“Voltaire, who was both the flatterer and the satirist of despotism, took another line. His force lay in exposing and ridiculing the superstitions which priest-craft, united with state-craft, had interwoven with governments. It was not from the purity of his principles, or his love of mankind (for satire and philanthropy are not naturally concordant), but from his strong capacity of seeing folly in its true shape, and his irresistible propensity to expose it, that he made those attacks. They were, however, as formidable as if the motive had been virtuous; and he merits the thanks rather than the esteem of mankind.”
Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)
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Thomas Paine 262
English and American political activist 1737–1809Related quotes
Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Source: Alexander’s Feast http://www.bartleby.com/40/265.html (1697), l. 77–83.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Reverend James Madison http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mtj:@field(DOCID+@lit(tj090050)) (31 January 1800).
About Weishaupt
"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)
“The craftsman is in his own craft beguiled.”
Lo schermitor vinto è di schermo.
Canto XIX, stanza 14 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)
Source: The Dervish House (2010), Ch. 5, §6 (p. 178)
Source: The Journey Home (1977), p. 121
Context: As for the "solitary confinement of the mind," my theory is that solipsism, like other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is a product of too much time wasted in library stacks between the covers of a book, in smoke-filled coffeehouses (bad for brains) and conversation-clogged seminars. To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.