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When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

Denis Diderot

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Denis Diderot
Age: 70 †
Born: 1713
Born: October 5
Died: 1784
Died: July 31
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Dulling
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They mistake the first manifestations of a developing sexual nature for the voice of God calling them to Himself and it is precisely when nature is inciting them that they embrace a fashion of life contrary to nature's wish.
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Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.
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And his hands would plait the priest's entrails, For want of a rope, to strangle kings.
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A thing is not proved because no one has ever questioned it... Skepticism is the first step toward truth.
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There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
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Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.
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En ge ne ral, plus un peuple est civilise , poli, moins ses moeurs sont poe tiques tout s'affaiblit en s'adoucissant. Ingeneral, themore civilized and refinedthepeople, the less poetic are its morals everything weakens as it mellows.
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Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
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Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.
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In order to get as much fame as one's father one has to much more able than he.
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How easy it is to tell tales!
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At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.
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Integrity is the evidence of all civil virtues.
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All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.
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What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.
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The world is the house of the strong.
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We swallow with one gulp the lie that flatters us, and drink drop by drop the truth which is bitter to us.
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La poe sie veutquelque chose d'e norme, debarbare et de sauvage. Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.
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Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.
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The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action.
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