Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry Quotes

“Gustavo Solivellas dice: "Dios nos dio el don de la vida; que depende de nosotros para tener el don de vivir bien" (Voltaire)”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“Gustavo Solivellas dice: "Si Dios no existiera, sería necesario inventarlo" (Voltaire)”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“To be a good patriot is to want one's city to be enriched by commerce and powerful in arms. It is obvious that a country cannot gain unless another loses, and that it cannot vanquish without causing unhappiness.
So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbours. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“Question the people, they want democracy. Only kings prefer a monarchy. How then is it possible that nearly the whole world is governed by monarchs? Ask the rats who proposed to hang a bell round the cat's neck. But in truth the real reason is, as I have said, that men are very seldom worthy to govern themselves.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“So it was in the ancient world. All was republican in Europe before the petty kings of Etruria and Rome. Republics are still seen today in Africa. Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria, towards the north, still live as men are said to have lived in the first ages of the world, free, equal among themselves, without masters, without subjects, without money, and almost without needs. The flesh of their sheep feeds them, their skins clothe them, huts of wood and earth are their shelters. They stink worse than any other men, but do not know it. They live and die more calmly than we do.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“He who burns with ambition to become aedile, tribune, praetor, consul, dictator, cries out that he loves his country, and he loves only himself. Every man wants to be sure that he can sleep at home without another man arrogating to himself the power to make him sleep elsewhere. Every man wants to be sure of his fortune and his life. Thus, all having the same wishes, it turns out that private interest becomes the general interest: when we express our hopes for ourselves we are expressing them for the republic.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“As for a man who is neither a cardinal's cook nor endowed with any other public office; as for a private person of modest views, but who is annoyed because he is received everywhere with an air of patronage or disdain, who sees clearly that several monsignors have no more knowledge, no more intelligence, no more virtue than he, and who is sometimes wearied to find himself in their waiting rooms, what should he do? He should leave.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“Every man has the right to believe himself, at the bottom of his heart, entirely equal to all other men. It does not follow from this that a cardinal's cook should order his master to prepare his dinner; but the cook can say: 'I'm a man like my master, like him I am born in tears; like me he will die with the same sufferings and the same ceremonies. Both of us perform the same animal functions. If the Turks capture Rome, and I am then a cardinal and my master a cook, I will take him into my service.' All this speech is reasonable and just; but until the Grand Turk captures Rome the cook must do his duty, or every human society is perverted.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“Every man is born with a powerful enough desire for domination, wealth and pleasure, and with much taste for idleness. Consequently every man would like to have other people's money and wives or women, to be their master, to subjugate them to all his caprices, and to do nothing, or at least to do only very agreeable things.
Obviously, having such amiable dispositions, it is as impossible for men to be equal as it is impossible for two preachers or two professors of theology not to be jealous of one another.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“A numerous family has cultivated good land. Two small neighboring families have barren and obstinate fields. It is obvious enough that the two poor families must serve the opulent family or murder it. One of the two indigent families offers its labor to the rich to get bread; the other attacks it and is beaten. The former family originated servants and laborers, the defeated family slaves.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“...all men would necessarily be equal if they were without needs. The poverty characteristic of our species subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality that is the real evil, but dependence. It matters very little that some man is called his highness, and another his holiness; but it is hard to serve one or the other.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“How can reason govern enthusiasm? This is because a poet first sketches the structure of his canvas: the reason then holds the brush. But when he proceeds to animate his personages and to endow them with passions, then the imagination kindles, enthusiasm takes over: it is a race horse carried away headlong, but its course has been properly laid out.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“It is the rarest of things to unite reason with enthusiasm. Reason consists of always seeing things as they are. The drunkard is deprived of his reason when he sees things double. Enthusiasm is precisely like wine: it can excite so much tumult in the blood vessels, and such violent vibrations in the nerves, that the reason is entirely destroyed. It can cause only slight jolts, which merely produce a little more activity in the brain. This is what happens in great outbursts of eloquence, and above all in sublime poetry. Rational enthusiasm is the attribute of great poets.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“A geometrician watches a touching tragedy: he sees only that it is well constructed. A young man by his side is moved and sees nothing. A woman weeps. Another young man is so carried away that, unhappily for him, he also decides to write a tragedy: he has caught the disease of enthusiasm.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“A farmer was told: ‘You have too many fish in this pond, they will not thrive; there are too many animals in your fields, there is not enough grass, they will lose weight.’ After this exhortation it so happened that pike ate half my man's carp, and wolves half of his sheep; the rest fattened. Will he congratulate himself on his management? This countryman is you yourself, one of your passions devours the others and you think you have triumphed over yourself.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“If we could change our character we would give ourselves one, we would be the masters of nature. Can we give ourselves something? Do we not receive everything? Try to arouse continuous activity in an indolent mass, to freeze with apathy the boiling soul of the impetuous, to inspire a taste for music and poetry into one who lacks taste and an ear: you will no more succeed than if you undertook to give sight to one born blind. We perfect, we mitigate, we hide what nature has placed in us; but we place nothing in ourselves.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“Religion, morality put a curb on the power of nature; they cannot destroy it. The drunkard in a cloister, reduced to one glass of cider with each meal, will no longer get drunk, but he will always love wine.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“What is happening today to elephants, lions, tigers, whose numbers have much decreased, once happened to mankind. In times when a region was little inhabited by men, they had few arts, they were hunters. The habit of feeding on what they had killed readily caused them to treat their enemies like their stags and their boars. It was superstition that caused human victims to be immolated, it was necessity that caused them to be eaten.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“Nations called civilized are right not to put their vanquished enemies on the spit, for if we were permitted to eat our neighbours we would soon eat our fellow countrymen, which would be a mixed blessing for the social virtues.”
― Voltaire , Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“They say: ‘Our masters depict god for us as the most senseless and the most barbarous of all kinds, therefore there is no god’; but they ought to say: ‘Therefore our masters attribute to god their own absurdities and rages, therefore god is the opposite of what they proclaim, therefore god is as wise and as good as they allege him to be mad and wicked.’ This is what wise men conclude.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“What are the inferences from all this? That atheism is a most pernicious monster in sovereign princes, and likewise in statesmen, however harmless their life be, because from their cabinet they can make their way to the former; that if it be not so mischievous as fanaticism, it is almost ever destructive of virtue.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“The Caffres, the Hottentots, the Topinamboux, and many other petty nations, have no god: that may be; but it does not imply that they deny the existence of a Deity; they neither deny nor affirm: they have never heard a word about him; tell them that there is a God, they will readily believe it; tell them that every thing is the work of nature, and they will as cordially believe it; you may as well say, that they are Anti-Cartesians as to call them atheists.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“Atheists, for the most part, are men of study, but bold and erroneous in their reasonings, and not comprehending the creation, the original of evil, and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypothesis of the eternity of things, and of necessity.

The sensualist and the ambitious have little time for speculation, or to embrace a bad system; to compare Lucretius with Socrates is quite out of their way. Such is the present state of things among us!”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“Bayle, therefore, should rather have examined which is the more dangerous, fanaticism or atheism? Now fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more mischievous; for atheism stimulates to none of those sanguinary procedures for which fanaticism is notorious; if atheism does not suppress crimes, fanaticism incites to the commission of them.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“...nothing can be more evident than that it was infinitely better for the Greeks to stand in awe of Ceres, Neptune, and Jupiter, than to be under no manner of awe; the sacredness of oaths is manifest and necessary, and they who hold that perjury will be punished, are certainly more to be trusted than those who think that a false oath will be attended with no ill consequence. It is beyond all question, that in a policed city, even a bad religion is better than none.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“Why is a society of atheists thought impossible? Because it is thought that men under no restraint could never live together; that laws avail nothing against secret crimes; and that there must be an avenging God, punishing in this world or the other those delinquents who have escaped human justice.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“...the Romans, who were much wiser than the Greeks, never molested any philosopher for his opinion. It was not so among the Barbarous nations who seated themselves in the Roman empire. The emperor Frederic II. having some difference with the popes, was immediately arraigned of atheism, and reported to have been, jointly with his chancellor de Vineis, the author of the book intitled The Three Impostors.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“There is not there a distinct soul in the machine: but what makes animals' bellows move? I have already told you, what makes the stars move. The philosopher who said, "Deus est anima brutorum," was right; but he should go further.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“The greatest fools are those who have advanced that this soul is neither body nor spirit. There is a fine system. By spirit we can understand only some unknown thing which is not body. Thus these gentlemen's system comes back to this, that the animals' soul is a substance which is neither body nor something which is not body.”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

“Listen to other brutes reasoning about the brutes; their soul is a spiritual soul which dies with the body; but what proof have you of it? what idea have you of this spiritual soul, which, in truth, has feeling, memory, and its measure of ideas and ingenuity; but which will never be able to know what a child of six knows? On what ground do you imagine that this being, which is not body, dies with the body?”
― Voltaire, Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry