Who Said It: Adam Smith or Karl Marx?


Can you figure out if these quotes were said by the father of modern economics or the father of communism?

1. “science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition”
2. “It is remarkable how the belief in the brutalization of man has become a government article of faith and political principle. But this is no contradiction of religiosity, for the animal-religion is the most consistent essence of religion”
3. “That the terrors of religion should thus enforce the natural sense of duty, was of too much importance to the happiness of mankind, for nature to leave it dependent upon the slowness and uncertainty of philosophical research”
4. “Religion no longer appears as the basis, but as the manifestation of secular narrowness. That is why we explain religious constraints upon the free citizens by the secular constraints upon them”
5. “That the sense of duty should be the sole principle of our conduct, is no where the precept of Christianity; but that it should be the ruling and the governing one”
6. “Finally, even when he proclaims himself to be an atheist through the intermediary of the state, that is, when he declares the state to be an atheist, he is still engrossed in religion, because he only recognizes himself as an atheist in a roundabout way, through an intermediary”
7. “Religion affords such strong motives to the practice of virtue, and guards us by such powerful restraints from the temptations of vice, that many have been led to suppose, that religious principles were the sole laudable motives of action”
8. “In fact, the perfected Christian state is not the so-called Christian state which acknowledges Christianity as its basis, as the state religion, and thus adopts an exclusive attitude towards other religions; it is, rather, the atheistic state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion among the other elements of civil society”


8 responses to “Who Said It: Adam Smith or Karl Marx?

Tell us what you think