The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), pg. 217
1900s
“The people became convinced—being ignorant, stupid and credulous—that the church held the keys of heaven and hell. The foundation for the most terrible mental tyranny that has existed among men was in this way laid.”
Rome, or Reason? A Reply to Cardinal Manning. Part I. The North American Review (1888)
Context: The people became convinced—being ignorant, stupid and credulous—that the church held the keys of heaven and hell. The foundation for the most terrible mental tyranny that has existed among men was in this way laid. The Catholic Church enslaved to the extent of its power. It resorted to every possible form of fraud; it perverted every good instinct of the human heart; it rewarded every vice; it resorted to every artifice that ingenuity could devise, to reach the highest round of power. It tortured the accused to make them confess; it tortured witnesses to compel the commission of perjury; it tortured children for the purpose of making them convict their parents; it compelled men to establish their own innocence; it imprisoned without limit; it had the malicious patience to wait; it left the accused without trial, and left them in dungeons until released by death. There is no crime that the Catholic Church did not commit,—no cruelty that it did not practice,—no form of treachery that it did not reward, and no virtue that it did not persecute. It was the greatest and most powerful enemy of human rights. It did all that organization, cunning, piety, self-denial, heroism, treachery, zeal and brute force could do to enslave the children of men. It was the enemy of intelligence, the assassin of liberty, and the destroyer of progress.
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Robert G. Ingersoll 439
Union United States Army officer 1833–1899Related quotes
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Robert G. Ingersoll
(1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
Rome, or Reason? A Reply to Cardinal Manning. Part I. The North American Review (1888)
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Albert Einstein
(1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Jotted (in German) on the margins of a letter to him (1933), p. 56
Unsourced variants: Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. / You can't blame gravity for falling in love.
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
“Can Hell and Heaven be merely the difference between ignorance and knowledge?”
Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 16 (p. 158)
“The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance.”
Maximilien Robespierre
(1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician
As quoted in Human Rights and Freedoms in the USSR (1981) by Fedor Eliseevich Medvedev and Gennadiĭ Ivanovich Kulikov, p. 221
Original: Le secret de la liberté est d'éclairer les hommes, comme celui de la tyrannie est de les retenir dans l'ignorance
Variant: The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
Source: Public statement (November 1792), quoted in Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre (1840), Volume 2, p. 253 http://books.google.com/books?id=iSMVAAAAQAAJ
Jacques Barzun
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Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937)
Context: Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.