The atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.

It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

Can theology give to the mind the ineffable boon of conceiving that which no man is in a capacity to comprehend? Can it procure to its agents the marvellous faculty of having precise ideas of a god composed of so many contradictory qualities?

Many men without morals have attacked religion because it was contrary to their inclinations. Many wise men have despised it because it seemed to them ridiculous. Many persons have regarded it with indifference, because they have never felt its true disadvantages. But it is as a citizen that I attack it, because it seems to me harmful to the happiness of the state, hostile to the march of the mind of man, and contrary to sound morality, from which the interests of state policy can never be separated.