san_jose_guy: A Modern Denis Diderot?

9/24/2018 11:27:12 PM

Denis Diderot was a French Enlightenment philosopher. Do any of his quotes sound like something our resident philosopher might write?

"Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest."

"Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man — it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country." - "On Women"

"The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive him crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum."

"What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls."

"In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice."

"Gaiety — a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine."

"My ideas are my whores."