Absurdities And Atrocities

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.  If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil.  Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate.

-- François-Marie Arouet (1694 - 1778), most famous under his pen name Voltaire, French writer and philosopher, Questions sur les miracles (1765)