Daily Inspiration Quote by Denis Diderot

A single step is Diderot’s way of puncturing the self-flattering myth that extremism looks obviously extreme. “Fanaticism” dresses itself up as virtue: certainty masquerading as courage, zeal marketed as moral clarity. “Barbarism” is the invoice that arrives later, after the slogans have done their work. The genius of the line is its compression. He doesn’t say fanaticism can lead to barbarism; he insists the distance between them is basically the length of a stride. In other words: once a mind decides it possesses unquestionable truth, cruelty becomes not a lapse but a duty.

The subtext is editorial in the most literal sense. Diderot, architect of the Encyclopedie, lived in a century that treated knowledge as an antidote to superstition and tyranny, while also watching how quickly “higher principles” can authorize humiliations, purges, and public spectacles of punishment. His Enlightenment project wasn’t just about collecting facts; it was about building habits of doubt, argument, and proportion. Fanaticism collapses all that into a single note: obedience to an idea.

The line’s sharpness comes from refusing to locate barbarism in distant “savages” or convenient villains. Diderot implies it’s a domestic possibility, incubated inside respectable convictions. Once you convert politics into theology, opponents stop being wrong and become impure. That is the step: from persuasion to cleansing, from debate to expulsion, from humanity as a constraint to humanity as a loophole.