====================================================== | Paul Morrison's Page of Collected Internet Quotes | ====================================================== | The latest version can always be found at: | | http://users.iafrica.com/p/pf/pfm/squotes.txt | ====================================================== Welcome to my collection of serious quotes harvested from the internet. These are the quotes that are not intended for humorous purposes, but rather to make you think. Feedback can be sent to paulmorrison@gmail.com Some quotes are actually a sequence of posts and replies from newsgroups, in this situation the hierarchy of the posts is indicated by the default '>' character, and combinations thereof. Please remember that I have copied the quotes exactly. The spelling mistakes contained below are the original words used. Its knot me hew is a badd spelur. The newest quotes appear at the top of this page. Last updated 30 April 2008 ======================================================================= "I don’t care what your religion is, if your holy book contradicts everything we know about reality, I pick reality." - Phil Plait "Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by so doing generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it." - Bertrand Russell, from the introduction to "History of Western Philosophy" "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. The quotations, when engraved upon the memory, give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more." - Winston Churchill "Thinking critically is a chore. It does not come naturally or easily. And if the fruits of such efforts are not carefully displayed to young minds, then they will not harvest them. Every school child must be implanted with the wonder of the atom, not the thrall of magic." - Perry DeAngelis "Astrology is as vacuous as the space it worships." - Perry DeAngelis ""Spirituality" is what cretins have in place of imagination. If you've ever described yourself as "quite spiritual", do civilisation a favour and punch yourself in the throat until you're incapable of speaking aloud ever again. Why should your outmoded codswallop be treated with anything other than the contemptuous mockery it deserves?" - Charles Brooker "Men never do evil so cheerfully and so completely as when they do so from religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal "My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven’t elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don’t miss it." - Christopher Hitchens "No religion should be respected. Some don't even deserve to be tolerated." - P.Z. Myers "If your religion says that you have the right to kill anyone who criticizes your religion - fuck your religion." - Ed Brayton "Please, please stop quoting the pope. No one should care what the cranky, irrelevant figurehead for an obsolete superstitious dogma says about science — he's no more a knowledgeable authority on this matter than RuPaul, and it doesn't matter which of them has the more fabulous wardrobe. Seriously, he's nothing but a sour old man yelling at those damn kids to get off his lawn." - P.Z. Myers "The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species." - Christopher Hitchens "if it weren't for religion Christopher Columbus would have landed on the moon." - Unknown "Religion poisons everything." - Christopher Hitchens "I hate ending up in scraps with nice Anglicans and thoughtful Catholics because the Church of England and intelligent Catholicism are not the problem. They are the best kind of Christians, but the best lack all conviction. It is the worst who are full of passionate intensity. Look at the evangelical movement in America, and to some extent, now, here. Look at the Religious Right in Israel. Look at fundamentalist Islam. What they share, what drives them, the tiger in their tanks, is an absolute, unshakeable belief in an ever-present divinity, with plans for nations that He communicates to the leaders, or would-be leaders, of nations. They are the very devil, these people, they could wreck our world, and their central belief in God's plan has to be confronted. Confronted with passion. Confronted because, and on the ground that, it is not true." - Matthew Parris "I mail myself a copy of the Constitution every morning just on the hope they'll open it and see what it says." - Bill Maher, regarding the US government reading everyone's e-mails "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan "Given the astounding number of galaxies and potential worlds arrayed overhead, the complexities of life on earth and the advances in our ethical discourse over the last 2,000 years, the world's religions offer a view of reality that is now so utterly impoverished as to scarcely constitute a view of reality at all." - Sam Harris "The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. 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 "My talk at McGill was greeted, like several others, with a reassuringly wholehearted, and almost universal, standing ovation. I am under no illusions that I deserve these enthusiastic receptions personally, or that they reflect the quality of my own performance as a speaker. On the contrary, I am convinced that they represent an overflowing of bottled-up frustration, from masses of decent people pushed to breaking point and heartily sick of the sycophantic ‘respect’ that our society, even secular society, routinely and thoughtlessly accords religious faith. Time after time, people in the signing queues thank me for doing no more than say in public what they have, in private, long wanted to say, and probably could say more eloquently than I can." - Richard Dawkins "Constitutions are chains with which men bind themselves in their sane moments that they may not die by a suicidal hand in the day of their frenzy." - John Stockton "The Bible is an ethical disaster area with islands of decent morality dotted about here and there." - Richard Dawkins "You think the guy who curtly dismisses an absurd claim that Jesus is going to magically destroy Christianity's enemies is the one who sounds unreasonable? Well, you're in big trouble now. I have an enchanted pig that breathes fire, and all I have to do is finish counting the grains of sand in the shell of a perfect razor clam, and he will be unleashed to eradicate mine wicked foes. Go ahead, try to convince me it won't happen." - P.Z. Myers "Do me a favor. It's a big favor, and we need everyone to join in. Next time your brother, or your sister-in-law, or your grandmother, or some guy in the booth next to you at the coffeeshop, starts talking about the Rapture or the End Times or the Second Coming or whatever crap they want to call it, just stand up, turn to them, and say loudly and clearly so everyone around you can hear it, YOU ARE A DEMENTED FUCKWIT. And walk away. Treat them as the pariahs they should be. This will be especially effective if you do it in your church." - P.Z. Myers, losing his temper somewhat "A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read." - Mark Twain "If you would not be forgotten, As soon as you are dead and rotten, Either write things worthy of reading, Or do things worth the writing." - Benjamin Franklin "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony "I also wonder if showing respect for all beliefs is causing more problems than it’s avoiding. The only thing that keeps most people from acting on their absurd beliefs is the fear that other people will treat them like frickin’ retards. Mockery is an important social tool for squelching stupidity. At least that’s what I tell people after I mock them. Or to put it another way, I’ve never seen anyone change his mind because of the power of a superior argument or the acquisition of new facts. But I’ve seen plenty of people change behavior to avoid being mocked." - Scott Adams "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato "Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation." - Johnny Hart "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 "If being offended is such a necessity to your enjoyment of life or your sense of self, think about the censorship you implicitly advocate. Consider that you may not be the one who gets to decide what is offensive and should be banned. Maybe it will be me. I guarantee you wouldn't like it." - Marlene Arpe, an atheist, discussing the muslim cartoon riots "I happen to think religion is destructive, oppressive and overburdened by silly hats. I also think the only reason Christianity has more adherents and respectability than, say, the Raelians or the Scientologists, is that the Christians came along first." - Marlene Arpe "Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don't." - Richard Dawkins "Global warming is not speculative. It threatens us enough so that it should be considered a national security issue. Failing to warn the citizens of a looming weapon of mass destruction - and that's what global warming is - in order to protect oil company profits, well, that fits, for me, the definition of treason." - Bill Maher "I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil -- you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself." - Dan Barker "I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." - Robert Heinlein "Learning isn't a means to an end; it is an end in itself." - Robert Heinlein "Belief gets in the way of learning." - Robert Heinlein "God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent — it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love (1973) "Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love (1973) "Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love (1973) "Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love (1973) "A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual"—find out how he feels about astrology." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love (1973) "A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity." - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love (1973) "The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed." - Robert Heinlein, Revolt in 2100 (1953), postscript "The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history." - Robert Heinlein "Without [religion] you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion." - Stephen Weinberg "Nobody should ever call Dawkins arrogant. On the scale established by American televangelists, by Christians in general, he is a timid model of bashful humility. Pit a man who works for his knowledge, who willingly tests and reviews it continually, against a mob who trusts in revealed knowledge dogmatically, and I'll tell you who the arrogant ones are." - P.Z. Myers, responding to claims that Richard Dawkins is too arrogant "Religion is a clumsy farrago of myths and wishful thinking and old traditions which is irrelevant to our understanding of reality, and in fact often impedes our understanding. We lose nothing if it goes away. As people recognize its lack of utility, something that often (but not necessarily) happens as we learn more about science, it fades away. It's like Santa Claus -- as we learned more about how the real world works and how our parents fulfill all the roles of the fat old myth, we don't mind seeing it go away." - P.Z. Myers "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." - H.L. Mencken "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 "When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One’s convictions should be proportional to one’s evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn’t—indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable—is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and refused to make them his own." - Sam Harris "Quoting the bible doesn't count as thinking" - Aaron Farber, from his webcomic Men In Hats "Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Rennaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can." - Peter Atkins "I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programs a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature, to which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the almighty, always quote beautiful things, they always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old, and I reply and say, "Well presumably the god you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful god with that action, and therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing." - David Attenborough "... I must caution you: don't get so enchanted with what I write or say that you automatically accept and believe it. Test it, question it, as you should all such material. Yes, I think I'm right most of the time when it comes to my subjects of expertise, but I'm fallible, as well. When I meet a person who enthusiastically states, "I'm a skeptic, too!" I often say, "I doubt that," just to keep in character and in practice!" - James Randi "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." - Albert Einstein "Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." - Bertrand Russell "Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain "One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." - James Watson "You see these dictators up on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. They're afraid of words and thought. ... They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words. ... A state of society where men may not speak their mind -- where children denounce their parents to the police -- where a businessman or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinion. Such a state of society cannot long endure if it is continually in contact with the healthy outside world." - Winston Churchill, comparing Nazism and Democracy "Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought." - Graham Greene "Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." - Benjamin Franklin "If we do not believe in freedom of expression for those we despise we do not believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky "As near as I can tell, the Culture of Life is one in which profoundly brain-damaged people must be kept alive at any cost, against their expressed wishes, abortions must be stopped while access to birth control and sex education must be limited, stem cell research must be made illegal no matter how many lives it could save, people must not be allowed to choose euthanasia over prolonged and painful death, various Iraqis and others of "those people" must be slaughtered and/or tortured, the mentally retarded, mentally ill, children and various and sundry other people...I mean nonhumans must be put to death to teach them a lesson so they don't do THAT again...I don't know. The irony seems to escape Mr. Bush." - Amanda Lowery "If atheism is a religion bald is a hair colour." - Martin Willett "Creation scientists use science like a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination. Any finding that can be bent to suggest support for biblical concepts is grasped eagerly, anything that is in contradiction to the Bible is wrong and can be shelved, until it proves useful in showing up the contradictions and inconsistencies in the “creed” of the enemy." - Martin Willett "Faith and science go together as comfortably as Judaism and pig breeding." - Martin Willett "The Ku Klux Klan see the rise of the black man as a threat to the white race. I see the rise of the poor of all creeds and colours as a challenge to our civilization. A challenge that can be met, but only as long as we see the real enemies; religion, intolerance, tribalism, nationalism, jealousy, superstition. The smart suited white Mormon is more of a threat than the hard working Nigerian. The lapsed Jewish lawyer is much less of a threat than the Catholic housewife who has a baby every year for the Pope. Race is a minor issue, culture matters." - Martin Willett ""Aliens of the Deep" is a convincing demonstration of Darwin's theory of evolution, since it shows creatures not only adapted perfectly to their environment but obviously generated by that environment. It drives me crazy when people say evolution is "only a theory," since that reveals they don't know what a scientific theory is. As the National Geographic pointed out only a month ago, a theory is a scientific hypothesis that is consistent with observed and experimental data, and the observations and experiments must be able to be repeated. Darwin passes that test. His rival, creationism, is not a theory, but a belief. There is a big difference." - Roger Ebert "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot "If intelligent design is creation theory, it's creation theory through a P.C. filter. It's like teaching that babies are delivered either by storks or ladies, while swapping out the word "stork" for "some bird" just to make it sound objective." - Jonathan Morris "[...] just because a question can be asked, it doesn't mean there's an answer." - Richard Dawkins "Ignorance is unfortunate, but willful ignorance is shameful." - Unknown "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." - H.L. Mencken " ... the reason the concept of God doesn't resonate with me is because I find it to be utterly useless for explaining or understanding anything." - Robert Carroll "You are not the one beautiful and unique snowflake who, unlike the rest of us, doesn't have to go through the tedious and difficult process of science in order to establish the truth. You're as foolable as anyone else. And since you have taken no precautions to avoid fooling yourself, the self-evident fact that countless millions of humans before you have also fooled themselves leads me to the parsimonious belief that you have too." - Daniel Rutter, responding to someone convinced of the results of a non-scientific test "I realized early on that it is detailed scientific knowledge which makes certain religious beliefs untenable. A knowledge of the true age of the earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do." - Francis Crick "I think it's important to realize that when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong." - Richard Dawkins "And I'm not anti-Christian -- I'm anti Christianity, anti all superstition. You seem to be suffering from the same misapprehension that affects many people: Being "tolerant" does not demand that I accept your beliefs as true, merely that I accept your right to believe them. Intolerance is banning your religion and forbidding it from being practiced, which is something I would never, ever call for. Naming all religion as mythology is not intolerance." - MaryAnn Johanson, responding to someone taking offense at her attitude towards religion "There's no reason or logic to it. But I guess once you start talking to an invisible superhero who lives in the sky and can see you all the time -- even in the bathroom -- reason and logic kinda go out the window." - MaryAnn Johanson, reviewing _The Passion Of The Christ_ "All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it's exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe -- almost worship -- this flooding of the chest with ecstatic wonder, that modern science can provide. And it does so beyond the wildest dreams of saints and mystics. The fact that the supernatural has no place in our explanations, in our understanding of so much about the universe and life, doesn't diminish the awe. Quite the contrary. The merest glance through a microscope at the brain of an ant or through a telescope at a long-ago galaxy of a billion worlds is enough to render poky and parochial the very psalms of praise." - Richard Dawkins "People who seek power tend to share the same sort of nature regardless of the grounds on which they feel they deserve power - be they religious, democratic, utopian, military etcetera." - Brendan Nelson "Religion can be harmless crazy nonsense as long as it exists under an overarching framework of secularism and rationalism. Or, to put it less politely, as long as it's nothing but a sideshow taking place at the margins of "normal" society, then we can all relax. But if that secular framework is removed and religion is allowed to assume the status it once had here in Western Europe, then it instantly transforms from something that's interesting but a bit crazy to something that is immensely dangerous." - Brendan Nelson "Ecumenism across religions is predicated on the idea that religion is harmless crazy nonsense. In fact religion is crazy dangerous nonsense. I think freedom from religion is a much better idea than freedom of religion." - William T. Goodall "God hates lies. Which is ironic because he is one. But that kind of hypocrisy doesn't bother him." - Richard Herring "An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup" - H.L. Mencken "What I find disappointing about most religious beliefs is that they are a kind of statement of contempt for nature and reality. It's absurdly hubristic. It holds the myths of a few thousand years above nature's many billion-yeared journey. It says reality is inferior and less satisfying than the stories we make up." - Ann Druyan "SETI is a statement. We might not be doing much, but it's all we can do, and we're doing it." - Terry Pratchett "Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." - Arthur C. Clarke "If the continued existence of the creationists' God depends on our ignorance of the world, no wonder creationists are trying to stifle science." - Sandy Harcourt "All pseudoscience is homeopathic: the less content it has, the more popular it is." - Phil Plait "I love the Pope, I love seeing him in his Pope-Mobile, his three feet of bullet proof plexi-glass. That's faith in action folks! You know he's got God on his side." - Bill Hicks "If the FBI's motivating factor for busting down the Koresh compound was child abuse, how come we never see Bradley tanks smashing into Catholic churches?" - Bill Hicks "I love talking about the Kennedy assasination. The reason I do is because I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated that our government could lie to us so blatantly, so obviously for so long, and we do absolutely nothing about it. I think that's interesting in what is ostensibly a democracy. Sarcasm - come on in. People say "Bill, quit talking about Kennedy man. It was a long time ago, just let it go, alright? It's a long time ago, just forget it." I'm like, alright, then don't bring up Jesus to me. As long as we're talking shelf life here..." - Bill Hicks "We gotta come to some new ideas about life folks ok? I'm not being blase about abortion, it might be a real issue, it might not, doesn't matter to me. What matters is that if you believe in the sanctity of life then you believe it for life of all ages. That's what I hate about this child-worship syndrome going on. "Save the children! They're killing children! How many children were at Waco? They're killing children!" What does that mean? They reach a certain age and they're off your fucking love-list? Fuck your children, if that's the way you think then fuck you too. You either love all people of all ages or you shut the fuck up." - Bill Hicks "Gods are children's blankets that get carried over into adulthood." - James Randi "To lie to the American people about the reasons for going to war, while certainly not as serious as lying about a blow job (clearly an impeachable offence) is surely not ok now is it? Or did I miss something on Fox News? ("A great little news station." J. Goebbels.)" - Eric Idle "Talking of which there is an extraordinary statement from Rumsfeld in the papers today. "We are going to outlast them!" he claims proudly. I bet it sounds better in the original German. Sometimes he has all the clarity of the National Socialist Party. Of course you're not going to outlast them, they live there. I'm reminded of the boast of Adolph's that the Third Reich will last a thousand years. (Close. It was actually twelve.)" - Eric Idle "Terrorism can never defeat America. Only America can defeat America. Bad choices, bad decisions, misleading the public for private reasons into public policy, spurning Allies, recklessly discarding statecraft and international treaties, and asserting dubious pre-emptive policy rights while denying International Courts of Justice, all these things can weaken America." - Eric Idle "When did we get so thin-skinned that any depiction of the president short of idolatry is "anti-American?" What happened to our sense of humor?" - Roger Ebert "The Second Law of Thermodynamics does not refute the theory of evolution. It does, however, refute the theory of God." - Unknown "We are all atheists, some of us just believe in fewer gods than others. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen Roberts "The consequences of people believing in astrology, or E-ray jugglers, or rod swingers, or crystal healers or whatever, is that we'll have a society where people can't tell the difference between knowledge and ignorance. That's a serious problem for democracy, because if people can't tell the difference between knowledge and ignorance, and can't tell when it is legitimate to claim that you know something, then they are open to political manipulation, to swindlers and frauds." - Mogens Niss "As an atheist I frequently feel under fire for being somehow "harsh" on religious people. I look back at human history and consider the violence and death that followers of these variously delusional creeds have visited upon heretics, blasphemers and scholars throughout the ages, and I have to say with some confidence - religious people are getting an easy ride considering what they did during the period for which they held the balance of power on this planet. I will therefore not moderate my atheist views. Especially when our planet stands on the brink of a medieval-style religious war." - Brendan Nelson "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. I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious. I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty... I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect. I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech... I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run. I believe in the reality of progress. I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant" - H.L. Mencken "The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human." - Aldous Huxley "One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up." - George Orwell "History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again." - Carl Sagan "Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck the government."" - Lenny Bruce "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it" - Mark Twain "Combat is what I've been trained for. I can command my vehicle. I can keep it from being attacked. What I have not been trained to do is look over my shoulder to see whether an American is shooting at me." - Steven Gerrard, British Lance Corporal, on a "friendly fire" incident "I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time." - Isaac Asimov "You will find men like him in all of the world's religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now." - Arthur C. Clarke "I have encountered a few 'creationists' and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad, or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created that whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading mankind?" - Arthur C. Clarke "Truth in matters of religion is simply the opinion that has survived." - Oscar Wilde "It is contended by many that ours is a Christian government, founded upon the Bible, and that all who look upon that book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemnly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah." - Robert Ingersoll "If we read in the annals of China that several thousand years ago, five thousand people were fed on one sandwich, and that several sandwiches were left over after the feast, there are few intelligent men who would credit the statement. But many intelligent people, reading a like story in Hebrew, or in Greek, or in a mistranslation from either of those languages, accept the story without a doubt." - Robert Ingersoll "The poor African that pours out his heart to his deity of stone is on an exact religious level with the robed priest who supplicates his god. The same mistake, the same superstition, bends the knees and shuts the eyes of both. Both ask for supernatural aid, and neither has the slightest thought of the absolute uniformity of nature." - Robert Ingersoll "The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the Christian religion was born." - 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 "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 "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 "In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." - Carl Sagan "If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? ... Is he maneuvering to maximize David Attenborough's television ratings?" - Richard Dawkins "I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world." - Richard Dawkins "VS Naipaul has described the religious impulse as the inability "to contemplate man as man", responsible to himself and uncosseted by a higher power. We may consider this a weakness; Bush, dangerously, considers it a strength." - Martin Amis "Although there is no Bible on Capitol Hill written in the blood of George Bush, we are obliged to accept the fact that Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive. We hear about the successful "Texanisation" of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?" - Martin Amis "I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition and that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s). Further, devils, demons, angels and saints are myths; there is no life after death, no heaven or hell; the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and 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 "We look at the ancient Greeks with their gods on a mountain top throwing lightning bolts and say, 'Those ancient Greeks. They were so silly. So primitive and naive. Not like our religions. We have burning bushes talking to people and guys walking on water. We're ...sophisticated.'" - Paul Provenza "I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself." - Christopher Hitchens "Some parents don’t teach their children about Santa because they don’t want to lie to them. They are afraid that this teaches kids that authority figures can lie to them. Interestingly, I feel this is exactly why you SHOULD teach kids about Santa. If she hasn’t been inoculated by figuring out that there’s no “Santa”, “Easter Bunny”, “Tooth Fairy”, or “Yoda”, how will my poor darling do when she has to figure out if there is a “God”" - Jeff Vogel "Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits." - Dan Barker "You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that _we_ are the ones that need help?" - Dan Barker "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 "The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed Christian notions." - Dan Barker "There is considerable fun to be had devising a religion. I recommend it." - Iain Banks "If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists. But if I say something insulting about Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouchability is something religions have been allowed to get away with for too long." - Richard Dawkins "To say that 'God made the world' is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance." - Peter Atkins "I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren't, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection." - Natalie Angier "I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control." - Forrest Ackerman "Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one." - Richard Dawkins "The universe is under no obligation to be stuck in our little boxes." - Phil Plait "Death is a part of life, and pretending that the dead are gathering in a television studio in New York to talk twaddle with a former ballroom-dance instructor is an insult to the intelligence and humanity of the living." - Michael Shermer, criticising "psychic" John Edward "Facts seldom interfere with belief." - James Randi "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt "everyone in the u.s should leave the u.s for a while, just to see how things are done elsewhere. you'd be surprised at how sane and reasonable so many other countries happen to be." - Moby "hey, here's a novel idea...what if every religious leader on the face of the earth renounced violence in all of its forms? people would still be violent, but at least then they wouldn't be able to justify it in the name of religion. just a thought." - Moby "In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chances of theism's truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else." - H.P. Lovecraft, exactly describing my own point of view "I certainly can't see any sensible position to assume aside from that of complete scepticism tempered by a leaning toward that which existing evidence makes most probable. All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality, exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine." - H.P. Lovecraft "My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment." - Albert Einstein "Science reveals where religion conceals." - Peter Atkins "It's often said that people 'need' something more in their lives than just the material world. There is a gap that must be filled. People need to feel a sense of purpose...You don't have to be a scientist - you don't have to play the bunsen burner - in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture." - Richard Dawkins "I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, "It is a matter of faith, and above reason."" - John Locke "Where church and state are entwined people are forced by the government to believe these things. Be thankful that in America we have separation of church and state." - G. Vincent Runyon, written 1959, and sadly no longer completely true "It's not anti-US, it's anti bullshit, and the US just happens to be the world's biggest bullshit exporters this year." - Charlie Bell "Life is wasted on the living." - Douglas Adams "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." - Douglas Adams "Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error." - Marcus Cicero "To disregard what the world thinks of us is not only arrogant but utterly shameless." - Marcus Cicero "All things tend to corrupt perverted minds." - Marcus Cicero "The more laws, the less justice." - Marcus Cicero "I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know." - Marcus Cicero "The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult." - Winston Churchill "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." - Winston Churchill "By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none." - Charlie Chaplin "I don't believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career." - Charlie Chaplin "I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician." - Charlie Chaplin "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." - Carl Jung "No one has any rights about me except me." - Bette Davis "I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse." - Isaac Asimov "I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself." - Isaac Asimov "My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job that he isn't worth discussing." - Isaac Asimov "I am prejudiced against religion because I know the history of religion, and it is the history of human misery and of black crimes." - Isaac Asimov "Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know -- and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know -- even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction -- than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too." - Isaac Asimov "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." - Isaac Asimov "Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centures since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes." - Isaac Asimov "Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition." - Isaac Asimov "Science can be introduced to children well or poorly. If poorly, children can be turned away from science; they can develop a lifelong antipathy; they will be in a far worse condition than if they had never been introduced to science at all." - Isaac Asimov "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." - Isaac Asimov "There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." - Isaac Asimov "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'" - Isaac Asimov "It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety." - Isaac Asimov "I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." - Isaac Asimov "Plausible impossibilities should be preferred to unconvincing possibilities." - Aristotle "Education is the best provision for old age." - Aristotle "The US public---naive and obedient as always--blithely sucked up the maudlin flag-waving and crocodile tears that accompanied the passage of the Patriot Act and the Office of Homeland Security. Authorities can now invade homes without warrants, arrest people without charges, and jail people without trials." - Kevin Tuma "I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams "All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others." - Douglas Adams "Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful." - V.S. Naipaul "I get restless when real science is evoked in the name of pseudoscience, but, hey, that's just me." - Roger Ebert "...the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..." - John Adams "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." - Albert Einstein "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." - Albert Einstein "You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question." - Albert Camus "Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant or enemy, must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves." - Aesop "Please all, and you will please none." - Aesop "Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own." - Aesop "We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified." - Aesop "Collect every piece of wisdom you can find, then do it your own way!" - David Brin "And, I've pointed out that there are two quite different types of faith: blind faith requires only need, the other kind requires evidence. I have great faith in the Sun showing up tomorrow morning because evidence — my experiences, some 27,073 of them to date — have established for me that it's quite probable that the event will occur. For other, but just as compelling reasons, I do not expect that Sophia Loren will be awaiting me this weekend." - James Randi "Science is what you know, Philosophy is what you don't know." - Bertrand Russell "Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, sometimes I think we aren't: in both cases, the idea makes me dizzy." - Arthur C. Clarke "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." - Winston Churchill "If you can't be funny, be interesting." - Harold Ross "Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy." - Wendell Berry "We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." - Carl Sagan "The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on nothing; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing and admits of no conclusion." - Thomas Paine "Freedom of Press is limited to those who own one." - H.L. Mencken "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news." - A.J. Liebling "Nearly any man can stand adversity, but if you want to test his charactrer, give him power." - Abraham Lincoln "It used to be the custom in this country that when you had made a career and were mature in judgment, you went to the Senate to give something back to the Republic. The idea that at age 25 you go out and buy a blow dryer and starting running for office is not what the founders had in mind." - Gore Vidal "Politics is like being a football coach. You've got to be smart enough to play the game and dumb enough to think it is important." - Eugene McCarthy "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." - G.K. Chesterton "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and thus clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H.L. Mencken "When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my own country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable." - Thomas Merton "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering "Patriotism is the conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." - George Bernard Shaw "Moderation in temper is always a virtue. But moderation in principle is always a vice." - Thomas Paine "I am insulted by the persistent asertion that I want war. Am I a fool? War! It would settle nothing." - Adolph Hitler, in 1933 "Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching." - Satchel Paige "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin "The saddest epitaph which can be carved in the memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time." - Thomas Jefferson "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." - Albert Einstein "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." - Albert Einstein "History is the sum total of the things they're not telling us." - Don DeLillo "If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops." - Kelvin Throop "When it shall be said in any country in the world, 'My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive' -- when these thing can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and government." - Thomas Paine "The police state that politicians are building isn't some cartoony reproduction of Nazi Germany; it's an America of the future that looks much like the United States of today, but works as if the whole country has been turned into an airport security checkpoint. It'll be like Mexico, with everybody averting their eyes as the cops stroll by, but with better plumbing. It's a country that has a familiar flag, regular elections and outraged civil liberties columnists, but where it's easier than ever to get yourself arrested for things that our parents wouldn't have considered crimes - or just for annoying the wrong people. Yes, America is becoming a police state. But unless you pay attention, you might not notice until it's too late." - J.D. Tuccille "I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability." - Oscar Wilde "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." - Mark Twain "It is my impression that the Capitol is now rather more like the Kremlin during Stalin's feisty reign than a place where the citizens used to wander about and feel at home . . . We have made so many enemies all around the world that, in the name of terrorism, a quite effective police state has ever so gradually replaced the old republics. . . When the people dislike the state as much as the state dislikes them, what happens next?" - Gore Vidal "Freedom is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear." - George Orwell "Those who want the government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide." - Harry Truman "History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." - Abba Eban "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." - Anatole France "If fascism came to America it would be on a program of Americanism" - Huey Long "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essense, is fascism -- ownerhips of government by an indiviual, by a group, or any controlling private power." - Franklin D. Roosevelt "Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim" - George Santayana "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason" - Benjamin Franklin "I've opened my heart to the benign indifference of the universe" - Albert Camus "We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both" - Louis Brandeis "Danger lies not in what we don't know, but in what we think we know that just ain't so." - Mark Twain "A cult is a religion with no political power" - Tom Wolfe "Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has" - Alphonse Kan "The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty. A person who claims to know the mind or will of God is pathological" - Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral "In America you can say anything you want -- as long as it doesn't have any effect" - Paul Goodman "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists" - G.K. Chesterton "There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong" - G.K. Chesterton "All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind" - Joseph Conrad "It has been pointed out quite often that Merka, having grown lonely since 'beating' the Soviet Union in the cold war and its breakup, seems hellbent on replacing it." - Rob Munsch "I find it disturbing that I respect Samuel L. Jackson more than I do the majority of popular black leadership." - Stan Chin "I trust the laws of mathematics more than I trust laws created by politicians." - Declan McCullagh "Be a craftsman in speech that you may be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting." - Ptahhotep "I quote others only in order the better to express myself." - Michel de Montaigne "Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today." - James Dean "I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me." - Mark Twain "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." - George Bernard Shaw "Awkwardness is an unnecessary vice that can be overcome with a little courage and a smile. Get over it." - Elizabeth Hoke "Wit is cultured insolence." - Aristotle "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You, too? I thought I was the only one."" - C. S. Lewis "When a man touches you with words, his hands are not far behind." - Il Postino "Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavour of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks." - Robert Heinlein, said by his character Lazarus Long "Indifference is the only sure defence." - Jody Powell "There is nothing so simple that it cannot be made difficult." - Merle Martin "People who wait until they feel like doing a job rarely do." - Cookie "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." - George Bernard Shaw "It is far easier to be wise for others than to be so for oneself." - La Rochefoucauld "The worst men often give the best advice." - Bailey "The Russian Government appears to think that Soviet decrees can change the laws of genetics; the Vatican apparently believes that ecclesiastical decrees could secure adequate nourishment for all even if there were only standing room on the planet. Such opinions, to my mind, represent a form of insane megalomania entirely alien to the scientific spirit." - Bertrand Russell "I was much cheered on my arrival by the warder at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion, and I replied 'agnostic.' He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: 'Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.' This remark kept me cheerful for about a week." - Bertrand Russell, on his stay in prison "The standpoint of modern liberal theologians is well set forth by Dr. Tennant in his book The Concept of Sin. To him sin consists in acts of will that are in conscious opposition to a known law, the moral law being known by Revelation as God's will. It follows that a man destitute of religion cannot sin." - Bertrand Russell "I do not understand where the 'beauty' and 'harmony' of nature are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. Most of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm." - Bertrand Russell "The power of prayer, moreover, had recognized limits; it would have been impious to ask too much. But the power of science has no known limits. We were told that faith could remove mountains, but no one believed it; we are now told that the atomic bomb can remove mountains, and everyone believes it." - Bertrand Russell "I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define 'faith' as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When 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." - Bertrand Russell "I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence." - Bertrand Russell "Much of the serenity and order of nature depends on eating the neighbors." - Roger Ebert "If millions of investors felt compelled to throw their cash insanely at Internet investments that made zero economic sense, is that an indictment of the Internet, or a demonstration that they were greedy herd animals?" - Roger Ebert "The theory that the biosphere was created without evolution, a few thousand years ago, is ruled out by overwhelming scientific evidence. To claim that there are 'alternative (always better) Biblical explanations of the same data', which make creationism a reasonable alternative to our best theories of biology and physics, is appalling intellectual dishonesty." - David Deutsch "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." - Richard Dawkins "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." - H.L. Mencken "First God created the monkey, for practice. Then He created the School Board." - Mark Twain "Oh dear, I'm feeling political today. It's just that it's dawned on me that 'zero tolerance' only seems to mean putting extra police in poor, run-down areas, and not in the Stock Exchange" - Terry Pratchett "Oh, come on. Revelation was a mushroom dream that belonged in the Apocrypha. The New Testament is basically about what happened when God got religion." - Terry Pratchett "On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." - Charles Babbage "I'm amused to see the terror expressed by some Christian zealots over the Harry Potter books and the Dungeons & Dragons game. They tremble at the possibility that children might actually begin to believe in the miracles and powers outlined in those popular items, or be led to criminal behavior. Strange indeed. Consider what Christians accept: burning bushes, angels, virgin birth, prophecy, healing touch, water turning into wine, parting the Red Sea, walking on water, levitation, raising the dead — to say nothing of incest, rape, mass murder, seduction, public fornication, and other nasty stuff found in the Bible...." - James Randi "Europeans are inclined to think that the Americans, having been late for the last two world wars, are determined to be early for the next one." - Matthew Engel "For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy." - Bertrand Russell "So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others." - Bertrand Russell "I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions. What physicist who was already active in 1900 would dream of boasting that his opinions had not changed during the last half century? In science men change their opinions when new knowledge becomes available, but philosophy in the minds of many is assimilated rather to theology than to science. A theologian proclaims eternal truths. The creeds remain unchanged since the Council of Nicaea. Where nobody knows anything, there is no point in changing your mind." - Bertrand Russell "In America it shouldn't be easier to get a gun than a drivers license" - Tori Amos "Life is only boring to boring people." - Robert Carroll "We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?" - Jean Cocturan "You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough." - Aldous Huxley "What an astonishing thing a book is!. It's a flat object made from a tree, with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it, and you are inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia an author speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epocs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic" - Carl Sagan > Hmmm, that'd be funny if the Borg were a wacko religious cult ... You are giving the Borg a bad name. The Borg accumulates the knowledge of conquered subjects. Young Earth Creationists delete knowledge. - Carl M "Every fool knows you can't touch the stars, but it doesn't stop a wise man from trying." - Harry Anderson "The theory of evolution no more mandates certain human behavior than the theory of gravity, in stating that objects fall, requires us to push each other from windows." - Kenneth Fair "If I thought that all the politicians who professed submission to deities, really meant it, I'd really be worried." - James Randi "We in the USA have suffered a terrible blow, dictated to zealots by an imaginary playmate of theirs named Allah, who to them is a vindictive, savage, dreadful monster who tells them to kill and to suicide. We'll get over it because most of us aren't totally locked into the my-god's-bigger-than-your-god fantasy, or we don't take it all that seriously." - James Randi "Science is a tool, not a final statement. It is never dogmatic, always ready to accept new paradigms, and totally flexible. It is the single most powerful means we have of understanding ourselves and our world, and probably the most important accomplishment of our species." - James Randi "Although I know the time my brother was born I will not give out that information. Along with my brother, I believe that an interest and belief in astrology is very dangerous to civilization. Richard devoted his life to increasing knowledge about the physical universe, and would not be willing to contribute to this retrogressive magic. I used to think that he was getting upset about a harmless parlor game, but it is more and more apparent that I was incorrect and that the belief in astrology and other ancient errors about reality is an important force operating in today's world. As usual Richard was right." - Joan Feynman, on why she will not make Richard Feynman's time of birth publicly available "I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it." - Albert Einstein "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it" - Albert Einstein "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings." - Albert Einstein "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." - Nietzsche "It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature. Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: 'What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature.'" - Richard Dawkins "T.H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, founded his ethics on a repudiation of Darwinism. Not a repudiation of Darwinism as science, of course, for you cannot repudiate truth. But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature." - Richard Dawkins "A wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a pekinese is a genetically modified wolf. Playing God? We've been playing God for centuries!" - Richard Dawkins "If people exercised greater discretion in who and how and to what degree they place their trust, we would know more as a community -- and we would know it better. There would be fewer paths for bad or phony knowledge." - Jeff Duntemann "When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them." - Thomas Paine "The United States is the most religiose country in the Western world, and its born-again Christian leader is eyeball to eyeball with the most religiose people on Earth. Both sides believe that the Bronze Age God of Battles is on their side. Both take risks with the world's future in unshakeable, fundamentalist faith that He will grant them the victory." - Richard Dawkins "If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic." - Richard Dawkins "Now, the invention of the scientific method is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that. It has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, "Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not?--because you're not!" If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday,' you say, "I respect that." - Douglas Adams "The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal--God is the Omnipotent Father--hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good." - Gore Vidal "all religions are sick men's dreams, false - demonstrably false - and pernicious." - Ibn Warraq "Some say I always find the cloud in the silver lining. But I sometimes think that the cloud's more interesting, if not more real." - Robert Carroll "It's an interesting dual trend and arms race: Police turning to software to snoop on alleged miscreants, while counter-techniques are developing apace. My money's on the defense." - Declan McCullagh "It is as respectable to be a modified monkey as modified dirt." - Thomas Huxley "Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Bill Watterson, said by the character Hobbes "At a time when madmen think they have the right to kill us because of what they think they know about an afterlife, which is by definition unknowable, those who don't know the answers are the only ones asking sane questions. True believers owe it to the rest of us to seek solutions that are reasonable in the visible world." - Roger Ebert "I absolutely didn't see anything that left me sheet-white and palpitating in fear. I never saw levitating bodies. I never saw navel-licking tongues. I never saw the perfect, classical Latin speeches. I never saw the preternatural strength. I never saw things that could not be accounted for in rational, secular terms." - Michael Cuneo, describing the 50 exorcisms he has witnessed "Perhaps the most amazing thing about the whole range of superstitious belief and disbelief is that they can coexist at all. The Magic Worlder drives down the expressway protected with medals, statues, charms, and a favorable horoscope. The rationalist drives carefully." - R.J. Riggins "People will waste an awful amount of money if they think they can earn more by doing so" - Marc Beyer "As for "The War Against Terrorism" itself ("TWAT", for short...), it is, IMO, a stupid publicity stunt that's going to result in a lot more lost lives." - Charlie Bell "I just have a thing about needless destruction of literature. It's a slippery slope, one day you're chucking out a couple of hundred old comics, the next you're burning a stack of National Geographics out on the driveway and before you know it, you're marching into Warsaw..." - Charlie Bell "As near as I can tell from here, the plan, such as it is, isn't to make nice-nice and hope that everyone joins hands and sings Kumbayah; it's to hope that they run out of whackos before we run out of napalm." - Jim Battista, on a possible US rection to the WTC disaster "I do not pray that God is on our side, I pray that we are on God's side..." - Abraham Lincoln "Skepticism requires questioning things. It is much more efficient to go blithely on assuming things are true and just getting on with life. The down side is it leaves you open to manipulation. Ignorance is bliss. But once you start down the path of knowledge you can never turn back. We trade happiness for truth. Most stick to happiness." - Unknown "Heresy is merely the story of the loser." - Patrick Gliddon "Democracy is the worst system in the world apart from all the rest." - John Ingram, paraphrasing Winston Churchill "The cosmos is grand enough without having to embellish it with nonsense." - Ratman "Understanding why and how the sun sets does not make the sunset any less beautiful." - Ratman "Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case." - Bertrand Russell "To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge." - Benjamin Disraeli "Can American moviegoers envision themselves attending a three-hour film about Eskimos, however good, when brainless fodder is available in every multiplex? I am not holding my breath for the answer." - Roger Ebert "Should one continue to base one's life on a system of belief that -- for all its occasional wisdom and frequent beauty -- is demonstrably untrue?" - Charles Templeton, former right-hand man to Billy Graham "What is the nature of God? His nature is entirely dependent upon the age or culture that has reinvented him." - Solomon Skink "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick "No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means." - George Bernard Shaw "The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority." - Thomas Huxley "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 "I believe in treating others as I want to be treated -- but I certainly don't believe in turning the other cheek and the truth is that I never knew any Christians who did either." - James Hervey Johnson "There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny." - Carl Sagan "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know." - Ann Druyan, discussing Carl Sagan "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 "One man's religion is another man's belly laugh." - Robert Heinlein "Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense." - Robert Heinlein "The biblical concepts of sin and salvation are an integral part of Christian doctrine. Christianity first creates a problem (sin) and then offers a "solution" (salvation). This is not unlike the protection racket; you either buy "protection"--or else!"" - Domald Morgan "The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell "Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength." - Michael Shermer "The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 'faith.'" - Robert Ingersoll "A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he knows." - Mark Twain "I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." - Mark Twain "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." - Mark Twain, describing the bible "I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God." - Thomas Edison "To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." - Isaac Asimov "It's a mistake to underestimate the human capacity for self-delusion." - Robert Park "They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan "There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe [in god/s] you may cease to behave." - Louis Kronenberger "Genetics answers all the questions about the human condition, except for the interesting ones." - Steve Jones "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one." - Voltaire "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? There isn't a religion on the planet that doesn't long for a comparable ability -- precise, and repeatedly demonstrated before committed skeptics -- to foretell future events. No other human institution comes close." - Carl Sagan "It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind." - Isaac Asimov "My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race." - Bertrand Russell "I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose." - Clarence Darrow "So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake.... Religion is all bunk.... All bibles are man-made." - Thomas Edison "He was immensely kind and generous, with his time and his material, to a young journalist, over 15 years ago; and watching how he, and how Alan Moore (who I met around the same time), treated their fans and other people – graciously, kindly and generously – taught that young journalist an awful lot about how famous authors ought to behave. And how most of them don’t. & I'll miss him." - Neil Gaiman, on the death of Douglas Adams "NAPOLEON: Monsieur Laplace! I have read with great interest your Traité de mécanique céleste - all five volumes - but nowhere have I found any mention of the Good Lord. LAPLACE: Sire, I have had no need of that hypothesis." - Unknown "The Bible Needs a Continuity Editor" - Laurence Brothers "Scientology -- the religion that exists to make Christianity seem sensible and rational." - Jim Battista "If womens lib had been around in ancient roman times and Mary had the courage to speak out against the roman who raped her we would never of had christianity." - Paul Castle "Creationism is not the alternative to Evolution, ignorance is" - Unknown "Piety and belief are powerful things, and few forces in nature can stand against one who is true to his faith, his God, and his own soul. However it is also true that the Gods tend to side with the heaviest artillery, so be prepared to change sides at the drop of a hat." - Carol Willis "I have seen lots of good people fail because of poor management, when that person is a woman and the manager is a man, sexism is accused. I see no reason to ascribe to sexism what can be more easily ascribed to incompetance." - Barry Vaughan "Religion does _not_ answer the big Why; religion merely offers up the big Because." - Bob O'Brien "Being open minded is good, but not so much that your brains fall out" - Carl Sagan, quoting James Oberg