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MELF'S QUOTE COLLECTION
a single phrase can make you laugh or make you cry
it can make you angry or make you happy
or
make you think
one sentence can change your life
QUOTES FROM AUTHORS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND COMEDIANS, IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER:
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages--
as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
-Edward Abbey
What's so unpleasant about being drunk? You ask a glass of water.
-Douglas Adams' "Ford", Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.
-Douglas Adams' "Ford", Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
-Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-Douglas Adams
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature
shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings
shall rule it by fictitious miracles?
-John Adams
The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere
in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths,
Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in
Christianity.
-John Adams
As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation.
But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been
blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the
most bloody religion that ever existed?
-John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816
I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of
the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved--the Cross.
Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!
-John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson
The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for
example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders
of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of
offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage
belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching
of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow
from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.
-Steve Allen, Steve Allen on the Bible Religion & Morality
WOODY ALLEN (1935 - ):
I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
-Woody Allen
Tradition is the illusion of permanence.
-Woody Allen, Deconstructing Harry
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
-Woody Allen
Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.
-Woody Allen
If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
-Woody Allen
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
-Woody Allen
As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree' -- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
-Woody Allen
It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.
-Woody Allen
I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
-Woody Allen
To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
-Woody Allen
Don't knock masturbation -- it's sex with someone I love.
-Woody Allen
I've never been an intellectual but I have this look.
-Woody Allen
The lion and the calf will lay down together, but the calf won't get much sleep.
-Woody Allen
If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.
-Woody Allen
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
-Woody Allen
Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.
-Woody Allen
If you don't fail now and again, it's a sign you're playing it safe.
-Woody Allen
A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
-Steward Alsop
I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.
-Maya Angelou
Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only
when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
-Maya Angelou
The gods too are fond of a joke.
-Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
All the biblical miracles will at last
disappear with the progress of science.
-Matthew Arnold, 1822-1888
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is
something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
-Isaac Asimov
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.-Isaac Asimov
Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.
-Clement Atlee
Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed
by preparation, foolish preparation!
-Jane Austen
I do not want people
to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
-Jane Austen
Theism is so confused and the sentences in which 'God' appears so
incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to
speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.
-Alfred Jules Ayer, British philosopher (1910-1989),
Language, Truth and Logic quoted in A History of God
RICHARD BACH:
Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.
Listen to it.
-Richard Bach, Illusions
Learning is finding out what you already know;
Doing is demonstrating that you know it;
Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.
We are all learners, doers, teachers.
-Richard Bach, Illusions
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
-Richard Bach, Illusions
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of
respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family
grow up under the same roof.
-Richard Bach, Illusions
The mark of your ignorance is your belief in injustice and tragedy.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a
butterfly
-Richard Bach, Illusions
Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and to
sickness, to riches and to poverty, to freedom and to slavery. It is we
who control these and not another.
-Richard Bach, Illusions
But one creature said at last, 'I am tired of
clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust the current known where it's going. I shall let go and let it take me where it wilt. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.'
-Richard Bach, Illusions
In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we
have chosen this lifetime.
-Richard Bach, Illusions
Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If
you're alive, it isn't.
-Richard Bach, Illusions
Dying is like diving into a deep lake on a hot day. There's the shock
of that sharp, cold change, the pain of it for a second, and then
accepting is a swim in reality. But after so many times, even the shock
wears off.
-Richard Bach, Illusions
To live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always
an easy sacrifice.
-Richard Bach, Illusions
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.-Francis Bacon
The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
-Walter Bagehot
Science and religion harmonize. Science without religion is
materialism - religion without science is superstition.
-Bahai pamphlet
...Jesus was almost certainly not 'of Nazareth'. An overwhelming
body of evidence indicates that Nazareth did not exist in biblical
times. The town is unlikely to have appeared before the third century.
-Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, The Messianic Legacy
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
-Russell Baker
The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice;
it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily
ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. He
who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about
the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
-Mikhail Bakunin
'If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and
must be free; then, God does not exist.'
I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle;
now, therefore, let all choose.
-Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State, 1874
A religion which requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil's propagation.
-Hosea Ballou
...the Bible as we have it contains elements that are scientifically
incorrect or even morally repugnant. No amount of "explaining away"
can convince us that such passages are the product of Divine Wisdom.
-Bernard J. Bamberger, The Story of Judaism
DAN BARKER:
The very concept of sin comes from the bible. Christianity offers to
solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person
who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?
-Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith
You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a
bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say
"God is love," they will claim that *you* are taking things out of context!
-Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith
How happy can you be when you think every action and
thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost?
-Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith
It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief
is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why
many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown.
-Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith
To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance
and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance.
-Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith
Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday,
singing, 'yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I
believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down. down.
Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.
-Dan Barker
There is no such thing as a god. If such a creature existed,
belief would be rendered unnecessary, and the entire system
of organized religion would collapse.
-Ron Barrier
I am NOT jealous of the woman who writes the Harry Potter books. It does NOT bother
me that her most recent book, Harry Potter and the Enormous Royalty Check, has
already become the best-selling book in
world history, beating out her previous book,
Harry Potter Purchases Microsoft.
-Dave Barry
The reason for this is hormones, which are chemicals that our bodies produce so they can take control away from our brains.
-Dave Barry
I could tell by the urgency in their voices that there were upside-down exclamation points at the beginnings of their sentences.
-Dave Barry
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
-Ernest Benn
Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise
why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans,
or Hindus who have never heard of her.
-Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)
The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of
reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in
one place at a time.
-John Berger, Ways of Seeing
The proper place for the study of religious beliefs is in a church or temple, at home, or in a course on comparative religions, but not in a biology
class. There is no place in our world for an ideology that seeks to close
minds, force obedience, and return the world to a paradise that never was.
Students should learn that the universe can be confronted and understood,
that ideas and authority should be questioned, that an open mind is a good
thing. Education does not exist to confirm people's superstitions, and
children do not learn to think when they are fed only dogma.
-Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism
BHAGAVAD GITA (Hindu Holy Book):
For one who is born, death is certain; for one who is dead, birth is
certain. So you should not grieve for what is inevitable.
-The Bhagavad Gita
When a man broods over sense objects, attachment to them arises. From
attachment arises desire, and desire breeds anger. From anger comes
delusion of mind, and from delusion, the loss of memory; from loss of
memory the destruction of discrimination; and from the destruction of
discrimination, the man perishes.
-The Bhagavad Gita
To the illumined man or woman, a clod of dirt, a stone, and gold are the same.
-The Bhagavad Gita
Unless a person is aware of the existence of the self
in a future life, he will not be inclined to attain what is good in this
life and avoid the evil.
-The Bhagavad Gita (from Shankara)
AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914, American author):
Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of
a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
-Ambrose Bierce
Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished
from the false and profane writings on which all other
faiths are based.
-Ambrose Bierce
Religion, n: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to
Ignorance the Nature of the Unknowable.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks
without knowledge, of things without parallel.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
Ocean: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made
for man -- who has no gills.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
-Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.
-Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
-Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
RESPONSIBILITY, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
-Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
COMPROMISE, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.
-Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
IMPARTIAL, adj. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy or adopting either of two conflicting opinions.
-Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.
-Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
Heaven: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of
their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while
you expound on yours.
-Ambrose Bierce
A clergyman is a man who undertakes the management of our
spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his earthly ones.
-Ambrose Bierce
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
-First Amendment, Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution
Prisons are built with stones of Law,
Brothels with bricks of Religion.
-William Blake, The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter
to bruise than polish.
-Anne Bradstreet
In the frank expression of conflicting opinions lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action.
-Louis D. Brandeis
In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued
above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression,
and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their
self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions.
-Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, 1994, p. 296
The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.
-William J. Broad
The pursuit of happiness belongs to us, but we
must climb around or over the church to get it.
-Heywood Broun, (1888-1939)
I do not see how anyone could come fresh to the Bible and see any regard
for human life at all in the early parts. From the extermination of every
living thing outside the ark to the ethnic cleansing of the promised land,
the story is one of utter disregard to human life except when it suits God's
purposes..... it does not license anyone to preach on the excellence of the
Ten Commandments as a sort of constitution document for modern society.
-Andrew Brown, religious correspondent for the Independent, a national UK paper
Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience.
-Rita Mae Brown
There are many extraordinary tales from antiquity, including women with snakes for hair, creatures whose gaze turns you to stone, creatures with equine
bodies and human torsos, many accounts of people rising from the dead, lots of
tales of magic, and numerous accounts of physical encounters with fantastic
beings. Ancient people were a superstitious, scientifically primitive lot,
and believed in many things that today we know are silly. I find it bizarre
that so many people see nothing suspicious about the extraordinary or
supernatural claims of the bible, yet don't hesitate to express disbelief in
equally well documented claims of minotaurs, basilisks, and wizards.
-Scott Brown
There's nothing shameful in acknowledging that you don't have the answers
to every question about life. Just accept the fact that you know only a
fraction of what's going on in the world. You don't have to attach
explanations in terms of a special revelation of God's will, a glimpse
at the supernatural, evidence of a conspiracy, or anything else.
-Harry Browne, How I Found Freedom in an
Unfree World, 1973, p. 151
Life goes by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a
while, you might miss it.
-Ferris Bueller
Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.
-Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
If someone were to prove to me -- right this minute -- that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior.
-Luis Bunuel
I'm still an atheist, thank God.
-Luis Bunuel
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in
one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
-John Burroughs, 1837-1921, American naturalist, The Light of Day
It is a common saying that thought is free. A man can never be hindered from thinking whatever he chooses so long as he conceals what he thinks. The
working of his mind is limited only by the bounds of his experience and the
power of his imagination. But this natural liberty of private thinking is of
little value. It is unsatisfactory and even painful to the thinker himself,
if he is not permitted to communicate his thoughts to others, and it is
obviously of no value to his neighbors. Moreover it is extremely difficult
to hide thoughts that have any power over the mind. If a man's thinking leads
him to call in question ideas and customs which regulate the behaviour of
those about him, to reject the beliefs which they hold, to see better ways of
life than those they follow, it is almost impossible for him, if he is
convinced of the truth of his own reasoning, not to betray by silence, chance
words, or general attitude that he is different from them and does not share
their opinions. Some have preferred, like Socrates, some would prefer today,
to face death rather than conceal their thoughts. Thus freedom of thought,
in any valuable sense, includes freedom of speech.
-J.B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought, 1913
God is usually on the side of big squadrons and against little ones.
-Roger de Bussy-Rabutin
If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.
-Samuel Butler
The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
-Herb Caen
Believing is easier than thinking. Hence
so many more believers than thinkers.
-Bruce Calvert
Vote early and vote often.
-Al Capone (1899-1947)
GEORGE CARLIN: (from BrainDroppings, 1997)
The straightest line between a straight distance is two points.
-George Carlin
I don't have to tell you it goes without saying there are some things better left unsaid. I think that speaks for itself. The less said about it, the better.
-George Carlin
Environmentalists changed the word jungle to rain forest, because no one would give them money to save a jungle. Same with swamps and wetlands.
-George Carlin
The safest place to be in an earthquake would be in a stationary store.
-George Carlin
It is impossible for an abortion clinic to have a waiting list of more than nine months.
-George Carlin
I thought it would be nice to get a job at a duty-free shop, but it doesn't sound like there's a whole lot to do in a place like that.
-George Carlin
The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? Death. What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards... You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch and you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities. You become a little baby, you go back into the womb, spend your last nine months floating... and you finish off as an orgasm.
George Carlin
Strictly speaking, celibate does not mean not having sex, it means not being married. No wedding.
The practice of refraining from sex is called chastity or sexual abstinence. No fucking. Priests don't take a vow of celibacy, they take a vow of chastity. Sometimes referred to as the "no--nookie clause".
-George Carlin
And speaking of sex, the Immaculate Conception does not mean Jesus was conceived in the absence of sex. It means Mary was conceived without Original Sin. That's all it has ever meant. And according to the tabloids, Mary is apparently the only one who can make such a claim. The Jesus thing is called virgin birth.
-George Carlin
The way I see it, this country has only four real victims-groups: Indians, blacks, women, and gays. I purposely left out the Spanish and the Asians, because when you look at what happened to the Indians and blacks, the Spanish and Asian people have had a walk in the park. It's not even close. Not to downplay the shit they've had to eat, but in about one hundred years the Spanish and Asians are going to be running this country, so they'll have plenty of chances to get even with the gray people.
-George Carlin
I say "black" because most black people prefer "black". I don't say "people of color." People of color sounds like something you see when you're on mushrooms. Besides, the use of of people of color is dishonest. It means precisely the same as colored people. If you're not willing to say "colored people", you shouldn't be saying "people of color" ... "People of color" is an awkward, bullshit, liberal-guilt phrase that obscures meaning rather than enhances it. Shall we call fat people, "people of size"?
-George Carlin
Now, the Indians. I call them Indians because that's what they are. They're Indians. There's nothing wrong with the word Indian. First of all, it's important to know that the word Indian does not derive from Columbus mistakenly believing he had reached "India". India was not even called by that name in 1492; it was known as Hindustan. More likely, the word Indian comes from Columbus's description of the people he found here. He was Italian, and did not speak or write very good Spanish, so in his written accounts he called the Indians, "Una gente in Dios." A people in God. In God. In Dios. Indians. It's a perfectly noble and respectable word.
So let's look at this pussified, trendy, bullshit phrase, Native Americans. First of all, they're not natives. They came over the Bering land bridge from Asia, so they're not natives. There are no natives anywhere in the world. Everyone is from somewhere else. All people are refugees, immigrants, or aliens. If there were natives anywhere, they would be people who still live in the Great Rift valley in Africa where the human species originated. Everyone else is just visiting. So much for the "native" part of Native American.
As far as calling them "Americans" is concerned, do I even have to point out what an insult this is? Jesus Holy Shit Christ! We steal their hemisphere, kill twenty or so million of them, destroy five hundred separate cultures, herd the survivors onto the worst land we can find, and now we want to name them after ourselves? It's appalling. Haven't we done enough damage? Do we further have to degrade them with the repulsive name of their conquerers?
-George Carlin
A scary dream makes your heart beat faster. Why doesn't the part of your brain that controls your heartbeat realize that another part of your brain is making the whole thing up? Don't these people communicate?
-George Carlin
The keys to America: The cross, the brew, the dollar, and the gun.
-George Carlin
Movies and television don't make you violent; all they do is channel the violence more creatively.
-George Carlin
Does God really have to watch all this shit?
-George Carlin
The piercing movement is off to a good start, and I like the idea behind it: self-esteem through self-mutilation.
-George Carlin
They keep saying you can't compare apples and oranges. I can. An apple is red and distinctly non-spherical; an orange is orange and nearly spherical. So, what's the big problem?
-George Carlin
Isn't it interesting that only sex and excretion can be found legally obscene in this country? Not violence, not neglect, not abuse of humans. Only shitting and fucking; two of nature's most necessary functions and irresistible forces. We're always trying to control and thwart nature, even in our language. Fuck this shit!
-George Carlin
The New Testament is not new anymore' it's thousands of years old. It's time to start calling it the Less Old Testament.
-George Carlin
It's way beyond ironic that a place called the Holy Land is the location of the fiercest, most deeply felt hatred in the world. And it makes for wonderful theater.
-George Carlin
Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?
-George Carlin
I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every
day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat,
light, food, a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't
have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough,
I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly
offered to "God" are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate.
-George Carlin
Tell a man he is brave, and you have helped him become so.
-Thomas Carlyle, English writer
Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases.
-Thomas Carlyle
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of
strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
-Rachel Carson
Education and religion are two things not regulated by supply and demand.
The less of either the people have, the less they want.
-Charlotte Observer, 1897
Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
-G. K. Chesterton
People are capable of seeing the deceit they're ensnared in. They
just have to make the effort.
-Noem Chomsky
CHUANG TZU (Taoist Scripture):
How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that
in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth,
has forgotten the way back?
-Chuang Tzu
Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but
spirit is empty and waits on all things.
-Chuang Tzu
Transmit the established facts; do not transmit words of exaggeration.
If you do that, you will probably come out all right.
-Chuang Tzu
Good fortune is as light as a feather, but nobody knows how to pick it
up. Misfortune is as heavy as earth, but nobody knows how to stay out of
it's way.
-Chuang Tzu
While he is dreaming, he does not know it is a dream, and in his
dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he
know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we
know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are
awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things... And when I
say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too.
-Chuang Tzu
Calculate what man knows and it cannot compare to what he doesn't
know. Calculate the time he is alive and it cannot compare to the
time before he was born. Yet man takes something so small and tries to
exhaust the dimensions of something so large!
-Chuang Tzu
To use a horse to show that a horse is not a horse is not as good as
using a non-horse to show that a horse is not a horse.
-Chuang Tzu
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
-Winston Churchill
History aside, the almost universal opinion that one's own religious
convictions are the reasoned outcome of a dispassionate evaluation of all the
major alternatives is almost demonstrably false for humanity in general. If
that really were the genesis of most people's convictions, then one would
expect the major faiths to be distributed more or less randomly or evenly over
the globe. But in fact they show a very strong tendency to cluster...which
illustrates what we all suspected anyway: that social forces are the primary
determinants of religious belief for people in general. To decide scientific
questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy would therefore be to put social
forces in place of empirical evidence...
-Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness: A
Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
-Tom Clancy
It may be that our role on this planet is
not to worship God, but to create him.
-Arthur C. Clarke
If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good.
-Morris Cohen
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but rising each time we
fall
-Confucious
It was man who first made men believe in gods.
-Critias, 480-403 B.C.E.
When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
-Norm Crosby
If one were to take the bible seriously, one would go mad.
But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.
-Aleister Crowley
They were allowed to stay there on one condition, and that is
that they didn't eat of the tree of knowledge. That has been
the condition of the Christian church from then until now.
They haven't eaten as yet, as a rule they do not.
-Clarence Seward Darrow, American lawyer (1857-1938)
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is
those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively
assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
-Charles Darwin, Introduction to The Descent of Man, 1871
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
-Chalres Darwin
Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.
-Leonardo Da Vinci
If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it
is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring
cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit.
But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the
accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe
would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set
of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.
Epidemiology, not evidence.
-Richard Dawkins
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need
to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of,
even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
-Richard Dawkins
I am against religion because it teaches us to
be satisfied with not understanding the world.
-Richard Dawkins
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should
expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil
and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
-Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music.
-Agnes De Mille
Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.
-Rene Descartes
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
-Rene Descartes (1596-1650), "Discours de la Methode"
To live is so startling it leaves time for little else.
-Emily Dickinson
We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise
And then, if we are true to plan
Our statures touch the skies
-Emily Dickinson
They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
-Emily Dickinson
Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.
-Gordon R. Dickson
Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
-Phyllis Diller
The cure
for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.
-Isak Dinesen
I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
-Isak Dinesen
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
-Paul Dirac (1902-1984)
Where knowledge ends, religion begins.
-Benjamin Disraeli
Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power.
She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment,
least of all death, for the purpose of promoting her ideas.
-John W. Draper, 1811-1882, U.S. chemist
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
-Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899
Light can change, every day is testimony to that. Dark can not. Dark
seeks immobile status; light seeks progression. Dark perceives itself to
be perfection, light moves on in the concept of perfectibility.
-David Eddings' "Garion"
Consistency is the defense of a small mind.
-David Eddings' "Beldin"
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
-Thomas Edison
All Bibles are man-made.
-Thomas Edison
ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955):
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-Albert Einstein
It's amazing that curiosity survives education
-Albert Einstein
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein
I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
-Albert Einstein
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
-Albert Einstein
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
-Albert Einstein
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
-Albert Einstein
In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and
it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love
affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and
to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try
to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he
must primarily do their bidding.
-Albert Ellis, Ph.D
When belief in a god dies, the god dies.
-Harlan Ellison, Deathbird Stories
There is no teacher who can teach us anything new,
He can just tell us to remember the things we always knew.
-Enigma
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
-Paul Erdos
God gave women intuition and femininity. Used properly, the combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I've ever met.
-Farrah Fawcett
MELISSA FEDAK:
Asking 'Is there a God' is the same as asking 'Is the Universe self-aware'.
-Melissa Fedak
Time is change. Measured time is our perception of
repeated changes.
-Melissa Fedak
Christianity is not chosen because it is the 'right' religion, nor because any of the 'sacred literature' is true. There's only two reasons people are Christians: social habit and because they need it's comforts more than truth.
-Melissa Fedak
People get so wrapped up in living, they forget they're existing.
-Melissa Fedak
Upside-down is not a description, it's a relationship.
-Melissa Fedak
Science is how the world acts on us. Religion is how we react to it.
When all reactions have merged toward sameness, religion will have become
science.
-Melissa Fedak
We don't know when life begins
We don't know that 'life' ends
We cannot know the will of god, if such a being exists
so it is impossible to argue coherently
about something of which we know nothing, prove nothing, make no measurements or assumptions about.
All we know is life and that we want a good one.
Therefore all we can do is the best for ourselves and our fellow humans in a way that brings about the best quality of life for all involved.
-Melissa Fedak (on Abortion)
By definition, a human is an individual. By definition, we become human at birth, when we can survive on our own as an individual human being. Potential is nothing until it is actualized just as potential energy does nothing until it becomes kinetic. A fetus cannot survive outside the mother until roughly 8 months in. But some seem to still find protecting this ignorant, dependent mass more important than thinking, breathing, independent thinkers.
-Melissa Fedak (on Abortion)
If any religion is the correct one, it should not only be able stand up against doubts, but should, in hand, not be afraid of doubters.
-Melissa Fedak
One who strives for satisfaction never will be. Satisfaction is a
process, not a destination
-Melissa Fedak
We depend on routine, but survive on spontaneity.
-Melissa Fedak
The difference between man and animal: man has the power to imagine,
not just remember.
-Melissa Fedak
I find it ironic that we take so seriously a world made out of matter
that is 99.9% nothing with only 5 small senses to observe the
interactions of the remaining .1%.
-Melissa Fedak
Life isn't about saving, it's
about saving yourself
-Melissa Fedak
Organized Religion is like Auto Repair. When you don't have the
motivation to learn how your car works, you give the responsibility over
to the mechanic.
-Melissa Fedak
Our learning is, from the time we our young, based on cause and effect. As we get older, we learn how to cause things to create a desired effect. However, this standard rule of making order out of our existence seems thrown to the wind when we cite all these 'effects' of God, yet give no explanation of how God is caused.
-Melissa Fedak
Religion is the practice that if something is repeated enough, if must be true.
-Melissa Fedak
Climbing the mountain is hard for some and easy for some. you can
keep your eyes on the ground if you wish, tracking your path. But the few
who stop, stand, and look around at the view really realize where they
are! It clears the brain, broadens the perspective... it may be a little
risky to keep your eyes off the ground, but it's worth it for the view.
-Melissa Fedak
It's true that no matter how agreeable the bird, if you make the cage
small enough, it will try with all abandon to get out.
-Melissa Fedak
The key to self-perfection
is the conscious union of awareness and subconscious thought.
-Melissa Fedak
It is only the ones who are uncomfortable with their own sexuality that speak about the wrong of the other.
-Melissa Fedak
Today's good Christian would probably preach love and peace, which is not an objectionable way to live and may have been what their great Jesus intended, but is certainly not what the Bible seems to imply are the most worthy ways to live. Why is modern Christianity still connecting itself so tightly to the archaic, violent and contradictory collection of writings, mostly before the time of Jesus, known as the Bible?
-Melissa Fedak
The Bible and even 'refined' modern day Christian practices
promote man over women, rich over poor (but help the poor!), man over other man as slaves, ritual over reason. It seems that a world who has proven that these hierarchies of no help in a civilized nation would have no use for this outdated religion unless one is a slave-holding, rich, nonthinking male, one who wants to be one, or one who wants to use 'ancient' ideas to gain power.
-Melissa Fedak
My problem with religion is that people seem to spend an inordinate amount of energy on the rituals expressing the belief and little on the belief itself. Lack of participation in the ritual seems to be of significance. This becomes a case, as in money, where the symbol means more than the reality.
-Melissa Fedak
Logical justification is denial of responsibility and the downfall of
will.
-Melissa Fedak
You are responsible for your pain as well as your happiness. No god is
not to praise or blame for either.
-Melissa Fedak
The chances that Christanity is the right religion is the same that English is the right language, and of equal meaninglessness.
-Melissa Fedak
God is the writer, director, choreographer and playing all the parts on the stage of life. All the bad and good things that happen, God is doing to himself. Because otherwise, the play would be boring.
-Melissa Fedak
Religion offers a sense of stability where there is none and that is its final purpose. It is a all-knowing, peaceful, safe blanket to wrap yourself in until you are ready to face your fear, a nice safe instruction manual until you can decide yourself how to act. Something to keep the frightful confusion of this sentience at bay until you are ready to investigate this adventure called life, to discover the wonders of existence, to learn your identity in the universe, a journey of which is its own reward and will leave you endlessly full of awe. Why substitute the amazing discoveries for yet another moment of ignorant peace? Why not at least give Questioning a try -- your safe blanket is always there for you.
-Melissa Fedak
How dull and dreary the world would be if god gave us an instruction manual
-Melissa Fedak
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
-James Feibleman
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-Richard P. Feynman
God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain
those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover
how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God;
you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So
therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured
that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't
believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live
to a certain length of time--life and death--stuff like that. God is
always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore
I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they
have been figured out.
-Richard Feynman
Make money your god and it will plague you like the devil.
-Henry Fielding
The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of
human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for
hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for progress.
-Emmet F. Fields
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
-Ian L. Fleming (1908-1964)
Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the
clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says,
"Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no
gardener." So, they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener....
So they set up a barbed wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol it with
bloodhounds... But no shrieks even suggest that some intruder has
received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber.
The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced.
"But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric
shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes
secretly to look after the garden which he loves." At last the Skeptic
despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what
you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an
imaginary gardener or even no gardener at all?"
-Anthony Flew
It will yet be the proud boast of women that
they never contributed a line to the Bible.
-George W. Foote
When I am dreaming, I don't know if I'm truly asleep or if I'm awake,
When I get up, I don't know if I'm truly awake, or if I'm still dreaming
Dream, dream, dream, life is but a dream
-Forest for the Trees
Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work.
-Anatole France
Don't dream it, be it.
-"Dr. FrankenFurter", Rocky Horror Picture Show
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790, American scientist,
diplomat and publisher):
How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, his precepts!
O! 'tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.
-Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac
Never confuse motion with action.
-Ben Franklin
If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in
Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been
persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians
thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practiced it on
one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed
persecution in the Romish church, but practiced it upon the Puritans.
These found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice
themselves both here [England] and in New England
-Benjamin Franklin, Toleration, Works, Vol.ii.,p. 112
I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... I mean
real good works ... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making
long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men,
and much less capable of pleasing the Deity.
-Benjamin Franklin, Works, Vol. VII, p. 75
By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be a
boss and work twelve hours a day.
-Robert Frost
The Bible is an extremely complex document that revels in a
multiplicity of voices, that critiques its own society and confesses its
divided opinion about everything. The Bible is a document of struggle, of
God-wrestling. It is a record of a society and the response of
individuals who constantly go back over their history and think about
these things.
-Tikva Frymer-Kensky
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
-Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
Plan for this world as if you expect to live forever; but plan for the hereafter as if you expect to die tomorrow.
-Ibn Gabirol
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-Galileo Galilei
Doubt is the father of invention.
-Galileo Galilei
I could prove God statistically.
-George Gallup
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians,
Your christians are so unlike your christ
-Mahatma Gandhi
There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
-Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Let the Bible be the Bible. It's not about science. It's not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting.
-Martin Gardner (from "Did Adam And Eve Have Navels?")
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
-Brendan Gill
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
-Gail Godwin
The happy do not believe in miracles.
-Goethe
By nothing do people show their character more than by the things
they laugh at.
-Goethe
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
-Goethe (1749-1832)
If there is a God, atheism must strike Him
as less of an insult than religion.
-Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science
collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke
miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into
the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to
abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all
fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion,
misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the
ideas of their opponents.
-Stephen Jay Gould, The Verdict on Creationism,
The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186
It is the position of some theists that their right to
freedom OF religion is abridged when they are not allowed
to violate the Rationalists right to freedom FROM religion.
-James T. Green
If high heels were so wonderful, men would still be
wearing them.
-Sue Grafton
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
-Graham Greene, 1981
Nothing shocks me more in the men of religion and their flocks than their pretensions to be the only religious people.
-Jean Guehenno
E. HALDEMAN-JULIUS:
... the Bible was a collection of books written at different times by
different men -- a strange mixture of diverse human documents -- and a
tissue of irreconcilable notions. Inspired? The Bible is not even
intelligent. It is not even good craftsmanship, but is full of
absurdities and contradictions.
-E. Haldeman-Julius, The Meaning Of Atheism
Remember that millions of Christians still base their belief in a God
upon the words of the Bible, which is a collection of the most
flabbergasting fictions ever imagined -- by men, too, who had lawless
but very poor and crude imagination. Ingersoll and numerous other
critics have shot the Christian holy book full of holes. It is worthless
and proves nothing concerning the existence of a God. The idea of a God
is worthless and unprovable.
-E. Haldeman-Julius, The Meaning Of Atheism
Commonly, those who have professed the strongest motives of love of a
God have demonstrated the deepest hatred toward human joy and liberty.
-E. Haldeman-Julius, The Meaning Of Atheism
The church has contributed nothing to civilization. It has progressed
somewhat, and it has become a little more decent, in reflection of the
movements of civilization that have taken place outside of the church
and usually in the face of the strong opposition of the church. But the
church has always resisted the process of civilization. It has struggled
to the last ditch, by fair means and foul, to preserve as long as it
could the vestiges of ancient and medieval theology, with all the
puerile moralities and harsh customs and medieval styles of belief.
-E. Haldeman-Julius, The Church Is a Burden,
Not a Benefit, In Social Life
It is an absurd fiction that the churches are useful. They are
nothing more than propaganda centers for superstitious faiths and
doctrines. Church members have a right to believe in and propagate
their various doctrines. But they should pay every item of the
cost, of this propaganda, including fair taxation for all church property.
-E. Haldeman-Julius, The Church Is a Burden,
Not a Benefit, In Social Life
He that leaveth nothing to chance will do very few things ill, but he
will do very few things.
-Lord Halifax
Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves
you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most
awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.
-Butch Hancock
The barbaric religions of primitive worlds hold not a germ of scientific
fact, though they claim to explain all. Yet if one of these savages has
all the logical ground for his beliefs taken away, he doesn't stop
believing. He then calls his mistaken beliefs 'faith' because he knows
they are right. And he knows they are right because he has faith.
-Harry Harrison, Jason din,
Deathworld, Berkeley Medallion Edition, 1976
Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no
other endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure.
-Harvard Lamphoon, Doon (paraphrase)
Mark's declaration that Jesus came from the dispersion (nazareth), meaning
the worldwide community of Jews outside Judaea (equivalent to diaspora),
was misinterpreted by Matthew and Luke to mean that he came from a city
called Nazareth [to fulfill prophesy]. In fact the term nazarite, or
nazoraios, had nothing to do with any city of Nazareth, since no such place
existed until the fifth century CE when one was built by a Christian Emperor
to whom the nonexistence of Jesus' alleged hometown was an embarrassment.
(Although the site of Nazareth was occupied in the first century, there is
no evidence of any village named Nazareth earlier than the fifth century....)
-William Harwood, Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus (Prometheus), p. 260
You may see a cup of tea fall off a table and break into pieces on the
floor... But you will never see the cup gather itself back together and
jump back on the table. The increase of disorder, or entropy, is what
distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.
-Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe
began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would
not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began.
This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
-Stephen W. Hawking, Der Spiegel, 1989
By the age of fifteen, I had convinced myself that nobody could give a
reasonable explanation of what he meant by the word 'God' and that it was
therefore as meaningless to assert a belief as to assert a disbelief in God.
-Hayek on Hayek
If you rest, you rust.
-Helen Hayes
There is no sin. It is an invention to shame people into believing fantasies. We are the only animals known to desire to act differently (often better)
than we do. This is a glorious quality, and provides optimism that we will
will eventually improve ourselves. We should be proud of it, not ashamed.
-Bryan Palmer Graef Hayward
In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in
pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the
roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight
comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.
-Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Einfalle, Volume 10
ROBERT HEINLEIN:
There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited
ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off,
enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself
to himself.
-Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
The mind's ability to rationalize it's own shortcomings
is unlimited; I am no exception.
-Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the
one true religion by faith - it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a
universe.
-Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Faith is intellectual laziness.
-Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the
strong. The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a
religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter
judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith
or choose to live in the bleak certainty of reason- but one cannot have both.
-Robert A. Heinlein, Friday
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves.
Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
-Robert Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark
cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there.
-Robert A. Heinlein, JOB: A Comedy of Justice
Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a
monotheism can believe anything... just give him time to rationalize it.
-Robert A. Heinlein, JOB: A Comedy of Justice
A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad;
yet, a many who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.
-Helvetius
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death
that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to
pass over me and through me and when it has gone past, I will turn the
inner eye to see it's path. Where the fear has gone, there will be
nothing. Only I will remain.
-Frank Herbert, Dune, 'the Litany'
Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples'
weakness, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost
impossible to eradicate.
-Mike Hermann (hermann@cs.ubc.ca)
There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.
-Don Herold
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
-Granville Hicks (1901-1982)
-I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so
-Adolf Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941
The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for
compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but
in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine.
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 1 Chapter 12
Whenever religion is involved, terrorists kill more people.
-Dr. Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for
the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence
at St. Andrews University, Scotland
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one
trifling exception, is composed of others.
-John Andrew Holmes
The whole Bible was written by slave owners, and for slave owners. There
is no hint of criticism of slavery anywhere in that book. Jesus made no
objection to mistreatment of slaves. He indicated that selling of debtors
into slavery would be continued his forthcoming kingdom of heaven as well
as masters having the right to beat their slaves and put them to torture.
-Merrill Holste, Slavery and the Bible, 1986
Few intelligent Christians can still hold to the idea that the Bible is an
infallible Book, that it contains no linguistic errors, no historical
discrepancies, no antiquated scientific assumptions, not even bad ethical
standards. Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the
magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by
many hands in different ages. The existence of thousands of variations of
texts makes it impossible to hold the doctrine of a book verbally infallible.
Some might claim for the original copies of the Bible an infallible character,
but this view only begs the question and makes such Christian apologetics
more ridiculous in the eyes of the sincere man.
-Elmer Homrighausen, Christianity in America, p. 121,
Fear of death has been the greatest ally of tyranny past and present.
-Sydney Hook
Fortunately psychoanalysis is not the only way to resolve inner
conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
-Karen Horney
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing
you will make one.
-Elbert Hubbard
No deity will save us, we must save ourselves. Promises of immortal
salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful.
-Humanist Manifesto II, Prometheus Books, 1973
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the
testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more
miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.
-David Hume, "Of Miracles", from An Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding, 1748
Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what
happens to you.
-Aldous Huxley
Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.
-Sir Julian Huxley
A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
-George Iles
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary
for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
-William Ralph Inge, 1920
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our
distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were
able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
-William Ralph Inge
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL (circa 1870):
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament,
he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings
of the New, he would be insane.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
If priests had not been fond of mutton, lambs never would have been sacrificed to god. Nothing was ever carried to the temple that the priest could not use, and it always happened that god wanted what his agents liked.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
Is it not wonderful that the creator of all worlds, infinite in power and
wisdom, could not hold his own against the gods of wood and stone? Is it
not strange that after he had appeared to his chosen people, delivered
them from slavery, feed them by miracles, opened the sea for a path, led
them by cloud and fire, and overthrown their pursuers, they still preferred
a calf of their own making? (Exod. 32:1-8) ...a God who gave his entire
time for 40 years to the work of converting three millions of people, and
succeeded in getting only two men, and not a single woman, decent enough
to enter the promised land? (Num. 14:29-30)
-Robert G. Ingersoll
It has been contended for many years that the Ten Commandments are the
foundations of all ideas of justice and law. Nothing can be more stupidly
false. Thousands of years before Moses, the Egyptians had a code far better.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess,
vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works
of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your
reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact.
We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our
hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact.
We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want a
'this year's fact'. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your
miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two
thousand years. Their reputation for 'truth and veracity' in the neighborhood
where they resided is wholly unknown to us. Give us a new miracle, and
substantiate it by witnesses who still have the cheerful habit of living this
world. Do not send us to Jericho to hear the winding horns, nor put us in the
fire with Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego. Do not compel us to navigate the sea
with Captain Jonah, nor dine with Mr. Ezekiel. There is no sort of use in
sending us fox-hunting with Samson. We have positively lost all interest in
that little speech so eloquently delivered by Balaam's inspired donkey. It is
worse than useless to show us fishes with money in their mouths, and call our
attention to vast multitudes stuffing themselves with five crackers and two
sardines. We demand a new miracle, and we demand it now.
Let the church furnish at least one, or forever hold her peace.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she
will be the slave of man. The bible was not written by a woman. Within
its leaves there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory
of mankind, nothing of value would be lost...I do not see how it is
possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of
Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the
work of an uninspired man.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
A crime against god is a demonstrated impossibility.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
God so loved the world that he made up his mind
to damn a large majority of the human race.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat,
no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual
mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance
to pretend that it supports the giver.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the
purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves.
-Robert G. Ingersoll
...to argue with a man who has renounced
his reason is like giving medicine to the dead.
-Robert G. Ingersoll, Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p.127
Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing
but a vacuum remains.
-Robert G. Ingersoll, Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 285
That church [Catholic] teaches us that we can
make God happy by being miserable ourselves...
-Robert G. Ingersoll, Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 492
...if all the bones of all the victims of the Catholic Church could be
gathered together, a monument higher than all the pyramids would rise...
-Robert G. Ingersoll, Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 497
All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person
that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention -- of barbarian
invention -- is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of
it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes;
drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your
brain the coiled form of superstition -- then read the Holy Bible, and you
will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite
wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and
of such atrocity.
-Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
EACH nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was invariably found on
the side of those in power. Each god was intensely patriotic, and detested
all nations but his own. All these gods demanded praise, flattery, and
worship. Most of them were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent
blood has ever been considered a divine perfume. All these gods have insisted
upon having a vast number of priests, and the priests have always insisted
upon being supported by the people, and the principal business of these
priests has been to boast about their god, and to insist that he could easily
vanquish all the other gods put together.
-Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead
calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first
let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!
-Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to
thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of
learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears
the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of
inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization.
-Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
In the olden times the church, by violating the order of nature, proved the
existence of her God. At that time miracles were performed with the most
astonishing ease. They became so common that the church ordered her priests
to desist. And now this same church -- the people having found some little
sense -- admits, not only, that she cannot perform a miracle but insists
that the absence of miracle, the steady, unbroken march of cause and effect,
proves the existence of a power superior to nature. The fact is, however,
that the indissoluble chain of cause and effect proves exactly the contrary.
-Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
Reason, Observation and Experience -- the Holy Trinity of Science -- have
taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now,
and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this
belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of
a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there
will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.
-Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
The book, called the Bible, is filled with passages equally horrible, unjust and atrocious. This is the book to be read in schools in order to make our
children loving, kind and gentle! This is the book they wish to be recognized
in our Constitution as the source of all authority and justice!
-Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
The thoughts of man, in order to be of any real worth, must be free. Under
the influence of fear the brain is paralyzed, and instead of bravely solving
a problem for itself, tremblingly adopts the solution of another. As long as
a majority of men will cringe to the very earth before some petty prince or
king, what must be the infinite abjectness of their little souls in the
presence of their supposed creator and God? Under such circumstances,
what can their thoughts be worth?
-Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
We are asked to justify these frightful passages, these infamous laws of war, because the Bible is the word of God. As a matter of fact, there never was, and there never can be, an argument even tending to prove the inspiration of
any book whatever. In the absence of positive evidence, analogy and
experience, argument is simply impossible, and at the very best, can amount
only to a useless agitation of the air. The instant we admit that a book is
too sacred to be doubted, or even reasoned about, we are mental serfs.
-Robert G. Ingersoll, The Gods, 1872
Love between women is seen as a paradigm of love between equals, and
that is perhaps it's greatest attraction.
-Elizabeth Janeway
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
-Randall Jarrell
THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826):
I never told my religion nor scrutinize that of another. I never attempted to make a convert nor wished to change another's creed. I have judged of others' religion by their lives, for it is from our lives and not from our words that our religion must be read. By the same test must the world judge me.
-Thomas Jefferson
The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful
that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have
been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to
them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what
parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence
that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other
parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate
those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty
gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
-Thomas Jefferson
There is not a truth existing which I fear...
or would wish unknown to the whole world.
-Thomas Jefferson
Because religious belief or non-belief is such an important part of every
person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches
that use government power to support themselves and force their views on
persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state
support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and
leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of separation between
church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
-Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government,
Section 46: Freedom of Religion
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
-Thomas Jefferson
Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there is one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded faith.
-Thomas Jefferson
If we believe that he [Jesus Christ] really countenanced the follies, the
falsehoods, and the charlatanisms, which his biographers [writers of the
New Testament] father upon him, and admit the misconstructions,
interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early and the
fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by
every sound mind that he was an impostor.
-Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson Bible
It is error alone that needs the support of
government. Truth can stand by itself.
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the
teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible.
-Thomas Jefferson, Toward The Mystery
Read the Bible as you would Livy or Tacitus. For example, in the book of
Joshua we are told the sun stood still for several hours. Were we to read
that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of
blood, speaking of their statues, beasts, etc. But it is said that the
writer of that book was inspired. Examine, therefore, candidly, what
evidence there is of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled
to your inquiry, because millions believe it. On the other hand, you are
astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr,
Aug. 10, 1787, in Works, Vol.ii., p. 217
But those mine enemies, which would not that I should
reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.
-'Jesus', Luke 19:27
No one has an idea really of where we should draw the line. What about
the Bible? Every nut who kills people has a Bible lying around. If
you're looking for violent rape imagery, the Bible's right there in your
hotel room. If you just want to look up ways to screw people up, there it
is, and you're justified because God told you to. You have Shakespeare and
you have Sophocles--what are we going to do, lose 'Oedipus Rex' if someone
pokes an eye out?
-Penn Jillette, from Reason magazine on censorship of violent TV shows
One of my favorite fantasies is that next Sunday not one woman, in any
country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our
time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they cease to be.
-Sonia Johnson
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer, but wish
we didn't.
-Erica Jong
You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you
hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
-Erica Jong
= AN HONEST PRAYER =
Dear Lord, love me today and forever, bless my soul and conscience
daily, agree with all of my decisions, punish my enemies until I am
satisfied, give me huge amounts of money, promise to help me always
win, look the other way when I cheat, justify my excuses and believe
all my lies, obey my wishes, and reserve the most luxurious part of
heaven just for me. I will be thankful as long as you do what I say.
Amen.
-Wally Kaspars, LUMPEN vol 5, Nos. 8/9
It's interesting to speculate how it developed that in
two of the most anti-feminist institutions, the church
and the law court, the men are wearing the dresses.
-Flo Kennedy
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic)
how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom
to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or
political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely
because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the
people who might elect him.
-John F. Kennedy
Many of the truths we trust in depend on our own point of view
-"Obi-wan Kenobi", Return of the Jedi
The Essenses are not mentioned anywhere in the New Testament, although
their numbers were at least as great as the Sadducees and Pharisees.
This would suggest an element of intentional secrecy regarding the
influence of the sect on the teachings and work of Jesus.
-Holger Kersten & Elmer R. Gruber, The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the Resurrection, p. 239]
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
-Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Faith is often the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate.
-F. M. Knowles
Changes in the educational levels of the general population in recent years
appear to account for much of the variance in biblical beliefs over time.
The current proportion of biblical literalists is 32%, only half of what it
was in 1963, when 65% of Americans said they believed in the absolute truth
of all words in the Bible and that it represented the actual word of God.
Belief in inerrancy is most likely to be found among people who did not
complete high school (58%), and least likely among college graduates (29%).
-Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation Under God, 1993, pg. 268
It should be made clear that in order to live a Christian
life, any Christian must be able to discriminate and hate,
because that's what the bible says.
-Bernhard Kuiper, Colorado Springs pastor
It makes a big difference if we think of God as a person or as
a force. One way you get Christianity, the other you get Star Wars.
-Jayne Kulikauskas
Honesty isn't a policy, it's a state of mind... or else it isn't
honesty
-Eugene L'Hote
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
-Anne Lamott
No one has the right to destroy another person's
belief by demanding empirical evidence.
-Ann Landers, advice columnist
The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed
by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been
committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement,
but few can argue with it.
-Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent at the
Behavioral Science Institution and Research Unit of the
FBI Academy, from The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
If we all lived forever, there wouldn't be anywhere to park.
-John Larroquette, Night Court
The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments
to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals.
It's just that they need more supervision.
-Lynn Lavner
It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.
-D. H. Lawrence
It is one of the commonest mistakes to consider that the limit of our
power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.
-C.W. Leadbeater
There once was a time when all people believed in God and
the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.
-Richard Lederer, Anguished English
Would you sing 'Krishna bless America' or pledge allegiance to 'One
nation under Allah'? If not, would that make you unpatriotic?
-Chris Lee
Murder is a crime. Describing murder is not.
Sex is not a crime. Describing it is.
-Gershon Legman
If you don't think that logic is a good method for determining
what to believe, make an attempt to convince me of that without
using logic. No one has even bothered to try yet.
-Brett Lemoine
Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort
of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent
and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know)
to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and
who do not feel that they need forgiveness.
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially
those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to
state clearly that evolution is a FACT, not theory, and that what
is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process
and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution.
-R. C. Lewontin, Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth,
Bioscience 31, 559 (1981) reprinted in EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATIONISM
There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are,
God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It
could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because
true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if
Christianity did not exist.
-G. C. Lichtenberg, (1742-99), German physicist, philosopher. Aphorisms,
"Notebook L," aph. 16 (written 1765-99; tr. by R. J. Hollingdale, 1990)
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
-Abraham Lincoln
The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could
never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.
-Abraham Lincoln
I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense.
But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the
papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians,
and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle
my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity.
-Abraham Lincoln
Much of the discussion on the existence of race reminds me of the
obituary in 'Time' Magazine (January 11, 1963) of Arthur O. Lovejoy.
When the late Professor Lovejoy was asked at a government investigation
if he believed in God, he promptly rattled off thirty-three definitions
of God and asked the questioner which one he had in mind. But of course
it really didn't matter to the questioner. To avow a belief in the
existence of God simply assured one's participation in the socio-cultural
system, in which everyone knows that God exists out there but we humans
are just too ignorant to perceive or define Him accurately.
-Frank B. Livingstone, On the Nonexistence of Human Races, in The Concept
of Race, pp. 55-56, 1964.
The poor wretches have convinced themselves that they are going to be
immortal and live for all time, by worshipping that crucified sophist and
living under his laws...they receive these doctrines by tradition, without
any definite evidence. So if any charlatan or trickster comes among them,
he quickly acquires wealth by imposing upon these simple people.
-Lucian
If God can do anything he can make a stone so heavy
that even he can't lift it. Then there is something God cannot
do, he cannot lift the stone. Therefore God does not exist.
-Lucretius, Roman poet
Fear was the first thing on earth to make gods.
-Lucretius (96?-55 B.C.)
Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.
-Martin Luther
God created Adam master and lord of living creatures, but Eve spoilt
all, when she persuaded him to set himself above God's will. 'Tis you
women, with your tricks and artifices, that lead men into error.
-Martin Luther
Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they
have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer
self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men
are practiced most maliciously and veheming his eyes on them.
-Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543
Idiots, the lame, the blind, the dumb, are men in whom the devils have
established themselves: and all the physicians who heal these infirmities,
as though they proceeded from natural causes, are ignorant blockheads....
-Martin Luther
If you allow people with religious agendas to set government policy
based on their religion, you change a country from the democracy we
have to the kind of religiously run country you find in Iran.
-Barry Lynn, Exec. director of Americans United for
Separation of Church and State, full-page ad in the
Gazette-Telegraph (Colo. Sprgs.) on Oct. 25. 1996
God tells Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil. If this was the only way they could
understand the difference between good and evil, how could they
have known that it was wrong to disobey god and eat the fruit?
-Laurie Lynn (sechum-l secular humanist discussion list)
There is no such thing as death. In nature nothing dies. From each sad remnant of decay, some forms of life arise so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.
-Charles Mackay
The 'proof' in support of creation science consisted almost entirely of
efforts to discredit the theory of evolution through a rehash of data and
theories which have been before the scientific community for decades. The
arguments asserted by creationists are not based upon new scientific evidence
or laboratory data which has been ignored by the scientific community.
...The creationists' methods do not take data, weigh it against the opposing
scientific data and thereafter reach the conclusions stated in Section 4(a).
instead, they take the literal wording of Genesis and attempt to find
scientific support for it. ...Act 590 lacks legitimate educational value
because 'creation science' as defined in that section is simply not science.
...Creation science has no scientific merit or educational value as science.
Maclean v. Arkansas
The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep
forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has
soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
-James Madison, 1803
Some day, the sun won't rise, the wind won't blow, and we'll all
know the truth: there is no truth.
-Euthanatos, Mage, WW
If Jesus was a Jew, why did he have a Spanish name?
-Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect
Religion to me is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need. But I'm not an atheist, no.
I believe there's some force. If you want to call it God... I don't believe God is a single parent who writes books.
-Bill Maher
Two recent surveys rate the United States at the top among Western nations
in belief in God and at the bottom among six major countries in school kids'
understanding of science and math. This could be dismissed as chance, but it
shouldn't be. While our economic competitors' schools are teaching students
advanced math and science, many of our schools are wasting energy debating
whether to teach evolution or creationism, which maintains that God created
the universe over a six-day period about 6,000 years ago.
-Bill Mandel, San Francisco Examiner, 12 February 1989
If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.
-Horace Mann
All really great lovers are articulate, and verbal seduction is the surest road to actual seduction.
-Marya Mannes
The power of philosophy floats through my head. Light as a feather,
heavy as lead.
-Bob Marley
There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that
there is very little about which one can be certain.
-W. Somerset Maugham
When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.
-W. Somerset Maugham
An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof
that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes
that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the
evidence on the werewolf question.
-John McCarthy
If someone tells you he is going to make a "realistic decision", you
immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
-Mary McCarthy
What you are about to hear is God's word to the men of this nation. We
are going to war as of tonight. We have divine power -- that is our weapon.
We will not compromise. Wherever truth is at risk, in the schools or
legislature, we are going to contend for it. We will win.
-Bill McCartney, head of Religious Right group "Promise Keepers"
Only by the most tortured exegesis and in the most tenuous theologizing
can anything resembling an anti-abortion position be ripped from the
scripture.... If there are good reasons for opposing abortion on
demand, and there may be, then these must be found outside the Bible.
-Delos B. McKown, What Does the Bible
Say About Abortion?, Free Inquiry
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
-Delos McKown
It is scandalous that any modern, intelligent, well-
educated person should believe in Christianity.
-Delos B. McKown, Ph.D., U.S. professor, philosopher, author, Former clergyman
H. L. MENCKEN (circa 1950s):
A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than
he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men
favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter
facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.
-H. L. Mencken
The cosmos is a gigantic fly wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that
the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
-H.L. Mencken
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to
mankind--that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the
ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done
to clear and honest thinking.
H.L. Mencken, New York Times Magazine, 11 September 1955
Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for
the evil conscience of their parents.
-H.L. Mencken
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and
at once the world becomes explicable.
-H.L. Mencken
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy
by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to
resort to physics or chemistry.
-H.L. Mencken
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent
God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a
board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation
that is losing money.
-H.L. Mencken
Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make
the father of knowledge a serpent slimy, sneaking and abominable.
-H. L. Mencken
Let me use their own terminology against them.
They aborted a child in the 200th trimester.
-Dennis Miller
If one is willing to make adjustments in the historical claims of the
Bible, they can be correlated with the archaeological evidence if one
is willing to take some liberties with the archaeological evidence.
-J. Maxwell Miller, Biblical archaeologist
The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism,
disbelief -- call it what you will -- than any book ever written.
-A.A. Milne
Never eat more than you can lift.
-Miss Piggy
Lord, there's danger in this land.
You get witch-hunts and wars
when church and state hold hands.
-Joni Mitchell
I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.
-Wilson Mizner
Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.
-Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
In making up the character of God, the old theologians failed to mention that He is of infinite cheerfulness. The omission has caused the world much tribulation.
-Michael Monahan
Science has proof without any certainty.
Creationists have certainty without any proof
-Ashley Montague
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, yet he makes gods by the dozens.
-Michel De Montaigne
Tonight, instead of discussing the existence or non-
existence of God, they have decided to fight for it.
-Monty Python
Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has
known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not
known man ... , keep alive for yourselves.
-Moses, relaying God's orders to his people, Numbers 31:17-18
The sentient may perceive and love the universe, but the universe may not
perceive and love the sentient. The universe sees no distinction between
the multitude of creatures and elements which comprise it. All are equal.
None is favored. The universe, equipped with nothing but the materials and
the power of creation, continues to create: something of this, something of
that. It cannot control what it creates and it cannot, it seems, be
controlled by its creations (though a few might deceive themselves
otherwise). Those who curse the workings of the universe curse that which
is deaf. Those who strike out at those workings fight that which is
inviolate. Those who shake their fists, shake their fists at blind stars.
-Michael Moorcock, The Chronicles of Corum
REV. DONALD MORGAN, ATHEOLOGIAN:
God: The Immutable One, though somewhat different for each person,
denomination, religion, society, and historical period. The
omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, all-wise, infinite mind who
-- for strictly personal reasons -- makes a point of seeming to
be an impotent, know-nothing, nowhere, bumbling oaf.
-Rev. Donald Morgan
If God is love, and if God is also omnipresent, then the Devil cannot
exist. If the Devil exists, God cannot be love and also be omnipresent.
Yet, an omnipresent God of love and the Devil are both said to exist. It
doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure that there is something wrong here!
-Rev. Donald Morgan
Theologian: An uncommon individual who, though possessing finite abilities,
has been called by God himself who, though possessing infinite abilities,
requires the assistance of the former in explaining Himself to the rest
of us. [Translation: if God existed, theologians would be out of work.]
-Rev. Donald Morgan
A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to atheism.
-Rev. Donald Morgan
If the Bible is telling the truth, then God is either
untruthful or incompetent. If God is truthful, then
the Bible is either untruthful or erroneous.
-Rev. Donald Morgan
Jesus' last words on the cross, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?' hardly seem like the words of a man who planned it that way. It
doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure there is something wrong here.
-Rev. Donald Morgan
....Man can contemplate his own mortality and finds the thought intolerable. Any animal will struggle to protect itself from a threat of death. Faced
with a predator, it flees, hides, fights or employs some other defensive
mechanism, such as death-feigning or the emission of stinking fluids. There
are many self-protection mechanisms, but they all occur as a response to an
immediate danger. When man contemplates his future death, it is as if, by
thinking of it, he renders it immediate. His defence is to deny it. He
cannot deny that his body will die and rot--the evidence is too strong for
that; so he solves the problem by the invention of an immortal soul--a soul
which is more 'him' than even his physical body is 'him.' If this soul can
survive in an afterlife, then he has successfully defended himself against
the threatened attack on his life.
This gives the agents of the gods a powerful area of support. All they
need to do is to remind their followers constantly of their mortality and
to convince them that the afterlife itself is under the personal
management of the particular gods they are promoting. The self-protective
urges of their worshippers will do the rest.
-Desmond Morris, Religious Displays, Manwatching: A Field
Guide to Human Behaviour, 1977, p. 149-51.
When science and the Bible differ, science has
obviously misinterpreted its data.
-Dr. Henry Morris, President of
Institute for Creation Research
The only Bible-honoring conclusion is, of course, that Genesis 1-11
is actual historical truth, regardless of any scientific or
chronological problems thereby entailed.
-Dr. Henry Morris, President of Institute for Creation Research, 1972
It is a just retribution for improper sexual misconduct
-Mother Teresa, on AIDS
I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot,
to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is
being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.
-Mother Teresa, on poverty
It is the greatest enemy of peace.
-Mother Teresa, on abortion
I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.
-Mother Teresa
Viewing the child solely as an immature person is a way of escaping comforting him
-Clark Mousakas
As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.
-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
I'm a pedestrian. I see religion like footwear. Some people like
to wear really comfortable shoes; some people like to wear big,
tall boots, really immerse themselves in it. I choose to go
barefoot, just don't step on my toes and we can get along just fine.
-K. Muir
The history of the rise of Christianity has everything to do with politics,
culture, and human frailties and nothing to do with supernatural manipulation
of events. Had divine intervention been the guiding force, surely two
millennia after the birth of Jesus he would not have a world where there
are more Muslims than Catholics, more Hindus than Protestants, and more
nontheists than Catholics and Protestants combined.
-John K. Naland, The First Easter,
Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 2
Religion, society and state; from none of these do women
get their proper honour. It is religion which has created
an unparalleled disparity between men and women.
-Taslima Nasrin
I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to
make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.
-Gloria Naylor
The applications of science are inevitable and unavoidable for all countries and peoples today. But something more than its application is necessary.
It is the scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of
science, the search for the truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept
anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous
conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and
not on preconceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind all this is
necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life itself
and the solution of its many problems.
-Jawaharlal Nehru, former Prime Minister of India
I want nothing to do with religion concerned with keeping the masses
satisfied to live in hunger, filth and ignorance. I want nothing to
do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people
that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized, on this
earth, capable of becoming true man, master of his fate and captain
of his soul. To attain this, I would put priests to work, also, and
turn the temples into schools.
-Jawaharlal Nehru
These extremist sects appeal to many people in an antispiritual age
because they combine their empowering theology with a warm, supportive
environment, at least at first. Those who join become part of a close-knit
body of believers who are convinced they understand the meaning of history
and what the future holds.
-Bruce Nelan, Time Magazine
Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source.
-Ron Nesen
It is interesting that every time God gives direct
orders to anyone, it is always "Thou shalt kill."
-Newsweek magazine
Think about the bio-mass involved [with the Biblical flood].
What happened to all the corpses? Sharks, for one.
-Raoul Newton, net.fundie.idiot
It is the creationists who blasphemously are claiming
that God is cheating us in a stupid way.
-J. W. Nienhuys
FRIEDRICH NIETSZCHE:
Christianity makes suffering contagious.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
. . . an absurd problem came to the surface: 'How COULD God permit that
[crucifixion of Jesus Christ]!' . . . the deranged reason of the little
community found quite a frightfully absurd answer: God gave his Son for
forgiveness, as a SACRIFICE . . . The SACRIFICE FOR GUILT, and just in its
most repugnant and barbarous form -- the sacrifice of the innocent for the
sins of the guilty! What horrifying heathenism!
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the
heart; but now it has to burden the heart first, in order
to lighten it afterward. Consequently it will perish.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, s.119
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.
'Whither is God?' he cried; 'I will tell you. WE HAVE KILLED HIM - you
and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could
we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire
horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?
Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, foreward, in all
direction? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through
an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not
become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need
to light candles in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of
the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the
divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead.
And we have killed him.'
-Friedrich Nietzsche
A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Mortal hostility against the masters of the earth, against the 'noble', that is also Christian. Hatred
of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind, is Christian; hatred
of the sense, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Belief means not wanting to know what is true.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 1889
The belief that the world as it ought to be is, really exists, is a belief
of the unproductive who do not desire to create a world as it ought to be.
It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can
do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in
a meaningless world because one organizes a small part of it oneself.
All the beauty and sublimity we have bestowed upon... imaginary things I
will reclaim as the property and product of man... with what regal
liberality he has lavished gifts upon things so as to impoverish himself
and make himself feel wretched!
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and
fragrant drop of levity--and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it
into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, 75 Aphorisms
Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols,
What the Germans Lack, aph. 2, 1889
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher
esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, 1881
In the beginning, there was nothing.
God said, "Let there be light!"
And there was light.
There was still nothing,
But you could see it a whole lot better
-Njkahn
As a literary monument the Bible is of much later origin than the Vedas;
as a work of literary value it is surpassed by everything written in the
last two thousand years by authors even of the second rank, and to compare
it seriously with the productions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare
or Goethe would require a fanatacized mind that had entirely lost its power
of judgment. Its conception of the universe is childish, and its morality
revolting, as revealed in the malicious vengeance attributed to God in the
OT and in the New, the parable of the laborers of the eleventh hour and
the episodes of Mary Magdelene and the woman taken in adultery.
-Max Nordau
Mental life is not neat and orderly. It does not proceed smoothly and
gracefully in neat, logical form. Instead, it hops, skips, and jumps its
way from idea to idea, tying together things that have no business being
put together; forming new creative leaps, new insights and concepts.
-Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
Marriage Ceremony: An incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the
law being dragged into the affairs of your family.
-O. C. Ogilvie
Why doesn't God behave in such a way as to be worthy of worship?
-Barry O'Grady, bary@it.com.au
YOUR PETITIONERS ARE ATHEISTS and they define their life-style as follows.
An Atheist loves himself and his fellowman instead of a god. An Atheist
knows that heaven is something for which we should work now -- here on
earth -- for all men together to enjoy. An Atheist thinks that he can get
no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction
and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue, and enjoy it. An
Atheist thinks that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his
fellowman can he find the understanding that will help to a life of
fulfillment.
Therefore, he seeks to know himself and his fellowman rather than to know a god. An Atheist knows that a hospital should be build instead of a church
An Atheist knows that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An
Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.
He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants
man to understand and love man. He wants an ethical way of life. He knows
that we cannot rely on a god nor channel action into prayer nor hope for an
end to troubles in the hereafter. He knows that we are our brother's keeper
and keepers of our lives; that we are responsible persons, that the job is
here and the time is now.
-Madalyn Murray (later O'Hair), preamble
to Murray v. Curlett, April 27, 1961
The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows.
-Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)
Your sweet little book is a bizarre collection of out-of-context quotations, misquotations, misleading quotations, non sequiturs, errors of fact and just
about every other dirty intellectual trick known to man.
-Tim O'Neill, on the JW's anti-evolution book
THE ONION http://www.theonion.com
Guns don't kill people; guns are designed and manufactured for the purpose of enabling people to use the guns to kill people.
-The Onion (3/23/00)
Humanity is eternally seeking answers to theological and philosophical questions, and if anyone knows the answers, it's our celebrities.
-The Onion (9-7-00)
The Onion: Is there a God?
Beth Littleford: I was raised with one and I can't quite let go.
Micky Dolenz: No. God is a verb, not a noun.
Rod Roddy: Yes. Otherwise, I would have to admit I've only been talking to myself all these years.
Jack Plotnick: Um, yes, there is a God, but it's sort of like we're all little pieces of God. He exploded, and we're all little pieces of Him. I just think we should all treat each other like we're little pieces of God.
Seth Green: God is, to me, pretty much an idea. God is, to me, pretty much a myth created over time to deny the idea that we're all responsible for our own actions.
-The Onion (9-7-00)
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to
doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer, Life, 10 October 1949
When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
-Peter O'Toole, The Ruling Class
My reason taught me that I could not have made one of my own qualities- they were forced upon me by Nature; that my language, religion, and habits were
forced upon me by Society; and that I was entirely the child of Nature and
Society; that Nature gave the qualities and Society directed them. Thus was
I forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief
in every religion which had been taught by man.
-Robert Owen, 1771-1858
Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be
true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of
mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.
-Robert Owen, 19th century reformer
THOMAS PAINE:
What is it the Bible teaches us? - raping, cruelty, and murder.
What is it the New Testament teaches us? - to believe that the
Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married,
and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
-Thomas Paine
The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story
of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in
vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told
of the assassination of Julius Caesar...
-Thomas Paine
The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the
study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles;
it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing;
and it admits of no conclusion.
-Thomas Paine
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
-Thomas Paine
When I see throughout this book, called the Bible, a history of the
grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales
and stories, I could not so dishonor my Creator by calling it by His name.
-Thomas Paine, Toward The Mystery
As to the book called the Bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of
God. It is a book of lies and contradictions, and a history of bad times
and bad men. There are but a few good characters in the whole book.
-Thomas Paine, Letter to William Duane, April 23, 1806
As to the book called the bible, it is blasphemy to call
it the Word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions
and a history of bad times and bad men.
-Thomas Paine, writing to Andrew Dean August 15, 1806
..but the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions
there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any...
-Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, p. 104
The NT, compared with the Old, is like a farce of one act...
-Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, p. 153
Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more
derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to
reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.
-Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, pg. 186
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman
Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church,
nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.
-Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the
cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which
more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we
call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of
wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my
part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
-Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it
is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
-The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, Vol. 9 p. 134
..we must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and New Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries.-The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, Vol. 9 p. 282
The Bible is a book that has been read more and
examined less than any book that ever existed.
-The Theological Works of Thomas Paine
All countries censored books; Protestant authorities labored to keep "papist" works from the eyes of the faithful ... ... In the Catholic world, with the
trend toward centralization under the pope, a special importance attached to
the list published by the bishop of Rome, the papal Index of Prohibited
Books. Only with special permission, granted to reliable persons for special
study, could Catholics read books listed on the Index, on which most of the
significant works written in Europe since the Reformation have been included.
-R.R. Palmer, A History of the Modern World, p. 90
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as
when they do it from a religious conviction
-Blaise Paschal, Pensees, 1670
A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidence
is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great
significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little
significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence.
-John Allen Paulos, mathematics professor, Innumeracy:
Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences
It is time to take Christ out of Christmas. It is time to
turn the holiday into what it is: a guiltless, egoistic,
pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.
-Leonard Peikoff, op-ed in the
Miami Herald, December 23, 1996
Perhaps there was an organization in Phineas' day known as the N.A.A.C.P.
(National Association for the Advancement of Canaanite People) who took
exception with this teaching of segregation. Perhaps there were pulpits
proclaiming a more tolerant and socially accepted view and government agency
crusading for 'affirmative action.' We really do not know; but we do know
from the Bible story in Numbers chapter 25 that the Israel people began to
disobey God's law, accept integration, cultural exchange and a type of
interracial marriage, and thus were struck collectively by a plague.
Phineas was the man who courageously fought against the racial treason
even to the point of bloodshed, and he too was honored by God.
-Pastor Pete Peters, THE BIBLE: Handbook For Survivalists, Racists,
Tax Protestors, Militants And Right-Wing Extremists, ND,
Scriptures For America, La Porte, Colorado, pp. 4-5
An attempt to give credibility to Hebrew mythology by making people
believe that the world's foremost biologists, paleontologists,
and geologists are a bunch of incompetent nincompoops.
-Ron Peterson, on Creation Science
It is fear that first brought gods into the world.
-Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon
Give me a museum and I'll fill it.
-Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
...Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise
anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear
and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded...
-Plato, Phaedrus
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
-Plato (427-347 B.C.)
The community which does not protect its humblest and most hated
member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false
or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the
universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack.
-Wendell Phillips, 1811-1884, American abolitionist, speech, 1863
I pledge allegiance to my flag
and to the republic for which it stands,
one nation, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
-Original Pledge of Allegiance, 1892
The creationists have this creator who is evil, who is small-minded, who is
malevolent, and who is not very bright and can't even get his science right.
Creationists have made their creator in their own image, in my view.
-Prof. Ian Plimer, The Skeptic, Vol 13, No 2
He who neglects to drink from the spring of experience are apt to die
of thirst in the desert of ignorance
-Ling Po
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of
fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
-Edgar Allan Poe
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one,
take this as a sign that you have neither understood the
theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
-Sir Karl Popper
Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.
-Sir Karl Popper
"Try this," she said, "it can't hurt. A simple experiment, and who knows?
It might mean a lot to you in the future." She handed me a pocket Bible,
which she carried at all times. "Open it randomly to a passage and read
what's written here." I don't know how I managed, but I kept sober as I
read the passage chance had sent me. "Does it mean something to you?" I
nodded gravely, and handed the passage to Todd. He had to leave the room
to keep from bursting. Exodus 22, xviv: "Whosoever copulateth with a beast
shall be put to death."
-Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations
The world is in need of less religion and more common sense.
-Llewelyn Powys, Celsus and Origen
God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be
compared, from the perspective of any of the
other players [i.e., everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex
version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes,
with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who _smiles all the time_.
-Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens 1991, pg 17
Putting a different spin on Flag Day, a 7-year-old atheist Wednesday urged
public-school students to refuse to recite the 'Pledge of Allegiance' until
the words 'under God' are excised. ...'When kids are forced to say, 'under
God,' it makes them think that atheists are bad people,' Ricky Sherman said
at a news conference, reading a statement he wrote on composition paper in
large block letters. ...'Atheists are good people,' he said. 'We just
know that God is make believe.'
-Press Democrat, 15 June 1989 (AP)
An engineering professor is treating her husband, a loan officer, to dinner
for finally giving in to her pleas to shave off the scraggly beard he grew
on vacation. His favorite restaurant is a casual place where they both feel
comfortable in slacks and cotton/polyester-blend golf shirts. But, as always,
she wears the gold and pearl pendant he gave her the day her divorce decree
was final. They're laughing over their menus because they know he always
ends up diving into a giant plate of ribs but she won't be talked into
anything more fattening than shrimp.
Quiz: How many biblical prohibitions are they violating? Well, wives are
supposed to be 'submissive' to their husbands (I Peter 3:1). And all women
are forbidden to teach men (I Timothy 2:12), wear gold or pearls (I Timothy
2:9) or dress in clothing that 'pertains to a man' (Deuteronomy 22:5).
Shellfish and pork are definitely out (Leviticus 11:7, 10) as are usury
(Deuteronomy 23:19), shaving (Leviticus 19:27) and clothes of more than one
fabric (Leviticus 19:19). And since the Bible rarely recognizes divorce,
they're committing adultery, which carries the rather harsh penalty of
death by stoning (Deuteronomy 22:22).
So why are they having such a good time? Probably because they wouldn't
think of worrying about rules that seem absurd, anachronistic or -- at best
-- unrealistic. Yet this same modern-day couple could easily be among the
millions of Americans who never hesitate to lean on the Bible to justify
their own anti-gay attitudes.
-Deb Price, And Say Hi To Joyce, lesbian columnist
PROVERBS:
The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
-Hungarian proverb
Man fools himself. He prays for a long life, and he fears an old age.
-Chinese Proverb
If a man has two pennies, he should buy a loaf of bread with one to
sustain his life and a flower with the other so he has a reason for
living
-Chinese Proverb
For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.
-Traditional Saying
The best defense against Christianity is a good Christian Education
-"Psycho" Dave, Psycho0@ix.netcom.com
I'm willing to bet that when we finally discover
the root causes for most sexual problems facing
people today, that Christianity will top the list.
-"Psycho" Dave
Christianity faces no greater enemy than the age of information.
-"Psycho" Dave
Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.
-Raymond Queneau, A Model History
Maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be
-Don Quixote
AYN RAND:
The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters.
And intends to be a master.
-Ayn Rand
Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material
on which to actualize it.
-Ayn Rand
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.
-Ayn Rand
If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral
commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction
in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the
obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
-Ayn Rand
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943)
To make sure that my blasphemy is thoroughly expressed, I hereby state my
opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition, that there is no
evidence for the existence of any god(s), that devils, demons, angels and
saints are myths, that there is no life after death, heaven nor hell, that
the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and that the Holy Ghost
is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision. I accuse the
Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place -- not to
mention the "ethnic cleansing" presently being performed by Christians in
our world -- and I condemn and vilify this mythical deity for encouraging
racial prejudice and commanding the degradation of women.
-James Randi, challenging blasphemy laws in several US states
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
-Ronald Reagan
Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified. -James Redfield
No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept.
Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and
in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of
persons who are disposed to believe them.
-Ernest Renan, 1863
I don't know if God exists, but it would be
better for His reputation if He didn't.
-Jules Renard
To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.-Tom Robbins
(more Tom Robbins quotes forthcoming!!!)
...I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one
fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all
the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
-Stephen F. Roberts
At the time of its Founding, the United States seemed to be an infertile
ground for religion. Many of the nation's leaders - include George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin - were not Christians,
did not accept the authority of the Bible, and were hostile to organized
religion. The attitude of the general public was one of apathy: in 1776,
only 5 percent of the population were participating members of churches.
-Ian Robertson, Sociology, 3rd editions, Worth
Publishing Inc.: New York, 1987, page 410
[The] feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is
about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages
women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice
witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
-Pat Robertson, Fundraising letter that was an in-
kind contribution to the Iowa Committee to Stop ERA,
as reported in The Washington Post, August 23, 1993
Therefore the spiritual standard for America would be the
gospel of Jesus and everything in the Old and New Testaments.
-Pat Robertson
My personal feeling is that oral sex is against nature.
-Pat Robertson
I know there are some Christians who believe that war and their participation in it are morally wrong. While I respect their views and must allow them
to follow their consciences, I do not believe the Bible teaches pacifism.
-Pat Robertson
A lasting peace will never be built upon man's
efforts, because man is sinful, vicious, and wicked.
-Pat Robertson
There will never be world peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world. How can there be
peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers
of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy moneychangers,
revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?
-Pat Robertson, The New World Order, 1991, P. 227, Word Publishing
The key in terms of mental ability is chess. There's never been a woman Grand Master chess player. Once you get one, then I'll buy some of the feminism...
-Pat Robertson (According to the Chess Federation of the U.S. there
were already two women Grand Masters at that time, both from Georgia.
Since Robertson's gaffe, three more women became Grand Masters)
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God,
who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
-Gene Roddenberry
When you are genuinely interested in one thing it will always lead to
something else.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
Experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does
occur.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused
of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with
religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
Bad logic to explain an unimaginable tragedy is preferable to no logic
-Ron Rosenbaum
Convicted pedophiles are highly Victorian and rigid in their sexual
attitudes. They generally believe in the double standard and, are,
quite surprisingly, highly religious. They see themselves as devout,
read the Bible regularly, and pray often for cure of their pedophilia.
-Rosenhan and Seligman, Abnormal Psychology, Second Edition, p. 435
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
-Yasutani Roshi
Better by far you should forget and smile than you should remember
and be sad.
-Christina Rossetti
...it really is like going to bed after a very, very long day. After all, to the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
-Salman Rushdie, on David Frost show
BETRAND RUSSELL (1872-1970, British philosopher, educator, mathematician, and social critic):
If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by
argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument
goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize
that argument is useless and will therefore result to force either in the
form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young
in what is called 'education'.
-Bertrand Russell
All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
-Bertrand Russell
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence,
it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
-Bertrand Russell
I think that in philosophical strictness at the level where one
doubts the existence of material objects and holds that the world
may have existed for only five minutes, I ought to call myself an
agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do
not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than
the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another
illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between Earth and
Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but nobody
thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in
practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.
-Bertrand Russell
We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there
is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith."
We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth
is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion
for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead
to strife, since different groups, substitute different emotions.
-Bertrand Russell
The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater
to those who are not dazzled by the divine radiance.
-Bertrand Russell
People are zealous for a cause when they are
not quite positive that it is true.
-Bertrand Russell
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
-Bertrand Russell
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests
that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
-Bertrand Russell
The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was,
as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that
all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of
this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by
sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in
Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a
force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
-Bertrand Russell
With very few exceptions, the religion which a man accepts is that of the
community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of
environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question.
-Bertrand Russell
Few people can be happy unless they hate
some other person, nation or creed.
-Bertrand Russell
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
-Bertrand Russell
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly
the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a
kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and
disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing - fear of the mysterious,
fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore
it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand
-Bertrand Russell, 1927
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally
cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so
may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one
of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside
the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason
to consider any of them. The fact that an opinion has been widely held
is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the
silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often
likely to be foolish than sensible.
-Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 1945
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot
face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost
inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes
them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought!
Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not real,
he becomes furious when they are disputed.
-Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
-Bertrand Russell
I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine
which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine
in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when
there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must of course admit
that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our
social life and our political system; since both are at present faultless,
this must weigh against it.
-Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
The question of the truth of a religion is one thing, but the question of
its usefulness is another. I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm
as I am that they are untrue.
-Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Christian, 1957
Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were
achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and
beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no
fire, no heroism, no intensity of though and feeling, can preserve an
individual life beyond the grave.
-Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 1957
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
-Bertrand Russell
The deliverance of the saints must take place some time before 1914.
-Charles Taze Russell, American religious leader
and founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, Studies in
the Scripture, Volume 3, 1910 edition
The deliverance of the saints must take place some time after 1914.
-Charles Taze Russell, American religious leader
and founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, Studies in
the Scripture, Volume 3, 1923 edition
Our Father or Mother, who are either in heaven, nirvana, Mecca or
Salt Lake City, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will
be done, providing thy will is that America is always the big winner
over foreign heathen. Give us this day our daily white bread, black
bread, Italian bread, Jewish rye, English muffins, or tacos, and a
quarter-pounder with cheese and large fries to go. And lead us not
into temptation, or into school buses that take us to neighborhoods
where the kids are different. For thine is the kingdom and the power
and the glory, especially for people who still use words like "thine."
-Mark Russell, humorist
Christian soldiers armed with virtue-
hearts afire with blind obsession,
cannot see the difference 'twixt
compassion and oppression.
-Sabbat, The Clerical Conspiracy
It requires only two things to win credit for a
miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
-Marquis de Sade, 1740-1814
...Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the 2, in
the 1st instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the 2nd a fool.
-Marquis de Sade
Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate. Ignorance and fear, you will repeat to them, ignorance and fear -- those are the twin bases of every religion.
-Marquis de Sade
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
-William Safire
CARL EDWARD SAGAN:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
-Carl Sagan
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
-Carl Sagan
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled
long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no
longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured
us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that
we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the
new bamboozles rise.)
-Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection
I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And
in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the
additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
-Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism
-The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who
sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But
if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe,
then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying...
it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
-Carl Sagan
You can't convince a believer of anything; for
their belief is not based on evidence, it's based
on a deep seated need to believe.
-Carl Sagan
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that
some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But
as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and
worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of
nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
-Carl Sagan
-Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy.
Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however
unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been
a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?
-Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark
Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad
apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me.
First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and
fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are
*any* miraculous cures from faith-healing, beyond the body's own ability
to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose' of fraud and
error in science is made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of
fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers.
-Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World:
Science As a Candle in the Dark
You see, the religious people -- most of them -- really think this planet
is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or
other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives,
giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children,
telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say,
making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that.
Why can't the gods let well enough alone? All this intervention speaks
of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't
he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he
hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would have listened to him
more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the
universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants?
Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing
the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's
not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business
if there was any competition.
-Carl Sagan's 'Sol Hadden' in 'Contact', 1985
Laughter is by definition healthy.
-Francoise Sagan
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE:
The Roman Catholic Church announced yesterday that the Shroud of Turin,
venerated by millions of Christians over the centuries as the burial cloth
of Jesus, cannot be authentic because new scientific tests show that it dates
from the Middle Ages. ... Nevertheless, Catholics were encouraged to continue
their veneration of the shroud as a pictorial image of Christ, still capable
of performing miracles, even though it cannot be accepted as a genuine
historic relic, and no one knows how the image was produced. ... At a news
conference yesterday, the shroud's custodian, Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero,
revealed that radiocarbon tests conducted independently by three laboratories
this year have concluded that the shroud cloth was created between 1260 and
1390. ... The shroud's authenticity has been debated since it was first put
on display in the mid-14th century. ... In the Middle Ages, many objects
appeared in Europe that were said to be the shroud of Jesus, fragments of his
cross or other relics, but most were discarded as fakes long ago, and few
others maintain a devoted following as does the Shroud of Turin. ... The
shroud, which belongs to the pope, has been kept for the last 410 years at
the Cathedral of Turin, where it lies folded inside a silver casket. It is
rarely put on public display. ... An estimated 3 million visitors came to
see it when it was last exhibited in 1978.
-Roberto Suro, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 October 1988
More than half the college students polled in three states, including
California, said they are creationists who believe that God created Adam
and Eve, while about one-third believe in aliens, Big Foot and the lost
city of Atlantis. ...The poll results, released yesterday by Texas
researchers, also indicated that students who believe in creationism are
less likely to read books, tend to be more politically conservative and
have a lower grade-point average than students who dispute that God created
Earth in six days. ...Last fall, about 1000 students attending colleges in
Texas, Connecticut and California filled out detailed questionnaire on their
beliefs. ...In Texas, 71 percent of students said they believe in the story
of Adam and Eve, while 51 percent in Connecticut and 47 percent in California
said they believed in the biblical first couple. An average of 44 percent of
the students in the three states said the story of Noah's Ark is true. About
one-third of all the students surveyed believed that Big Foot, a hairy man-
like creature reputed to live in the mountains of northwest America, actually
exists. An equal number believed in the lost city of Atlantis, a legendary
island of advanced civilization that supposedly sank into the ocean. Thirty
percent of the students responding to the survey said aliens from outer space
visited Earth in ancient times. Overall, 37 percent said they believed in
ghosts, and 39 percent said it is possible to communicate with the dead.
-San Francisco Chronicle, 3 November 1986 (UPI)
Exhausted, dehydrated, yet spiritually uplifted, some 350,000 Catholic
pilgrims packed themselves onto a hot and dusty field yesterday to say
good-by to Pope John Paul II. ... More than 10,000 people were treated
at field hospitals for mostly minor problems. Leading the list of maladies
were dehydration, severe asthma, altitude-caused dizziness, and twisted
ankles suffered by pilgrims tripped up by prairie-dog holes. ...The
73-year-old pontiff made two visits to the site by Marine helicopter.
-Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 August 1993
Television preacher Pat Robertson, who plans to officially announce his
candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next month, said he
would not tolerate atheists in his administration, Time magazine reported
yesterday. ... Although Robertson firmly denied a quote attributed to him
that only born-again Christians and Jews should hold government jobs, he
told Time that nonbelievers would have no place in his administration if
he were elected.
-San Francisco Chronicle, 21 September 1987 (UPI)
Now that he did so well in Iowa, The Reverend Pat Robertson doesn't want to
be called a 'former television evangelist' anymore. He told NBC's Tom Brokaw
in no uncertain terms that such a 'slur' was the height of 'religious bigotry.
And he's right. Who'd want their sister to marry a television evangelist?
But how shall we ace newsmen describe him instead? I've given the matter a
great deal of thought, and I think the fairest to all concerned is 'former
hemorrhoid healer.' This refers, of course, to the former hemorrhoid healer's
celebrated, videotaped sermon to his congregation back in 1981, when he
cried: 'Satan has gone! God has just healed somebody! A hernia has been
healed! Several people are being healed of hemorrhoids and varicose veins!
People with flat feet! God is doing just great things to you!' ... 'Former
hurricane deflector' struck me as macho, and most voters would probably like
a president who could deflect hurricanes. But Hurricane Gloria, which he
deflected back in 1985 to save his broadcasting station in Virginia Beach,
slammed into Long Island and Boston instead, doing $320 million worth of
damage.
-Arthur Hoppe, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 February 1988
Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense
it.
-George Sand
GEORGE SANTAYANA (1863-1952, U.S. philosopher, writer, professor):
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration
for those who don't understand it.
-George Santayana
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
-George Santayana
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling
so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily
contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
-George Santayana, Reason in Religion
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident,
quite as much as what language he shall speak.
-George Santayana, Reason in Religion
Shelley was familiar with tyranny and intolerance. In 1811, while yet
an undergraduate, he'd had the 'The Necessity of Atheism' published at
Worthing in Sussex. It appeared for sale in the bookshop window of
Munday and Slater's for just twenty minutes. The brevity of the sale
was due, unfortunately, not to an exhaustion of the edition, but the
appearance upon the scene of a clerical wowser yclept John Walker. The
good Rev., strolling by the bookstore, saw the essay upon display, and
exhibiting correct Christian indignation, upbraided the two miserable
sinners. The pamphlets were removed and burned in true Hitlerian fashion -
except for one that Slater kept, and which is the surviving copy.
-Joseph Sapere
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
-Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Anti-abortionists believe that life begins at the moment you agree with them.-Saturday Night Live
Women have babies and men provide the support. If you don't like the way we're made you've got to take it up with God.
-Phyllis Schlafly, (who has had a successful
business career and run for public office, but would
apparently deny that to other women)
As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-
Christian tradition praised as the source of our present-day concern for
human rights, that is, for the valuable idea that all individuals everywhere
are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on this earth.
In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to
human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for
acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation, and oppression, but also
for enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small
children, torture, and genocide.
-Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 1989 speech
There are no happy endings ... because nothing ends
-"Schmendrick", The Last Unicorn
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training,
for it trains people as to how they shall think.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted
in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of
five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
-Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Aristotle once said, 'Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.'
So we say, 'The Bible is dear, but dearer still is truth.'
-J. Frank Schulman, in UU pamphlet: UU views of the Bible.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
-E. F. Schumacher
Without cultural sanction, most or all our religious beliefs
and rituals would fall into the domain of mental disturbance
-John F. Schumaker, Corruption of Reality, Unified
Theory of Religion, Hypnosis and Psychotherapy
There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of
the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the
Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the
kingdom of God upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration,
never had any existence. His image has not been destroyed from without, it
has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical
problems which come to the surface one after another.... He is a figure
designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by
modern theology in a historical garb.
-Dr. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus
It is, therefore, our unequivocal conclusion that creationism, with its
accounts of the origin of life by supernatural means, is not science.
-Science and Creationism, National Academy Press, 1984
If you're looking for a little background reading on scientific
creationism, it's best not to take the word scientific too seriously.
A three-year database search of 4,000 scientific publications -- focusing
on the names of people associated with the Institute for Creation Research
and on phrases and keywords such as 'creationism' -- didn't turn up a
single paper. A follow-up study of 68 journals found that only 18 of
135,000 total manuscript submissions concerned scientific creationism,
and all 18 were rejected. Reasons cited included 'flawed arguments,'
'ramblings,' and 'a high-school theme quality'.
-Science 85 6(7):11, September 1985
Nothing happens in contradiction to nature;
only in contradiction to what we know of it.
-Agent Scully, X-Files
While we are postponing, life speeds by.
-Seneca (3BC - 65AD)
To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.
-Michael Servetus
Love and stoplights can be cruel.
-Sesame Street
Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book.
No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.
-Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel), 1904-1991
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950):
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope?
If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
-George Bernard Shaw
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the
point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
-George Bernard Shaw
There are scores of thousands of sects who are ready at a moment's
notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject.
-George Bernard Shaw
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
-George Bernard Shaw, Annajanska (1919)
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says:
He is always convinced that it says what he means.
-George Bernard Shaw
Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
-George Bernard Shaw
I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
-George Bernard Shaw
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death. -George Bernard Shaw
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
-George Bernard Shaw
Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
-George Bernard Shaw
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
-George Bernard Shaw
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
-George Bernard Shaw
All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.
-George Bernard Shaw
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
-Fulton Sheen (1895-1979) or John Buchan (1875-1940)
If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet (1792-1822)
The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
There are in fact so many strong biblical, doctrinal, and logical arguments
against the existence of a literal hell that this question naturally arises:
Why do the churches teach it and why do people often believe it? ... The
churches tend to believe that fear, rather than love conquers all.
-Robert Short, Methodist clergyman, U.S. Catholic magazine, April 1980 pp. 37-40
The central problem of Christianity is: if the Messiah has come, why is
the world so evil? For Judaism, the problem is: if the world is so evil,
why does the Messiah not come?
-Seymour Siegel
Dear God. We paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.
-Bart Simpson saying grace
I was at Bible camp, learning how to be more judgmental.
-Mrs. Flanders (Homer Simpson's neighbor)
Suppose we've chosen the wrong god. Every time we go
to church we're just making him madder and madder
-Homer Simpson's version of Pascal's Wager, "The Simpsons"
Marge, have you ever actually sat down and read this thing?
Technically, we're not even allowed to go to the bathroom.
-Priest on The Simpson's
Prayer has no place in the public schools, just
like facts have no place in organized religion.
-School Superintendent on "The
Simpsons" episode #100, 1994
Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking
the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe,
from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man.
-George Gaylord Simpson
If you keep saying things are going to be bad,
you have a chance of being a prophet.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer
A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as
vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The
infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm
the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.
-Jane Smiley, in the Chicago Tribune
The Bible is the greatest hoax in all history.
The leading characters of the Old Testament would
today be in the penitentiary and those of the New
would be under observation in psychopathic wards.
-Charles Smith, 1887-1964, U.S. attorney, author
... why have those countries with a strong Church-State alliance displayed
such an eagerness to enforce religious dogmas and eliminate dissent through
the power of the state. Why has Christianity refused, whenever possible, to
allow its beliefs to compete in a free marketplace of ideas? The answer is
obvious and revealing. Christianity is peddling an inferior product, one
that cannot withstand critical investigation. Unable to compete favorably
with other theories, it has sought to gain a monopoly through a state
franchise, which means: through the use of force.
-George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God
Jesus has now been reduced to a mantra. . . chanted
mindlessly by followers, who have no idea of the
relationship of doctrine to history and mythology.
-A.A. Snow
A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who
never owned a car.
-Carrie Snow
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for
life to interpret my dreams.
-Susan Sontag
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe --though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived. -Susan Sontag
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
-Susan Sontag
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which
human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
-Susan Sontag (1933)
It needs but to glance over the world and to contemplate the doings of
Christians everywhere to be amazed at the ineffectiveness of current
theology. Or it needs only to look back over past centuries and the
iniquities alike of populace, nobles, kings, and popes to perceive an
almost incomprehensible futility of the beliefs everywhere held and
perpetually insisted upon.
-Herbert Spencer, Facts and Comments, 1901
One might be asked "How can you prove that a god does
not exist?" One can only reply that it is scarcely
necessary to disprove what has never been proved.
-David A. Spitz
Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer.
It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who
watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide
people to follow His precepts -- there is just too much misery and
cruelty for that. On the other hand, I respect and envy the people
who get inspiration from their religions.
-Benjamin Spock
I could not believe that anyone who has read this book would be so
foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the
divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not
read the text? Are they hopelessly misinformed? Is there a different
Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naivete?
-Bishop John Shelby Spong
Social science affirms that a woman's place in society marks the level
of civilization.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The bible teaches that women brought sin and death into the world, that
she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the
judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her
was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period suffering and anguish,
and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent
on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information
she might desire... Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton
All through the centuries scholars and scientists have been imprisoned,
tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict
with a petty text of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the
universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy
books of all the religions on earth.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible Part 2. (From Great Infidels pg. 143.)
What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
-Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Everybody gets so much information all day that they lose their
common sense.
-Gertrude Stein
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
-Gloria Steinem
It is an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe
something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations
with all their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.
-Gloria Steinem
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to
combine marriage and career.
-Gloria Steinem
Logic is in the eye of the logician.
-Gloria Steinem
I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people.
I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing
a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an
African painting his face white and praying to a rock.
-Howard Stern
How could the Pat Robertsons and the Pat Buchanans, presuming
to be the spokespeople for God, spew such doctrines of
divisiveness, intolerance and inhumanity? Who is that God?
-Barbara Streisand
There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant
opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion.
Let it once enter into our civil affairs, our government soon would be
destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be
destroyed. Those who made our Constitution saw this, and used the most
apt and comprehensive language in it to prevent such a catastrophe.
-Supreme Court of Wisconsin, Weiss v. District Board, March 18, 1890
I'm convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react
to it. And so it is with you.
-Charles Swindoll
Let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave
of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good.... If a Christian voted
for Clinton, he sinned against God. It's that simple.... Our goal
is a Christian Nation... we have a biblical duty, we are called by
God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't
want Pluralism. We want theocracy. Theocracy means God rules.
I've got a hot flash. God rules.
-Randall Terry, Head of Operation Rescue, from The
News Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Aug 15, 1993
I'm extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end.
-Margaret Thatcher
In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man
--if you want anything done, ask a woman.
-Margaret Thatcher
Creationists have set themselves apart from other Christians
by intimately interweaving their story of the "who" of creation
with the "how" of creation. For them, it is the flat earth
problem all over again.
-Theology Today, October 1982
Have you ever noticed how people who wear camouflage gear really stand out
in a crowd?
-Peter Thomas
There may be Gods, but they care not what men do.
-Henry David Thoreau
I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to
support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster.
-Henry David Thoreau, On the
Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
-Henry David Thoreau
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
-Kelvin Throop, III
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
-James Thurber
Christian doctrine was shredded to pieces by biblical scholars in the 18th
and 19th centuries, but the information didn't get out to the bulk of people
beyond the academic world. With the Information Age, this will all change.
-Farrell Till, The Skeptical Review
Appointed. The Rev. Lloyd John Ogilvie, 64, Presbyterian minister, to the
post of Chaplain of the U.S. Senate. Currently senior pastor of the First
Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, California, Ogilvie is also host of a
daily radio show and a weekly TV program, Let God Love You. His new job
will pay $115,700 a year in taxpayer dollars.
-Time magazine, 6 February 1995
Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces
itself to this: 'Great God, grant that twice two be not four.'
-Ivan Turgenev, 1818-1883, Russian novelist, writer
I believe Christ was a man like ourselves; to look upon
him as God would seem to me the greatest of sacrileges
-Leo Tolstoy
Death is not a period, but a comma in the story of life.
-Amos Traver
More ominously, some antiabortion activists have vandalized and
even bombed abortion facilities. There has been a remarkable, although
not-much-remarked-upon, rise in the incidence of such antiabortion
violence. Since 1977 extremists in the United States have bombed
or set fire to at least 117 clinics and threatened 250 others.
They have invaded some 231 clinics and vandalized 224 others.
-Laurence H. Tribe, Abortion, 1990, page 172
Do you want real TRUTH in capital letters? Then search yourself for
why you believe the things you do. Don't be afraid to analyze why your
religion gives you the high it does. Answer yourself this question: Is
TRUTH important enough for me to give up my religion if that is required?
Until you answer yes to this you are not being honest with yourself.
-Dave Trissel
That's the problem with believing in a supernatural
being. Trying to determine what he wants.
-Councellor Troi, ST:TNG
The world is equally shocked at hearing
Christianity criticized and seeing it practiced.
-Dr. Elton Trueblood
God, we know you are in charge, but why
don't you make it slightly more obvious?
-Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1990, address to students at West Point
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910):
The only people who should use the word 'we' are kings, editors, and
people with tapeworms
-Mark Twain
Man is the only animal that blushes...or needs to.
-Mark Twain
Everything human is pathetic; the secret of humor itself is not joy
but sorrow.
-Mark Twain
It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand
that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
-Mark Twain
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
-Mark Twain
Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.
-Mark Twain
Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print
anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast
-Mark Twain, Reflections on Religion, 1906
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
-Mark Twain
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
-Mark Twain
(The Bible) is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some
clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals;
and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible
is built mainly out of fragments of older Bibles that had their day and
crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily.
Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in
earlier Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one,
and that singular heaven I have told you about.
-Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
-Mark Twain
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
-Mark Twain
Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual
intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven
-Mark Twain
If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian.
-Mark Twain, Notebook
Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet
broke a chain or freed a human soul.
-Mark Twain
Religion consists in a set of things which the average
man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.
Mark Twain
Strange...a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet
preferred to make bad ones; who made them prize their bitter life, yet
stingily cut it short; mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied
seventy times seven and invented Hell; who mouths morals to other people
and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who
created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility
for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs,
upon himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this
poor, abused slave to worship him!
-Mark Twain
'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it
would sound any better if it were true.
-Mark Twain
One who knows others is wise
One who knows himself is enlightened
One who has power over others has physical strength
One who has power over themself is strong
-Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Every time I close the door on reality it comes in
through the windows.
-Jennifer Unlimited
I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes
several days attack me at once.
-Jennifer Unlimited
Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be
expected to appear wherever there is a planet whose conditions
duplicate those of the earth.
-Harold Urey, Time magazine, 24 November 1952
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
-Paul Valery
Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
-Henry Van Dyke
Nothing is more depressing and more illogical than aggressive Christianity.
-Gerald Vann
I'm a born-again atheist.
-Gore Vidal
Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever.
More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than
any other name in the history of the world.
-Gore Vidal, from Secular Humanist Bulletin (Summer 1995)
VOLTAIRE (1694-1778, French philosopher, writer):
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
-Voltaire
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-Voltaire
What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We
are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally
each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature.
-Voltaire
'It is demonstrated,' [Pangloss] said, 'that things cannot be otherwise:
for, since everything was made for a purpose, everything is necessarily
for the best purpose. Note that noses were made to wear spectacles; we
therefore have spectacles. Legs were clearly devised to wear breeches,
and we have breeches. Stones were created to be hewn and made into castles;
[the Baron Thunder-Ten-Tronkh] therefore has a very beautiful castle...'
-Voltaire, Candide
Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer.
(If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.)
-Voltaire
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind
to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
-Voltaire
You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth
of the Church, Rome has always favored the doctrine which most completely
subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason.
-Voltaire
God created sex. Priests created marriage.
-Voltaire
The man who says to me, 'Believe as I do, or God will damn you,'
will presently say, 'Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.'
-Voltaire
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
-Voltaire
Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies.
-Voltaire, on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan.
Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy; the mad daughter of a wise mother.
-Voltaire
"The name of the new religion," said Rumfoord, "is The Church of God
the Utterly Indifferent. . . The two chief teachings of this religion
are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God
Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God."
-Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels grateful and has no one to thank.
-Wendy Ward
Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.
-Andy Warhol
LEMUAL K. WASHBURN (circa 1911):
A dogma will thrive in soil where the truth could not get root.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
If man had no knowledge except what he has got out of the
Bible he would not know enough to make a shoe.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
The day of the Bible is passed. Books have taken its place.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
The original sin was not in eating of the forbidden fruit, but
in planting the tree that bore the fruit.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
The character of God would stand vastly higher in human
estimation if he had visited the garden in which he had placed the
first human pair and picked up the serpent and cast him over the
garden wall before he had a chance to tempt Eve, instead of waiting
until the mischief was done, and then cursing the whole lot for
what he might so easily have prevented.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
The Bible upon which Christianity is founded does not say what Christianity
is, what a Christian is, nor what we must do in order to be a Christian.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911
No church has all the truth, and no school either. So-called
religion merely shows where the search after truth ended. But truth
is the infinite reality,, and it will always be for man to find.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
If God exists, what objection can he have to saying so?
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
Priests will pardon thieves but not philosophers.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
To build one house for man is better than to build a dozen
houses to God.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
It has been discovered that the man who was lost in thought
was not a church member.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
It is a waste of words to talk about God and what he knows and
what he does. No man knows that God does anything, that God knows
anything, or that there is a God.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
What a poor business
Roman Catholicism would do among men if it advertised to save only
those who were temperate, upright, intelligent and moral.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
When christian ministers stand up in their pulpits and say
"Let us pray," if they would sometimes vary the invitation and say:
Let us laugh, they would do their congregations more good.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
God cannot be put into the national Constitution without
putting liberty out of it.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
We do not want holy books, but true ones; not sacred writings,
but sensible writings.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays
Do not thank God for what man does.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911
You cannot stuff your minds with the lives
of saints and grow good on the stuffing.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911
If we do not need to worship God six days in the week
why do we need to worship him on the seventh?
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911
If there were no ministers and no priests, how long would there be any churches?
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911
The truths which God revealed have been overthrown
by the truths which man has discovered.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911
To depend upon God is like holding on to the tail-end of nothing.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth
Reading And Other Essays, 1911
We are told that 'all things are possible with God,'
and yet God cannot boil an egg in cold water.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth
Reading And Other Essays, 1911
The foolish and cruel notion that a wife is to obey her husband
has sent more women to the grave than to the courts for a divorce.
-Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth
Reading And Other Essays, 1911
Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are
caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most
inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes
that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age,
would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that
we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as
to endanger the peace of society.
-George Washington, letter to Edward Newenham, October 20,
1792
There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than
the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every
country the surest basis of public happiness.
-George Washington, address to Congress, 8 January, 1790
I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty
-John Waters
By the cold and religious we were taken in hand -
shown how to feel good; and told to feel bad.
-Roger Waters, from The Final Cut (Pink Floyd)
Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but
a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning
but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
-James Watson, winner of the Nobel prize for
his co-discovery of the structure of DNA
ALAN WATTS:
A short passage from Alan Watts that answers the most vital questions of philosophy using only the simplest metaphors.
Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide;
it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the
world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The images of God that are tangible are not really very dangerous. The dangerous images of God are those that we make, not out of wood and stone, but out of ideas and concepts. Sir Thomas Aquinas, for example, defined God as a necessary being, He who is necessarily. That is a philosophical concept; but that concept is an idol because it confuses God with an idea. Because an idea is abstract it seems much more spiritual than an image made of wood or stone. That's precisely where it becomes deceptive. Many people think that the bible is the authentic word of God and they worship the bible, making it an idol..
-Alan Watts, The Essence of Alan Watts series - GOD
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
-Alan Watts
Nothing fails like success - because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Apart from your brain, or some brain, the world is devoid of light, heat, weight, solidity, motion, space, time, or any other imaginable feature.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
No current will "flow" through a wire until the positive pole is connected with the negative, or, to put it very simply, no current will start unless it has a "point of arrival" apart from which there can never be the "currents" or phenomena of light, heat, weight, hardness, and so forth. One might almost say that the magic of the brain is to evoke these marvels from the universe, as a harpist evokes melody from the silent strings.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth - urgent as they are - will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit. For, as things stand, we have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. Certainly they will supply the immediate jolt of energy and hope that methedrine, and similar drugs, give in extreme fatigue. But peace can only be made by those who are peaceful and love can only be shown by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Faith is always a gamble because life itself is a gambling game with what must appear, in the hiding aspect of the game, to be colossal stakes.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
A double-bind game is a game with self-contradictory rules...The social double-bind game can be phrased in several ways:
The first rule of this game is that it is not a game.
Everyone must play.
You must love us.
You must go on living.
Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.
Control yourself and be natural.
Try to be sincere.
Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
No one can be compelled to behave freely or forced to act independently.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
It comes, then, to this: that to be "viable," livable, or merely practical,
life must be lived as a game - and the "must" here expressed a condition, not a commandment.
It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive with its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents. For to "love your enemies" is to love them as enemies; it is not necessarily a clever device for winning them over to your own side. The lion lies down with the lamb in paradise, but not on earth - "paradise" being the tacit, off-stage level where, behind the scenes, all conflicting parties recognize their interdependence, and, through this recognition, are able to keep their conflicts within bounds.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are - as now practiced - like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life don't seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with the human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda is the worst possible source of control for a powerful technology.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Therefore The Book that I would like to slip to my children would itself be slippery. It would slip them into a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling. It would be a temporary medicine, not a diet; a point of departure, not a perpetual point of reference. They would read it and be done with it, for if it were well and clearly written they would not have to back to it again and again for hidden meanings or for clarification of obscure doctrines.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience - a new feeling of what it is to be "I".
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
If I see first see a tree in winter, I might assume that it is not a fruit-tree. but when I return in the summer to find it covered with plums, I must exclaim, "Excuse me! You were a fruit-tree after all." Imagine, then, that a billion years ago some beings from another part of the galaxy made a tour through the solar system in their flying saucer and found no life. They would dismiss it as "Just a bunch of old rocks!" But if they returned today, they would have to apologize: "Well - you were peopling rocks after all!" You may, of course, argue that there is no analogy between the two situations. The fruit-tree was at one time a seed inside a plum, but the earth - much less the solar system or the galaxy - was never a seed inside a person. But, oddly enough, you would be wrong.-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Our whole knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. For knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain: we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its structure.
-Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
And all the good you've done will soon be swept away,
You've begun to matter more than the things you say
-Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber, Jesus Christ Superstar
The United States is not a Christian nation. It is a great nation
with Christians, among others, in it. But our greatness is based
on the fact that there is no official religion.
-Sen. Lowell Weicker
Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real
life.
-Simone Weil
When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.
-Mae West (1892-1980)
It's better to be looked over than over-looked.
-Mae West
In spite of illness, in spite of even the archenemy sorrow, one CAN
remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is
unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in
big things and happy in small ways.
-Edith Wharton.
When I tell people here in France that one of every three Americans has had
a personal conversation with Jesus Christ, they think it's an insane asylum.
And they think you must be talking about certain unenlightened farmers or
very old people. You tell them, no it's corporation presidents, members of
Congress, presidents of universities --they're all "born again." Then they're
totally shocked. It's what makes America very different from any of the other
Western democracies....That kind of large admixture of irrationality into a
modern society is a very dangerous combination that doesn't bode well...
-Edmund White, writer for Atlanta's Etcetera Magazine
The total absence of humour in the Bible is one
of the most singular things in all literature
-Alfred North Whitehead
The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.
-Katharine Whitehorn
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
-Dr. Who
OSCAR WILDE (playwright, 1854-1900):
A thing is not necessarily true
because a man dies for it.
-Oscar Wilde
Truth in matters of religion, is simply opinion that has survived.
-Oscar Wilde
Happiness is not something you experience, it is something you
remember
-Oscar Wilde
Religions die when they are proved to be true.
Science is the record of dead religions.
-The Oscariana of Oscar Fingall O'Flaherty
Will Wilde,1856-1900, for George Bernard Shaw
Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.
-Oscar Wilde
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
-Oscar Wilde
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
-Oscar Wilde
There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.
-Oscar Wilde
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
-Oscar Wilde
The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
-Oscar Wilde
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
-Oscar Wilde
An ordinary man away from home giving advice.
-Oscar Wilde (on experts)
I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.
-Oscar Wilde
Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
-Oscar Wilde
The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.
-Oscar Wilde
The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
-Oscar Wilde
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance
-Oscar Wilde
Of course, the United States was not originally intended to be a Christian
nation. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and most of the founding fathers
were skeptics or Deists; they specifically intended a secular government
with an unbreachable wall between church and state; they even wrote into
the treaty with the Moslem nation of Tripoli a clear statement that, unlike
European countries, the United States is not, in any sense, a Christian
nation. (So clearly understood was the principle of separation of church
and state in those days that the treaty passed Congress without any debate
on that clause, and President John Adams signed it at once, without any
fear that it might jeopardize his political future.)
-Robert Anton Wilson, Sex and Drugs, 1973
Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar
situation here on this planet, it is because they have
accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies
are the modern from of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.
-Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, 1991
I think--therefore I'm single.
-Lizz Winstead
If God had really intended men to fly, he'd make it easier to get to the airport.
-George Winters
When we make mistakes they call it evil.
When God makes mistakes they call it Nature!
-Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick
A cult is a religion with no political power
-Tom Wolfe
[I]n 1776 perhaps 15 percent of all colonists were regular churchgoers.
-Forrest G. Woods, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity
and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the
Twentieth Century, 1990, p. 247
In the year before the schism, 25,000 communicants owned 208,000 slaves -
over 9 percent of the total slave population - and 1,200 Methodist clergymen
were themselves slaveholders. If anyone needed a barometer to measure the
southern Methodist's official commitment to bondage he had only to consider
the fact that every minister elevated to the rank of bishop in the Methodist
Episcopal Church, South, between 1846 and the Civil War was a slaveholder
-Forrest G. Woods, on the division of the Methodist Episcopalian
Church of 1844, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race
in America from the Colonia Era to the Twentieth Century, p.309]
[Fundamentalists] never wonder why, if herpes is sent by
'god' to scourge "adulterers," whooping cough and measles
weren't purposely created to lambaste children.
-Fred Woodworth
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Black holes are where God divided by zero.
-Steven Wright
I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it.
-Steven Wright
Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
-Stephen Wright
I was walking down the street wearing glasses when the prescription ran out.-Steven Wright
We are god because only we can create his existence within our minds.
-Yello
Let us start a new religion with one commandment, 'Enjoy thyself.'
-Israel Zangwill
The only difference between a cult and a religion
is the amount of real estate they own.
-Frank Zappa
Your mouth is your religion; you put
your faith in a hole like that?
-Frank Zappa
Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned --
I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you
exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to
share your dogma, rapture or necrodestination.
-Frank Zappa
What was it that Adam ate that he wasn't supposed to eat? It wasn't
just an apple - it was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil. The subtle message? Get smart and I'll fuck you over -- sayeth
the Lord. God is the smartest -- and he doesn't want any competion. Is
this not an absolutely anti-intellectual religion?
-Frank Zappa
Many men go into the ministry not only for the power trip involved, but
also so that they will never have to be interrupted or contradicted.
-Frank Zindler, Dial An Atheist, 1990, p. 170
Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity --
famine, earthquake, and plague -- led to mass conversions,
another indirect influence by which epidemic diseases contributed
to the destruction of classical civilization. Christianity owes
a formidable debt to bubonic plague and to smallpox, no less than
to earthquake and volcanic eruptions.
-Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, 1934
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
-Emile Zola (1840-1902)
UNKNOWN:
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
Explaining the unknown by means of the unobservable
is always a perilous business.
All general statements are false.
freethinker n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of
reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief.
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God:
this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand
The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be
amused.
I am playing a game of imagination using reality's rules.
You never leave the places that you love. You go away, taking a part
of them along and leaving a part of you behind
The light at the end of the tunnel is that of an oncoming train.
(capsule description on Christianity) God had to kill himself to appease himself, so that he wouldn't have to roast us (his beloved creations) alive
for all eternity, except that he didn't really die.
Hate: the fear of not being loved
A committee is a group of people who, individually, can do nothing,
but collectively can meet and decide that nothing can be done.
Hurry? I have no time to hurry!
Ironically, the only constant in life is change.
If the Bible proves that God exists, then comic books prove the existence of Superman.
People who think they know everything are very irritating to those of
us that do.
Most of the world is asleep; only a few are awake, but the few are
constantly amazed.
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other
The obvious is the last thing we see, think, or do
You can hardly make a friend in a year, but you can lose one in an
hour.
In complete darkness, we are all the same. It's only our knowledge
and wisdom that separate us. Don't let your eyes deceive you.
On the sixth day God created man
On the seventh day, man returned the favor.
Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day;
Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish
Christ died for my sins, descended into Hell, and rose again
On the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures...
And all I got was this lousy t-shirt.
Man created God in his own image.
Theology: The study of elaborate verbal disguises for non-ideas.
Belief in heaven is very difficult without
a greedy desire for it: All scams need a hook.
Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which
you really stop to look fear in the face
Jealousy comes more from self-love than true love.
Fear is the darkroom where negatives are developed.
He who knows not and knows not he knows not, he is a fool. Shun
him.
He who knows not and knows he knows not, he is simple. Teach
him.
He who knows and knows not he knows, he is asleep. Wake him.
He who knows and knows he knows, he is wise. Follow him.
You cannot deal with the serious things in life until you understand
the amusing
People accept the absurd because they're used to it
Those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for
illness.
Do not follow where the path may lead. Instead, go where there is no
path, and make a trail.
The human mind is like a parachute: it only functions when open
It's not tragic to die doing something you love
He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
The greatest thing about being apathetic is that you don't have to
exert yourself to prove you're sincere.
Since the Bible and the church are obviously mistaken in telling us
where we came from, how can we trust them to tell us where we are going?
If you don't stand up for something, you're liable to fall for
anything
Why tip-toe through life to arrive safely at death?
Whenever I think of how religion started, I picture some frustrated
old man making out a list of all the ways he could gain power, until
he finally came up with the great solution of constant fear and guilt,
then he leaped up and started planning a new wardrobe.
Moses: the self-proclaimed meekest of all men even though he allegedly
spoke face to face with God and gave us the so-called Ten Commandments
(though they aren't really ten in number); the man who wrote (or
edited) the account of his own death and burial; the man who --
according to himself -- was God's spokesperson in the same way that
Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, -- and a parcel of others --
claim to speak for God.
Christianity answers difficult questions and unthinkable fears:
Ask Questions and Religion Responds:
I don't like to be afraid. Just believe and God will love you.
I'm all alone. God loves us and thinks were special
Why do bad things happen? God works in mysterious ways
But what do I do? Do as you would want to be done to you
Why bother doing anything? Heaven is the reward
My life is worthless. God has a plan for you
But I don't understand. Have faith.
Religion will answer any question and maybe if you are lucky, you
may live your whole life never fearing or questioning anything.
A person with imagination is not alone.
Accept your limitations, then go beyond.
When you aim for perfection, you discover it is a moving target
You can't direct the wind, but you can adjust the sails
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred
days of sorrow.
Question reality
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