"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction"
- Blaise Pascal
About this Quote
This quote by Blaise Pascal talks to the power of spiritual conviction in inspiring people to do evil. Pascal recommends that when individuals are driven by spiritual conviction, they are most likely to do evil with a sense of purpose and interest. This is because religious conviction can supply a sense of ethical validation for one's actions, enabling them to do wicked without feeling guilty or remorseful. Moreover, spiritual conviction can offer a sense of community and belonging, which can make it simpler to dedicate wicked acts without feeling isolated or alone. Eventually, Pascal's quote works as a caution versus the dangers of religious conviction, and how it can be utilized to control individuals into doing evil.
"I have an almost religious zeal... not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up"
"An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example, about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room for doubt"
"I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life"
"This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis... only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost"
"Well, in The Chosen, Danny Saunders, from the heart of his religious reading of the world, encounters an element in the very heart of the secular readings of the world - Freudian psychoanalytic theory"
