Baron d'Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry (1723–1789) was a French author, philosopher and encyclopedist. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, Germany. He is most famous as being one of the first self-described atheists in Europe.

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• It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.
  • Samuel Wilkinson, trans., The System of Nature (Project Gutenberg e-text), vol. 1, chap. IX
  • Date and place of publication unknown. Original publication in French, 1770, as La Système de la nature, under the name of Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud.

• If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them.
  • Samuel Wilkinson, trans., The System of Nature (Project Gutenberg e-text), vol. 2, chap. I
  • Date and place of publication unknown. Original publication in French, 1770, as La Système de la nature, under the name of Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud.

• When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.
  • Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas (London: W. Stewart & Co., ca. 1900) (Project Gutenberg e-text), preface
  • Translator unknown. Original publication in French at Amsterdam, 1772, as Le bon sens ("Common Sense"), and often attributed to John Meslier.

• Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty.
  • ibid., preface

• All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.
  • ibid., chap. 30

• Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.
  • ibid., chap. 206

"Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself." (from his work ‘Système de la nature, quoted by Norman Hampson ('The Enlightenment') p.220 (paperback edition)

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• If we look back at the begining we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom, respect and tyranny support them, in order to make the blindness of man serve their own interest. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

• All religions are ancient monuments to superstitions, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies rejuvenated.
  • Quoted in Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Insulting Quotations