Michel Onfray

I found it amazing people can think that art must be connected to religion. Religion may give art themes, but there would still be art without religion. Bach is not proof that art exists.

Religion is like magic. It is all about tricks.

It's hard for me to imagine a philosopher disconnected from the world, indifferent to the cares of his country, unmoved by poverty, unemployment: I am a committed citizen.

God is a fiction invented by people so they do not have to face the reality of their condition.

If we include hedonistic philosophy in hospitals, the lives of patients suffering from cancer would be much, much better.

Camus believed in dialogue and diplomacy, and enlisted his work as a philosopher to the need to find nonviolent solutions, whereas Sartre called for violent conflicts and justified terror.

We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment - by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve.

You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition.

I discovered philosophy in my youth when I read 'wildly,' and thus I was exposed to the world of ideas.

Death is a false fear. When it is here, you won't be. When it's not, you are here.

Religion is an irrational construct.

Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy.

We can no more tolerate neutrality and benevolence toward every conceivable form of discourse, including that of magical thinking, than we can lump together executioner and victim, good and evil.

Religion is a reassurance - in fact, that's its only purpose.

Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants; feminists find I am not enough of a woman; anarchists a petit-bourgeois who has sold out because I believe in universal suffrage.

I have a big problem with Islam.

I believe in libertarian options because they allow an interesting management of the capital and are based on co-operation, reciprocity, contract, federation.

For the establishment, philosophy is both an elitist and an idealist discipline: In high school, it is a compulsory subject; at university, they teach the idealist line. They are conducting a conversation with themselves.

By aiming for paradise, we lose sight of earth. Hope of a beyond and aspiration to an afterlife engender a sense of futility in the present. If the prospect of getting taken up to paradise generates joy, it is the mindless joy of a baby picked up from his crib.

I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don't constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood - which are my ideals.