Critics Of Religion

"The minister [Robert Walpole] preaches corruption aloud and constantly, like an impudent missionary of vice."

"My Lord, I have insisted the more on this duty which men owe to their country, because I came out of England, and continue still, strongly affected with what I saw when I was there. Our government has approached, nearer than ever before, to the true principles of it, since the revolution of one thousand six hundred and eighty eight: and the accession of the present family to the throne, has given the fairest opportunities, as well as the justest reasons, for compleating the scheme of liberty, and improving it to perfection."

"[N]o human institution can arrive at perfection, and the most that human wisdom can do, is to procure the same or greater good, at the expence of less evil."

"It seems to me, upon the whole matter, that to save or redeem a nation under such circumstances from perdition, nothing less is necessary than some great, some extraordinary conjuncture of ill fortune, or of good, which may purge, yet so as by fire. Distress from abroad, bankruptcy at home, and other circumstances of like nature and tendency, may beget universal confusion. Out of confusion order may arise: but it may be the order of a wicked tyranny, instead of the order of a just monarchy. Either may happen: and such an alternative, at the disposition of fortune, is sufficient to make a stoic tremble! We may be saved indeed by means of a very different kind; but these means will not offer themselves, this way of salvation will not be opened to us, without the concurrence, and the influence of a PATRIOT KING, the most uncommon of all phænomena in the physical or moral world. Nothing can so surely and so effectually restore the virtue and public spirit, essential to the preservation of liberty, and national prosperity, as the reign of such a prince."

"The situation of Great Britain, the character of her people, and the nature of her government fit her for trade and commerce. Her climate and her soil make them necessary to her well being. By trade and commerce we grew a rich and powerful nation, and by their decay we are growing poor and impotent. As trade and commerce enrich, so they fortify our country. The sea is our barrier, ships are our fortresses, and the mariners, that trade and commerce alone can furnish, are the garrisons to defend them."

"The service of our country is no chimerical, but a real duty. He who admits the proofs of any other moral duty, drawn from the constitution of human nature, or from the moral fitness and unfitness of things, must admit them in favour of this duty, or be reduced to the most absurd inconsistency."

"To what higher station, to what greater glory can any mortal aspire, than to be, during the whole course of his life, the support of good, the controul of bad government, and the guardian of public liberty?"

"Neither Montaigne in writing his essays, nor DesCartes in building new worlds, nor Burnet in framing an antedeluvian earth, no nor Newton in discovering and establishing the true laws of nature on experiment and a sublimer geometry, felt more intellectual joys; than he feels who is a real patriot, who bends all the force of his understanding, and directs all his thoughts and actions, to the good of his country."

"The second proposition admits and encourages the very practice we censure so justly, for which the saint [ Augustine of Hippo ] was so famous, and by which he contributed so much to promote contentions in his own days, and to perpetuate them to ours. The practice of deducing doctrines from the scriptures that are not evidently contained in them... Who does not see that the direct tendency of this practice is exactly the same as the event has proved it to be? It composes and propagates a religion, seemingly under the authority of God, but really under that of man. The principles of revelation are lost in theology, or disfigured by it: and whilst some men are impudent enough to pretend, others are silly enough to believe, that they adhere to the gospel, and maintain the cause of God against infidels and heretics, when they do nothing better, nor more, than espouse the conceits of men, whom enthusiasm, or the ambition of forming sects, or of making a great figure in them, has inspired. If you ask now what the practice of the christian fathers, and of other divines, should have been, in order to preserve the purity of faith, and to promote peace and charity, the answer is obvious... They should have adhered to the word of God: they should have paid no regard to heathen philosophy, jewish cabala, the sallies of enthusiasm, or the refinements of human ingenuity: they should have embraced, and held fast the articles of faith and doctrine, that were delivered in plain terms, or in unequivocal figures: they should not have been dogmatical where the sense was doubtful, nor have presumed even to guess where the Holy Ghost left the veil of mystery undrawn."

"Our world seems to be, in many respects, the bedlam of every other system of intelligent creatures."

"It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature's God; that is, he follows God in his works and in his word."

"They (Thucydides and Xenophon) maintained the dignity of history."

"The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it."

"The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them."

"We are born too late to see the beginning, and we die too soon to see the end of many things."

"Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense."

"I have read somewhere or other, — in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, — that history is philosophy teaching by examples."

"Nations, like men, have their infancy."

"[I]t is a pretty shocking observation that the Queen is to be the guarantee for a loan of this extraordinary nature made by the Dutch, and especially at a time, when under pretence of disability they directly refuse to furnish their quotas for the sea service, in spight of the obligations of all sorts, which lye upon them to do otherwise."

"The manners of our fore-fathers were, I believe, in many respects better: they had more probity perhaps, they had certainly more show of honour, and greater industry."

"We have been twenty years engaged in the two most expensive wars that Europe ever saw. The whole burthen of this charge has lain upon the landed interest during the whole time. The men of estates have, generally speaking, neither served in the fleets nor armies, nor meddled in the public funds, and management of the treasure. A new interest has been created out of their fortunes, and a sort of property, which was not known twenty years ago, is now encreased to be almost equal to the terra firma of our island. The consequences of all this is, that the landed men are become poor and dispirited. They either abandon all thoughts of the publick, turn arrant farmers, and improve the estates they have left: or else they seek to repair their shattered fortunes by listing at court, or under the heads of partys. In the mean while those men are become their masters, who formerly would with joy have been their servants."

"Though the condition of France by evident tokens appears to be miserable, yet their ill circumstances are certainly exaggerated in our accounts. I doubt, we may add that our own state is not much better than our enemy's, and that an unseasonable harvest would reduce our people to the same misery as we triumph over. Peace is as much our interest as theirs. I am so firmly persuaded of this, that I will continue to hope the winter may ripen this glorious fruit, which the summer could not. As to the conditions of this peace, it is melancholy to reflect, that those articles you speak of, which will in their consequence devolve so prodigious a power on Holland, seem to be agreed on all sides; whilst the single principle on which we engaged in the war, remaines the only point in dispute."

"You may observe yourself...what a difference there is between the true strength of this nation and the fictitious one of the Whigs. How much time, how many lucky incidents, how many strains of power, how much money must go to create a majority of the latter; on the other hand, take but off the opinion that the Crown is another way inclined, the church interest rises with redoubled force, and by its natural genuine strength."

"A peace must be had; and all mankind sees plainly now, in how vile a manner former opportunities were neglected of making a better than at this hour we have reason to expect."

"One party [the Whigs] had given their whole attention, during several years, to the project of enriching themselves, and impoverishing the rest of the nation; and, by these and other means, of establishing their dominion under the government and with the favour of a family, who were foreigners, and therefore might believe, that they were established on the throne by the good will and strength of this party alone. This party in general were so intent on these views, and many of them, I fear, are so still, that they did not advert in time to the necessary consequences of the measures they abetted: nor did they consider, that the power they raised, and by which they hoped to govern their country, would govern them with the very rod of iron they forged, and would be the power of a prince or minister, not that of a party long."

"Another party [the Tories] continued sour, sullen, and inactive, with judgments so weak, and passions so strong, that even experience, and a severe one surely, was lost upon them. They waited, like the Jews, for a Messiah, that may never come; and under whom, if he did come, they would be strangely disappointed in their expectations of glory and triumph, and universal dominion. Whilst they waited, they were marked out like the Jews, a distinct race, hewers of wood and drawers of water, scarce members of the community, tho born in the country."

"The Persians, it is said, distinguish the different degrees of the strength of fancy in different poets, by calling them, painters or sculptors. Lucretius, from the force of his images, should be ranked among the latter. He is, in truth, a sculptor-poet. His images have a bold relief."

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas."

"Docti furor arduus Lucreti."

"The noblest descriptive poem extant."

"Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti, Exitio terras cum dabit una dies."

"Lucretius, who follows [Epicurus] in denouncing love, sees no harm in sexual intercourse provided it is divorced from passion."

"Lucretius was passionate, and much more in need of exhortations to prudence than Epicurus was. He committed suicide, and appears to have suffered from periodic insanity – brought on, so some averred, by the pains of love or the unintended effects of a love philtre."

"If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems."

"Interviewer: What brings Aristotle closer to Lucretius' statement, “Happy is he who can know the causes of things”? Professor Berti: This is a point that has perhaps not yet been adequately explored because Lucretius was known to be an Epicurean, and Epicureans in ancient times were generally hostile to Aristotle and polemical towards him. Most of the anti-Aristotelian anecdotes preserved in history are of Epicurean origin. Nevertheless, Lucretius, the great Epicurean poet and philosopher, while sharing Epicurus' belief that happiness consists in pleasure – what he calls in Latin “'voluptas”', with which he begins his poem “'De Rerum Natura”' – Lucretius himself states that happy is he who has been able to know the causes of things. Therefore, this pleasure, this happiness, which is clearly an intellectual pleasure, includes knowledge of the causes, that is, the ability to explain phenomena and solve the problems that experience presents us with. And this is ultimately a trait shared by all great philosophers, but also – I would say – by all philosophers, all those who love philosophy, that is, the desire to know, the happiness that comes from solving problems and discovering the causes of why things happen."

"If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius (I mean of his soul and genius) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions. He is every where confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod over him, and using a magisterial authority, while he instructs him. [...] He seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists; urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future; all this too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the triumph, before he entered into the lists. From this sublime and daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could have been every where as poetical, as he is in his descriptions, and in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aimed more to instruct, in his system of nature, than to delight."

"All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher."

"The poem of Lucretius in six books, entitled "De Rerum Natura," was the first accurate statement of the Epicurean philosophy in the Latin language... no writer has in stronger terms controverted all the popular notions of heathenism, and even those fundamental points in all religions, the existence of a creative power, a providence, and the immortality of the soul. His language and versification partake of the rudeness of an early period of literature; and, in the argumentative parts of his works the poet is frequently scarce discernible. But where the subject admits of elevated sentiment or descriptive beauty, no poet, at least no Roman poet, has taken a loftier flight, or exhibited more spirit and sublimity. Nor is it only in detached passages that he has displayed the genius of a true poet: the same animated strain is supported almost throughout entire books, when he gets free from the trammels of his system."

"On the Nature of Things is not an easy read. Totaling 7,400 lines, it is written in hexameters, the standard unrhymed sixbeat lines in which Latin poets like Virgil and Ovid, imitating Homer's Greek, cast their epic poetry. Divided into six untitled books, the poem yokes together moments of intense lyrical beauty, philosophical meditations on religion, pleasure, and death, and complex theories of the physical world, the evolution of human societies, the perils and joys of sex, and the nature of disease. The language is often knotty and difficult, the syntax complex, and the overall intellectual ambition astoundingly high."

"Circumretit enim vis atque iniuria quemque, atque, unde exortast, at eum plerumque revertit."

"Nam cupide conculcatur nimis ante metutum."

"Sic volvenda aetas commutat tempora rerum. Quod fuit in pretio, fit nullo denique honore."

"Scilicet et fluvius qui visus maximus ei, Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit."

"Quod siquis vera vitam ratione gubernet, divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parvo aequo animo; neque enim est umquam penuria parvi."

"Titus Lucretius poeta nascitur: qui postea amatorio poculo in furorem versus, cum aliquot libros per intervalla insaniae conscripsisset, quos postea Cicero emendavit, propria se manu interfecit anno aetatis XLIV."

"Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat."

"Vitare, plagas in amoris ne iaciamur, non ita difficile est quam captum retibus ipsis exire et validos Veneris perrumpere nodos."

"[The Roman philosopher Lucretius] thought it a mistake to find the prospect of my death upsetting. Yes, as the deprivation account points out, after death we can't enjoy life's pleasures. But wait a minute, says Lucretius. The time after I die isn't the only period during which I won't exist. What about the period before my birth? If nonexistence is so bad, shouldn't I be upset by the eternity of nonexistence before I was born? But that's silly, right? Nobody is upset about that. So, he concludes, it doesn't make any sense to be upset about the eternity of nonexistence after you die, either."

"Nec prorsum vitam ducendo demimus hilum tempore de mortis nec delibare valemus."

"Ut quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum."