It is a safe bet that every publicly held idea, every received convention, is foolishness, for it has suited the majority.

Since ideologues get their opinions in bulk, they assume everyone else does too, and thus that anyone who disagrees with one of their opinions must disagree with all of them.

It's idiocy, but all war is idiotic, and the most whole-hearted idiot is apt to win.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

The great defect, for Chamfort, consisted in the public’s reluctance to submit its thinking to the rigors of rational examination, and its tendency to rely instead on intuition, emotion, and custom. “One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,” the Frenchman observed, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little more than common nonsense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: “The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that’s the tradition.”

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

The things everyone knows are most likely to be wrong.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

Il y a à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre.