With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), a German physicist and one of the Enlightenment’s sharpest aphorists, is best known for his posthumously published notebooks (the “Sudelbücher,” or waste books). These private jottings—observations, epigrams, and philosophical fragments—often dissected the psychology of belief, superstition, and intellectual fashion. The remark about unbelief arising from “blind belief” fits Lichtenberg’s recurring theme: skepticism is frequently selective rather than principled, and people may reject one doctrine not from critical inquiry but because they are already committed to another creed, ideology, or prejudice. The line is typically encountered in English as a translated aphorism from those notebooks rather than from a formal treatise or public speech.

The aphorism argues that disbelief is not automatically a sign of rational independence. Many people deny a claim, religion, or idea not because they have examined evidence, but because they are uncritically attached to a competing belief—social, political, metaphysical, or personal. Lichtenberg thus exposes a common self-deception: we congratulate ourselves for being “skeptical” in one area while remaining credulous in another. The deeper implication is a call for consistent critical thinking—testing one’s own assumptions as rigorously as one tests others’—and a warning that negation can be as dogmatic as affirmation when it is driven by allegiance rather than inquiry.