II
1. Behold the crucifix; what does it symbolize? Pallid incompetence hanging on a tree.
2. I question all things. As I stand before the festering and varnished facades of your
haughtiest moral dogmas, I write thereon in letters of blazing scorn: Lo and behold; all
this is fraud!
3. Gather around me, Oh! ye death-defiant, and the earth itself shall be thine, to have and
to hold!
4. Too long the dead hand has been permitted to sterilize living thought!
5. Too long right and wrong, good and evil have been inverted by false prophets!
6. No creed must be accepted upon authority of a "divine" nature. Religions must be put
to the question. No moral dogma must be taken for granted - no standard of
measurement deified. There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes. Like the
wooden idols of long ago, they are the work of human hands, and what man has made,
man can destroy!
7. He that is slow to believe anything and everything is of great understanding, for belief
in one false principle is the beginning of all unwisdom.
8. The chief duty of every new age is to upraise new men to determine its liberties, to
lead it towards material success - to rend the rusty padlocks and chains of dead custom
that always prevent healthy expansion. Theories and ideas that may have meant life
and hope and freedom for our ancestors may now mean destruction, slavery, and
dishonor to us!
9. As environments change, no human ideal standeth sure!
10. Whenever, therefore, a lie has built unto itself a throne, let it be assailed without pity
and without regret, for under the domination of an inconvenient falsehood, no one can
prosper.
11. Let established sophisms be dethroned, rooted out, burnt and destroyed, for they are a
standing menace to all true nobility of thought and action!
12. Whatever alleged "truth" is proven by results to be but an empty fiction, let it be
unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires,
dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage!
13. The most dangerous of all enthroned lies is the holy, the sanctified, the privileged lie -
the lie everyone believes to be a model truth. It is the fruitful mother of all other
popular errors and delusions. It is a hydra-headed tree of unreason with a thousand
roots. It is a social cancer!
14. The lie that is known to be a lie is half eradicated, but the lie that even intelligent
persons accept as fact - the lie that has been inculcated in a little child at its mother's
knee - is more dangerous to contend against than a creeping pestilence!
15. Popular lies have ever been the most potent enemies of personal liberty. There is only
one way to deal with them: Cut them out, to the very core, just as cancers. Exterminate
them root and branch. Annihilate them, or they will us!
