“Christianity… is an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it. Attributed in "The West and the Rest", by Niall Ferguson, Penguin 2011”
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Frederick II of Prussia36
king of Prussia 1712–1786Related quotes
Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) American painter and printmaker
Quote from her letter of July, 1871; as quoted in her biography online at https://www.marycassatt.org/biography.html
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
21st January 1826) Io triumphe (under the pen name Iole
The London Literary Gazette, 1826
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist
Possibly a paraphrase of Bertrand Russell in My Philosophical Development (1959): "This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them." It is similar in meaning to Orwell's line from Notes on Nationalism (1945): "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." However, Russell was commenting not on politics, as Orwell was, but on some philosophers and their ideas about language.
Misattributed
Variant: Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.
Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer
Helen in A Trojan Ending (London: Constable, 1937)
“I‘m strictly reality oriented. I don’t indulge in make-believe. I don’t wish to be where I’m not.”
Ilana Mercer South African writer
2010s, 2016
Arthur Chapman (poet) (1873–1935) American poet and newspaper columnist
Out Where the West Begins http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#OUT, st. 1. <br class="br"> Out Where the West Begins and Other Western Verses http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#outbk (1917)
Unni Wikan (1944) Norwegian anthropologist
25 April 2007 protest of misattributed quote below