“Here's your first problem," he said, pointing at a sentence. "'Religion is the opium of the people.' Well, I don't know about people, but I think you'll find that the opium of pirates is actual opium.”
Source: The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists
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Gideon Defoe 2
British writer 1975Related quotes
“It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.”
Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 159 (1972 edition)
“If religion was the opium of the masses, then communism was the methamphetamine of the masses.”
Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GPAl_q2QQ
Biblical Lectures
“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 smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.”
1930s