“Why Opium produces sleep: … Because there is in it a dormitive power.”
Le Malade Imaginaire (1673), Act III, sc. iii
Original
Quare Opium facit dormire: … Quia est in eo Virtus dormitiva.
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Molière 72
French playwright and actor 1622–1673Related quotes
“The sleep of reason produces monsters.”
1790s
2000s, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (2004)
On his childhood. p. 40
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“Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.”
Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) [New York Review Books Classics, 2004], Ch. 5, p. 340
Karl Marx, in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843-4), wrote "Religion…is the opium of the people" ("Die Religion…ist das Opium des Volkes"). Wilson was not the first writer to turn Marx’s statement on its head: Evelyn Waugh published a review of Harold Laski's Faith, Reason and Civilization in The Tablet, 22nd April 1944, under the headline "Marxism, the Opiate of the People".
In 1955 the French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote a book on Marxism called L'Opium des intellectuels. Hence Wilson's line is often attributed to him.
“The reason why fear is so powerful is because you believe it to be stronger than you.”
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 36