-George Orwell
"Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know"
- Michel de Montaigne"It's important to acknowledge that strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous."
-Dr. Craig L. Blomberg, The Case for Christ (26)
"The man who invented the telescope found out more about heaven than the closed eyes of prayer ever discovered." - Robert G. Ingersoll
   “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” | |
"I had no need of that hypothesis."
-Pierre-Simon Laplace responding to Napoleon's inquiry: 'M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.'
"I believe there is something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government."
-Woody Allen
Prayer: How to do nothing and still think you’re helping.
"Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer."
~Author Unknown
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. "
-Thomas Jefferson
"Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression ."
-Thomas Jefferson
"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty."
-Thomas Jefferson
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
-James Madison
"A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?"
- W. Somerset Maugham
"To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy."
- David Brooks
"---if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking."
- Ayn Rand
"--- the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.
- Ayn Rand
"I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case."
- Christopher Hitchens"I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows."
-Susan B. Anthony
The legitimate powers of government extend to only such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God."
-THOMAS JEFFERSONPeople who want to share their religious views with you, almost never want you to share yours with them."
-Dave Barry
"When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust."
-ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL
"Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it."
-C.C. Colton
"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men are quite capable of every wickedness."
-Joseph Conrad
"All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties."
-MIKHAIL BAKUNIN"When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
-Quentin Crisp
"The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right."
-G.K. Chesterton
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"
-Annie Dillard
"It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty."
-STEVE ALLEN
"How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible?"
-John W. Draper
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. "
– Frietrich Nietzsche
"The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals, and 362 to heterosexuals. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t love heterosexuals, it’s just that they need more supervision."
-Lynn Lavner
"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties."
-Erich Fromm
"If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. Are they? Do members of atheist organizations in the United States commit more than their fair share of violent crimes? Do the members of the National Academy of Sciences, 93 percent of whom do not accept the idea of God, lie and cheat and steal with abandon? We can be reasonably confident that these groups are at least as well behaved as the general population. And yet, athiests are the most reviled minority in the United States."
-SAM HARRIS
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."
— Isaac Asimov
"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-Voltaire
"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
-Stephen F. Roberts
"An athiest is a man with no invisible means of support."
-John Buchan
"An atheist is a guy who watches a Notre Dame-SMU football game and doesn't care who wins."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Atheism is a non-prophet organization."
-George Carlin
"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
"Faith is what you have in things that don't exist"
-Homer Simpson
"If there really was one true god, it should be the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it. And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that."
-Aronra
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
-Bertrand Russell
"If you want to live under sharia law, go back to the hellhole country you came from, or go to another hellhole country that lives under sharia law."
-Mahfooz Kanwar
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."
-Andre Gide
"Any religion which prohibits doubts abandons any hope of growth or development. A religion without doubt is fixed and unchanging. Such a religion is useless to dynamic thinking individuals who are curious about the truth of reality."
-Donavan Hall
"To deny, to believe, and to doubt absolutely -- this is for man what running is for a horse."
-Blaise Pascal
"If your god won't answer a molested child's prayer what makes you think he'll answer yours?"
-Chris O'Rourke
"Faith consists in believing not what seems true, but what seems false to our understanding."
-Voltaire
"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation."
- Charles Baudelaire
"Some excel in rhyme who reason foolishly."
- Nicholas Boileau
"We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities."
- Henry Bolingbroke
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
- author unknown
"Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision."
- Charlotte Bronte
"As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason."
- Sir Thomas Browne
"A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason."
- Thomas Carlyle
"Reason is the wise man's guide, example the fool's."
- Welsh Proverb
"Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out." - Sydney Smith
"Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world."
- William Allen White
"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."
- Oscar Wilde
"People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess."
- Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
"Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice."
- Allan Bloom
"If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you."
- Lord Chesterfield
"He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and he that dares not reason is a slave."
- William Drummond
"Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up."
- Robert Frost
"A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with."
- James A. Froude
"What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational."
- Georg Hegel
"To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual."
- Georg Hegel
"Reason gains all people by compelling none."
- Aaron Hill
"Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason."
- Immanuel Kant
"Reason can in general do more than blind force."
- Gaius C. Gallus
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
"Reason should direct and appetite obey."
- Marcus T. Cicero
"Let reason govern desire."
- Marcus T. Cicero
"The common dogma [of fundamentalists] is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years.... That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defense against the dangerous new knowledge. ... When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. ... Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity."
-G Gaia
It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.
-Upton Sinclair
"A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows public opinion."
-Chinese Proverb
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. An ailing world would do well to reach for the right bottle in the medicine cabinet.
- Adam Smith
Tench Coxe, James Madison’s friend, on the 2nd Amendment
Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.
Tench Coxe, Federal Gazette, June 18,1789, A friend of James Madison, writing in support of the Madison’s first draft of the Bill of Rights.
"When the end comes, Armageddon outta here ----------!"
- J.F. Bierlein
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