Faith & Spirit Quote by Francis Picabia

Picabia’s line lands like a Dada one-liner with a shiv tucked inside it: God isn’t presented as metaphysical truth but as social armor. The exclamation points matter. They mimic the fervor of belief even as the sentence undermines it, performing devotion while exposing its utility. “Always” is the trapdoor word, implying a grim continuity: whatever costumes modernity wears, the underlying fear-and-competition engine stays the same.

The real target isn’t private faith so much as the way belief gets drafted into masculine solidarity and aggression. “Men” here reads less as humanity than as a gendered power bloc, and the second clause is the punchline: the deity is needed not to defend against chaos, nature, or existential dread, but against other men - rivals, enemies, scapegoats, the neighboring tribe with its own god. Picabia compresses a whole political theory into a sentence: the sacred becomes a technology for legitimizing violence and insulating the self from accountability. If God is your defender, your cause is automatically righteous; your opponent is automatically suspect.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Picabia moved through Cubism, Dada, and a broader avant-garde milieu that had watched World War I turn supposedly enlightened Europe into an industrial slaughterhouse. After that, “civilization” looked like a thin varnish over territorial panic. The quote channels that postwar disillusionment: not an argument against spirituality per se, but a verdict on how easily it’s recruited as a badge, a weapon, a permission slip. The sting is that it doesn’t accuse a few bad actors; it indicts a habit.