491.