Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
VoltaireRead
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Interpretation
The quote illustrates the power of persuasion and belief, highlighting how absurd ideas can lead to harmful actions.
Voltaire's quote emphasizes the danger of blind belief and the influence that persuasive individuals can have over others. If someone can convince you of irrational or absurd ideas, they can also drive you to perform terrible deeds, suggesting that critical thinking and skepticism are essential for moral integrity and consciousness.
In practice
In a debate about the role of propaganda in society.
Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.
It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
I was not created to be occupied by eating delicious foods like tied up cattle.
We should daily feel a deeper union with Life, a greater sense of that Indwelling God - the God of the seen and of the unseen - within us.
Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.
The problem of racial difference in America - and in modern life more broadly - is always presented as an economic, political, biological or cultural problem. But I want to say that it's at least as much a philosophical and imaginative disaster.
"Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened. "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.
Every time we sit at a table at night or in the morning to enjoy the fruits and grain and vegetables from our good earth, remember that they come from the work of men and women and children who have been exploited for generations.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.