Pierre-Joseph Proudhon - God Quotes

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Before entering upon the subject-matter of these new memoirs, I must explain an hypothesis which will undoubtedly seem strange, but in the absence of which it is impossible for me to proceed intelligibly: I mean the hypothesis of a God.
To suppose God, it will be said, is to deny him. Why do you not affirm him?
Is it my fault if belief in Divinity has become a suspected opinion; if the bare suspicion of a Supreme Being is already noted as evidence of a weak mind; and if, of all philosophical Utopias, this is the only one which the world no longer tolerates? Is it my fault if hypocrisy and imbecility everywhere hide behind this holy formula?

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Tormented by conflicting feelings, I appealed to reason; and it is reason which, amid so many dogmatic contradictions, now forces the hypothesis upon me. A priori dogmatism, applying itself to God, has proved fruitless: who knows whither the hypothesis, in its turn, will lead us?
I will explain therefore how, studying in the silence of my heart, and far from every human consideration, the mystery of social revolutions, God, the great unknown, has become for me an hypothesis, — I mean a necessary dialectical tool.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
God is stupidity and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and poverty; God is evil. For as long as men bow before altars, mankind will remain damned, the slaves of kings and priests.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
The idea of God is the type and foundation of the principle of authority and absolutism, which it is our task to destroy or at least to subordinate wherever it manifests itself.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon