All VOLTAIRE Quotes about “Atheism”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
“So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.”
“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.”
“Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.”
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.”
“Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.”
“All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God.”
“The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.”
“Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.”
“Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.”
“England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.”
“Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.”
“The atheists are for the most part imprudent and misguided scholars who reason badly who, not being able to understand the Creation, the origin of evil, and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypothesis the eternity of things and of inevitability.”
“Meslier was the most singular phenomenon ever seen among all the meteors fatal to the Christian religion.”
“Let us therefore reject all superstition in order to become more human; but in speaking against fanaticism, let us not imitate the fanatics: they are sick men in delirium who want to chastise their doctors. Let us assuage their ills, and never embitter them, and let us pour drop by drop into their souls the divine balm of toleration, which they would reject with horror if it were offered to them all at once.”
“Whenever an important event, a revolution, or a calamity turns to the profit of the church, such is always signalised as the Finger of God.”
“What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?”
“It is reported in the supplement of the council of NicÃ¦an that the fathers, being very perplexed to know which were the cryphal or apocryphal books of the Old and New Testaments, put them all pell-mell on an altar, and the books to be rejected fell to the ground. It is a pity that this eloquent procedure has not survived.”
“If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.”
“Custom, law bent my first years to the religion of the happy Muslims. I see it too clearly: the care taken of our childhood forms our feelings, our habits, our belief. By the Ganges I would have been a slave of the false gods, a Christian in Paris, a Muslim here.”
“As you know, the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention to make the pope and the monks more powerful and turn a whole kingdom into hypocrites.”
“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.”
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him; let us worship God through Jesus if we must - if ignorance has so far prevailed that this name can still be spoken in all seriousness without being taken as a synonym for rapine and carnage. Every sensible man, every honourable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.”
“Before receiving your instruction, I must tell you what happened to me one day. I had just had a closet built at the end of my garden. I heard a mole arguing with a cockchafer; 'Here's a fine structure,' said the mole, 'it must have been a very powerful mole who did this work.' 'You're joking,' said the cockchafer; 'it's a cockchafer full of genius who is the architect of this building.' From that moment I resolved never to argue.”
“You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of the Church, Rome has always favored the doctrine which most completely subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason.”

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