"when they think they have said enough to prove that they are brutes, they appear as proud as if they had demonstrated that they are gods."

     "The materialists are offensive to me in many respects; their doctrines I hold to be pernicious, and I am disgusted at their arrogance.  If their system could be of any utility to man, it would seem to be by giving him a modest opinion of himself; but these reasoners show that it is not so; and when they think they have said enough to prove that they are brutes, they appear as proud as if they had demonstrated that they are gods."

     Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America II (1840).II.xv ("How religious belief sometimes turns the thoughts of Americans to immaterial pleasures"), trans. Henry Reeve, with revisions by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), vol. 2, pp. 145).