Quotations page 0
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"So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that "evil" woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman, it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity." -- Frank Zappa
"Theology ... induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge when in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe" - Bertrand Russell
"Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us."
"Death is an experience best avoided, as it makes reliable internet access difficult to obtain."
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." -- Robert Heinlein
"All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher." -- Lucretius (99 - 55 B.C.E.)
"It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death."
All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." --Samuel Johnson
"I try to take one day at a time, but recently, several days have hit me all at once."
"Even a religion like Christianity purportedly created to champion the poor and downtrodden was later taken over by the rich and powerful for their own benefit." --C. W. Dalton
"At one point in time, many of us actually had Jesus as our personal lord and saviour. Unfortunately, we later had to dismiss him for incompetence, gross negligence, misconduct and consistent failure to show up for work."
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." -- Plato
"All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason." -- Immanuel Kant
"For God so loved the world that He gave man free will and then got pissed when we didn't meet his arbitrary standards. Oh, and he had his son offed when He realized how impossible those standards were." -- [Michael 4:22]
"It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense. They thus become part of the armies of the night, the purveyors of nitwittery, the retailers of intellectual junk food, the feeders on mental cardboard, for their ignorance keeps them from distinguishing nectar from sewage." -- Isaac Asimov, "The Armies of the Night"
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." -Carl Sagan
"Ubi dubium ibi liberts (Where there is doubt, there is freedom)" -- Latin proverb
"Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope." -- P.J. O'Rourke
"This message was composed entirely from recycled words and phrases using only renewable, caffeinated energy sources. No trees or whales died in the process."
"Don't worry.No matter how fast your processor is, software engineers/game writers are working as we speak to slow it down;-)"
"When I get a little money, I buy books; And if any is left, I buy food and clothes."--ERAMUS
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan
"Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?" --Nietzsche
"He that cannot reason is a fool; he that will not is a bigot; He that dare not is a slave." -- Sir William Drummond c.1770-1828
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." -- Robert Heinlein.
"Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe." -- Thomas Henry Huxley
"Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's." -- Aldous Huxley
"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
"To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride." --H. L. Mencken
"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" -- Bertrand Russell
"Several thousand years ago, a small tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories were embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successfully. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject." -- Tom Weller, about evolution
"The world holds two classes of men -- intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence." -- Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri (973-1057; Syrian poet)
"A religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it." -- Sigmund Freud, 1921
"The only spiritual disease is righteousness, and only religious people have it."
"Useful Phrases to Know when Traveling in The Middle East: Akbar khali-kili haftir loftan - Thank you for showing me your marvelous gun"
"There's no more proof for the existence of God than there is for the existence of the Easter Bunny. That's right. The Easter Bunny."
"Al Capone went to church every Sunday."
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men." -- Bertrand Russell
"God has no place within these walls, just as facts have no place within organized religion." -- Homer Simpson (#100, 1994)
"All character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people." -- Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933
"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
"First they took the jews. And I said nothing, because I wasn't a jew. Then they took the gays, and I held my mouth shut, because I wasn't gay. Then they came for the handicapped, and still I remained silent, because I was not handicapped. Then they came for me... and then there was no one left to speak up."
"We are the Pentium Borg. You will be approximated."
"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in ours (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies." --Thomas Jefferson
"Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours." --Marcus Aurelius
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." --Albert Einstien
"The two most abundant substances in the universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity. Not necessarily in that order"
"We ought to be stressing real science in the classroom instead of stressing somebody's religion" -- 'Dr' Kent Hovind
"Time that I enjoy wasting is not wasted time" -- T.S.Eliot
"I'm trying to free your mind, but I can only show you the door. You're the one who has to walk through." -- Morpheus - ("The Matrix")
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan (1934-1996) "Cosmos"
"Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." -- Carl Sagan (1934-1996) "Cosmos"
"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 (1934-1996) "Cosmos"
"I believe that the extraordinary should be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
"To solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it." -- Richard P. Feynman
"If a human being is condemned and restricted to perform the same functions over and over again, he will not even be a good ant, not to mention a good human being." -- Norbert Wiener
"If at first you don't succeed, look at it this way - you failed."
"I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence." -- Doug MacLeod
"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems." -- Rene Descartes
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- B. Russell
"The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves...is what I call hell" --Andre Malraux, La Condition Humaine
"time is a precious thing, if you don't use it today, you can't use it tomorrow.." DON'T WASTE IT ON RELIGION..
"Freedom begins between the ears."
"Assimilation turns us all into friends. In fact, it brings us so close together, we can hear each other's thoughts.
Is that fun?"
Yes. It's fun"
-- Borg Queen and small boy talking. Star Trek Voyager: Unimatrix Zero
Cure available for EMS (excess money syndrome). $10,000 per week. Guaranteed to work or you pay for it again.
"This came to me from your server unsolicited. Please have them kicked off. If you recieve multiple copies of this, it is because your customer sent it multiple times to ME. Full header and copy of the spam to follow."
"I reserve the absolute right to be smarter today than I was yesterday." -Adlai Stevenson.
"You know you're getting old when you bend down to pick up something off the floor, and before you straighten up you ask yourself, 'Is there anything else I can do while I'm down here?'."
"Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" -- George Orwell
"If they squeeze olives to get olive oil, how do they get baby oil?" -- George Carlin
"Error: Keyboard not attached. Press F1 to continue."
"There are three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical." --Stanislaw Lem
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage them to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." -- Jefferson's "Commonplace Book," 1774-1776 quoting from criminologist Cesare Beccaria, 1764
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." -- Kenneth H. Olson, President of DEC, at the convention of the World Future Society, 1977
"More and more people care about religious tolerance as fewer and fewer care about religion." -- Alexander Chase, Perspectives
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." -- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1758
"I have the world's largest collection of anti-cat jokes!" -- Snoopy
"The creationists have this creator who is evil, who is small-minded, who is malevolent, and who is not very bright and can't even get his science right. Creationists have made their creator in their own image, in my view." -- Prof. Ian Plimer - The Skeptic, Vol 13, No 2
"In heaven all the interesting people are missing." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
"It's not your fault that you're always wrong" -- Marilyn Manson
"Theology: The study of elaborate verbal disguises for non-ideas."
"I am attempting to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins."
"I do this really moronic thing that the government doesn't want me to do. It is called thinking" -- George Carlin
"I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, 'Hey, the sign says you're open 24 hours.' He said, 'Yes, but not in a row.'" - Steven Wright
"We are Borg sheep, resistance is futile, you will be... Ooh look, fresh grass."
"Sin: A system devised by the sadistic to manipulate the brainless"
"When a clear head leads the way, a warm heart can safely follow." -- Marilyn Vos Savant
"But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer [Jesus] of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State." -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Samuel Kercheval, 1810
"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a Virgin Mary, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.... But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with] all this artificial scaffolding." -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, 11 April 1823
"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose." -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Baron von Humboldt, 1813
"Consciousness is that annoying period between naps"
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear." --Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787
"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck." --Thomas Jefferson
"And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter." -- Thomas Jefferson
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!" -- John Adams
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity." -- Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution." -- James Madison
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove
"A man who is always ready to believe what is told him will never do well." -- Petronius
"Once you stop learning, you start dying."
"There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses." - Ezekiel 23:20
"I'll pull the trigger if you don't do what I say. I'm just warning you because I LOVE you and would hate to have to blow your brains out." -- "God"
"The flies actually invade the bodies of fire ants and lay their eggs there. As the larval stages of the fly develop inside the body, they pupate in the ant's head. The head of the ant then falls off."
"'Voting' is a ritual designed to perpetrate the mistaken notion that 'the people' have anything whatever to do with the process of who really weilds power in the world. The political 'choices' being presented are as pointless and innane as the choice between 'Pepsi' and 'Coke.' It is simply absurd to believe that this choice will actually effect the real lives of people in any significant fashion. The whole business is merely one part of an overall tactic designed by those who have power to maintain that power by distracting the attentions of the people, keeping them occupied with the trivial so that they do not wake up and actually pay attention to what those who wield power are up to."
"A government solution to a problem is always followed by the creation of at least two additional problems, either of which was worse than the original problem which the government set out to solve."
"What's loving about sticking a picture of torture into a childs mind and telling him that it's his fault the man on the stick has nails in his hands and feet?"
"Flying is easy. Just throw yourself at the ground and miss it."
"This so-called new religion is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants designed to take away the money of fools. Now, let's say the Lord's Prayer forty times, but first let's pass the collection plate." - Rev. Lovejoy
"Entertainment is a thing of the past, today we've got television" -- Archie Bunker
"The wind is like the air, only pushier."
"Whenever a priest comes all they talk about is sex. Whenever a prositute comes all they talk about is God."
"This manual virus works on an honour system. So, please firstly e-mail this to everyone in your mailing list, then randomly delete a few of your own computer files."
"Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most." -- Ozzie Osborne
sign on a fence "Salespeople and burglars welcome. Dog food is expensive.
"My God, it's full of stars!"
"I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you."
"If God didn't have a sense of humor -- were did the Christians come from?"
"If I see a professing vegetarian eating meat, it is no hypocrisy for me to point out his inconsistency even though I personally do not subscribe to the principles of vegetarianism."
"Nothing works contrary to nature, only to what we know of it." -- Scully
Ad for candy bars: "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't."
"Impossible things usually don't happen." -- Treiman's Theorum
"A fool speaks because he has to say something, but a wise man speaks because he has something to say." -- Confucius
"The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?" -- Judith Hayes
"Comparing religion to science is like comparing bullshit to horsepower."
"Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to." -- George Seaton
"As for the 'stories' in the Bible. They are all true... at least those that have happened."
"The right question is more important than the right answer." -- Piers Anthony
"What do you care what other people think, Mr. Feynman?"
"Isn't it funny how, as we learn more about the universe around us, the less there is for their god to do?"
"One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment." -- S. Weinberg, Nobel laureate physicist.
"If you can get them when they are young, then you have them for life. Its the oldest marketing scheme there is."
"Any slogan simple enough to fit in a .sig is too simple to do any good."
"There are two types of power. There is authority, which can only be given, and control, which can only be taken."
"No being is so important that he can usurp the rights of another" -- Picard to Data/Graves "The Schizoid Man"
"Dear God, let us pummel the other team into oblivion. Let us rub their faces in the dirt and dance upon their lifeless corpses, holding our spears aloft. In Jesus' Name, amen."
"Eat grass - Millions of cows can't be wrong."
"Proof establishes knowledge; knowledge inspires belief; belief in any other context is mere sentiment."
"Dear logic and reason. Please help those afflicted with the god mind virus to gain control of rational thoughts through the understanding of how powerful memes take over control of ones reasoning abilities. Please give them the power to overcome the superstitious beliefs of their ancestors handed down from thousands of years ago, when people had not the tools of science to unravel the mysteries of life, and due to constant brainwashing from childhood. I ask this in the name of Darwin and Dawkins." -- Ahuman.
"It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe in something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous." -- Gloria Steinem
"If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank" -- Woody Allen
"It's rather a shame. Now that the creationists are deprived of their chance of burning people at the stake, their best argument is gone." -- Isaac Asimov, Life and Times, 1979
"There are some things money can't buy, for everything else there's MasterCard." -- TV commercial
sign at a travel agency "Welcome ... Please Go Away"
"FREELOVER? Freethinking Realist Exploring Expressive Liberty, Openness, Verity, Enlightenment, and Rationality (also, pro-love, free from state and church authorities)"
"Putting a bone in one's nose is scarcely on the level of putting a man on the moon" -- William A. Henry
"This message is made from 100% recycled bits."
"The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is." -- Winston Churchill
"We only half live when we only half think." -- Voltaire
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." -- George Bernard Shaw
"I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"He concluded the old coffee table was not really a coffee table at all, but rather the sacred Ark of the Covenant described in the Old Testament. How it got to New Jersey," he remarked, "God only knows."
"Salesmen are not welcome, especially if their products are non-material and without verification of alleged implications in the past!"
"And then, one Thursday nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..."
"Do you know that if all the Christians were laid end to end around the world, three quarters of them would drown?"
"I submit that we are both Atheists. I simply believe in one fewer god that you do. When you can understand why you dismiss all other gods, then you will understand why I dismiss yours." -- Stephen F. Frost
Sign in a laundry: "Absolutely No Dying In The Machines"
"Why would God need a starship?" -- from Star Trek V
Sign in front of a funeral home: "Drive carefully, we'll wait"
We provide a special tax-reducing savings account for very rich people. -30% interest.
Sign at grocery store near Dallas -- "Blue Bell ice cream. 2 half-gallons $500"
"The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind in both theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity." -- Bakunin
"A people who are not convinced of their uniqueness and value will perish." -- David Lane
"The light of faith makes us see what we believe." -- St. Thomas Aquinas
"Faith is believing something you know ain't true." -- Samuel Clemens
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable." -- H. L. Mencken
"Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Although it is said that faith can move mountains, experience shows that dynamite works better."
"People who have too much faith and not enough doubt tend to get dogmatic." --Lou Marinoff, a philosophy professor at City College
"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God." -- Martin Luther
"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry." -- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
"To open the eye of faith is to close the eye of reason." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck." -- Thomas Jefferson
"In view of the stupidity of the majority of the people, a widely held opinion is more likely to be foolish than sensible." -- Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." -- Bertrand Russell
"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite." -- Bertrand Russell
"I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are outgrowing."-- Lord Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
"There are some truths, however, that we should never forget: Superstition has always been the relentless enemy of science; faith has been a hater of demonstration; hypocrisy has been sincere only in its dread of truth, and all religions are inconsistent with mental freedom." -- R.G. Ingersoll
"God; (he's) my favorite fictional character." Homer Simpson
"A cult is a religion with no political power." -- Tom Wolfe
"This alternating current thing is just a fad. It is much too dangerous for general use." -- Thomas Alva Edison
"Wisdom is knowing that you don't know.'' -- Socrates
I AM NOT A SHEEP!!!
"Nothing that results from human progress is achieved with unanimous consent. And those who are enlightened before the others are forced to pursue that light in spite of others."
"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle of lotteries, dating, and religion." -- "The Dilbert
Principle"
"And what if we picked the wrong religion? Every week, we're just making God madder and madder!" -- Homer, 'Homer the Heretic'
"It takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen." -- Homer Simpson
"God has no place within these walls (school), just like facts have no place in organized religion!" -- Superintendent Chalmers
"Boy, everyone is stupid except me." -- Homer Simpson, 'Homer the Heretic'
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth." -- Henry Louis Mencken
"just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt." -- Clarence Darrow
"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free." -- Charles Evans Hughes
"A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." -- Adlai Stevenson
"Now is all you'll ever have."
"If humans had evolved from animals, we'd all be sitting around arguing about religion, wouldn't we?"
"Greetings, I am pleased to see that we are different. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us." -- Vulcan greeting
"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish." -- Timothy Jones
"The Invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
"Religion is a terrific meme. That's right. But that doesn't make it true and I care about what's true. Smallpox virus is a terrific virus. It does it's job magnificently well. That doesn't mean it's a good thing. It doesn't mean that I don't want to see it stamped out." -- Richard Dawkins
"Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death." -- Albert Einstein
"Atheism is not a belief in the same sense that astigmatism, rheumatism, and botulism are not beliefs."
"Q: 'Let us pray for understanding and for compassion.' Picard: 'Let us do no such damn thing.'"
"The Church says that the world is flat but I know that it is round for I have seen its shadow on the moon and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church." -- Ferdinand Magellan
"A once-in-a-lifetime chance comes only once or twice in a lifetime." -- Archie Bunker
"A difference that makes no difference is no difference."
"I don't want to spend my life explaining myself. Either you get it or you don't." -- Frank Zappa
"A problem is an opportunity to do your best." -- Duke Ellington
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all it's contents." - HPL
"if a priest tells his flock that he can forgive their sins, then he will have sins in abundance." -- John Quincy Adams speaking against Christianity.
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. When you give up that force, you are ruined." -- Patrick Henry Virginia's U.S. Constitution ratification convention.
"Socrates: You are wise if you admit you know nothing. DeCartes: Only the Wise can know Anything. Sartre: you're an asshole if you think you are Wise."
"I shall respect your beliefs, if you can justify them. If you justify them only by saying you have faith in them, I shall not respect them" -- Richard Dakwins
"Windows 98: A 32-bit patch for a 16-bit GUI shell running on top of an 8-bit operating system written for a 4-bit processor by a 2-bit company who cannot stand 1 bit of competition."
"(Snoopy to Woodstock) And sometimes they worshiped cats! Can you believe it? They put little gold collars on them and they built cat shrines and everything! Then, one day they decided to worship something better than cats. They decided to worship rocks!" -- Peanuts by Schultz 12/7/97
"The fact that many things that violate our consciences (i.e killing babies) are not sins according to Christianity (since killing babies is OK according to Christians if that is God's will). In short, the 'sin' idea reduces the idea of 'good and evil' to 'approved and disapproved', with the most evil actions imaginable being called good if they think their God approves, and the most good actions imaginable being called evil if they think their God disapproves."
"The concept of sin divorces morality from reality."
"It was the schoolboy who said: 'Faith is believing what you know ain't so.'"-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"Scientific creationism: a religious dogma combining massive ignorance with incredible arrogance."
"Creationist: (1) One who follows creationism. (2) A moron. (3) A person incapable of doing math. (4) A liar. (5) A very gullible true believer."
"So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe." -- Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg _Nightfall_
"Playing God, at least while you're alive, is very difficult. You must do absolutely nothing." -- ZZ
"Answers are easy. Good ones are hard. And the absence of a good one is no basis for failing to reject a bad one." -- Neal M. Stevens
"Meaning is a human construct, and therefore I can assign life whatever meaning I wish." - Peter Berger, in aa
"The early Christians would take a baby, wrap it in a mixture of flour and water, and proceed to induct followers into their cult by having them stab at the dough mass with a sharp knife in 1st century Pilsbury, England."--Zoray's book of Illumined Naughty Lore
"I prefer to call Jesus-believers "Crusaders" (from the Latin word _crux_, "cross") instead of "Christians" because (a) the cross is the agreed-upon symbol for the Jesus cult, and (b) crosses exist but "christs" don't."
"When a clear head leads the way, a warm heart can safely follow." -- Marilyn Vos Savant
"I chose not to choose life, I choose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons, who needs reasons when you've got heroin?"
"It is sad, but in the USA today the ignorant think everything is an opinion and this somehow levels the playing field." -- Christopher A. Lee, alt.atheism
"The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!" -- Bill Watterson's Calvin.
"If the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body then left-handed people are the only ones in their right minds!"
"The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is." -- Winston Churchill
"God must love stupid people...He made SO many."
"The intelligent man portions his belief to the evidence" -- Hume
"If the sum of credible evidence we have is that the universe lacks anything like a god, then we shouldn't be shy about concluding that there isn't one." -- Neal M. Stevens (NMS)
"Religion is a crutch for weak minded people." Jesse Ventura, Governor of Minnesota
"It may be said that, thanks to the 'clercs', humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good. This contradiction was an honour to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilisation slipped into the world." "La Trahison des clercs" [The Treason of the Intellectuals] (1927) Julien Benda (1867-1956)
"I am my own Master." --Raistlin Majere
"I will have the tiniest, most invisible administration in history" -- Alan Yu for President!
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear" -- Thomas Jefferson, 1787
"I can't stand here and argue with your biblical rhetoric." -- Agent Mulder, Miracle Man
"The more you know, the less you believe"
"The point of existence is not to find the most powerful thing you can imagine and then grovel before it. The idea revolts me" -- unnumbered atheist
"I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't." -- Jules Renard
"I believe I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science." -- Charles Darwin
"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it. "
"The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible" - Mark Twain
"I think that naming your ignorance God and pretending that, having named it, you have converted ignorance to knowledge is a sorry approach to the unknown." -- John Popelish
"I want you to know, when it comes to believing in god...I really tried. I really really tried. I tried to believe that there is a god who created each one of us in his own image and likeness, loves us very much and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize...something is FUCKED-UP. Something is WRONG here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is NOT good work. If this is the best god can do, I am NOT impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently run universe, this guy would have been out on his all-powerful-ass a long time ago." -- George Carlin
"Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life."
"Here at Microsoft, drive head contention is more than just our promise to you. It's a way of life."
"Don't let reality hit you in the ass on your way out."
"The right to be left alone is the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men" - Supreme Court Justice- Louis Brandeis
"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life." --Terry Pratchett
"This is not a dress rehearsal. This is the only life you will ever have and this is the only world you will ever know. Seize the day."
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Humans share 98.4 per cent of their DNA with the chimpanzee species."
"Eskimo: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?
Priest: No, not if you didn't know.
Eskimo: Then why did you tell me?"
"Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich"
"If something's really hard to do, it's probably not worth doing...." -- Homer Simpson
"Faith is the glorification of ignorance." -- Jeff Dee
"FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION. It comes bundled with the software."
"There is no god worth our worship." -- Martin Schlottmann
"It's called religion. It's when you believe something that nobody in his right mind would believe." -- Archie Bunker
"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -- Susan Ertz
"God had to kill himself to appease himself, so that he wouldn't have to roast us (his beloved creations) alive for all eternity, except that he didn't really die."
"Religion easily has the greatest bull shit story ever told. Think about it, religion has actually convinced people...that there's an INVISIBLE MAN...LIVING IN THE SKY...who watches every thing you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten special things that he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever 'til the end of time...but he loves you." -- George Carlin
"No being is so important that he can usurp the rights of another" -- Picard to Data/Graves "The Schizoid Man"
"The god of the Bible measures up to the level of a petty and vicious tyrant ... It would not be hard to measure up to, and exceed, that level of moral purity. Atheists surpass it every day." -- Doug Krueger
"At first there was nothing. Then God said 'Let there be light!' Then there was still nothing. But you could see it."
"DO! or DO NOT! - there is no TRY." -- Jedi Master Yoda
"Nothing works like prayer
Corollary:
Prayer works like nothing! Exactly like it!"
"Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it, But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things." -- Hippocrates of Cos
"There is no virus attached to this e-mail. In God's name please send this message to all your friends, then delete all the files on your hard disk."
"I have never understood why the injection area of the skin is wiped with an alcohol swab prior to execution by lethal injection."
"Reality is for people who can't handle science fiction"
A "pay per" might be a coin-operated cat simulator.
I believe in life before breakfast.
"The most important part of computer repair is using the correct pliers for pounding in the screws."
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, 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." -- Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate physicist
It's raining: Somebody up there must have a bladder control problem.
"It's difficult to prove a sleeping cat's presence in a dark room, especially when there's no cat."
"There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably, some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he does not dare face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not real, he becomes furious when they are disputed." -- Bertrand Russell
"It is a poor workman who blames his tools. But it takes a completely wretched workman to blame his creations. Such a workman is not only bereft of talent, but is also devoid of understanding, responsibility, and even intelligence."
"The Church preaches love, but in its heyday tortured and burned people. The injunction is symbolized by Orwell's "Ministry of Love", which is the torture and liquidation bureau." -- Richard A. Posner
"You think there is a magic pixie that comes from nowhere, made the universe, then tortures people eternally for not believing in it, because it loves them? Does that sum it up?" -Steve Knight
"If God exists, he ought to collapse all wave functions as an independent observer, yes? (Like Shroedinger's cat. If he exists, everything is God's cat.) So does the existence of quantum indeterminacy prove the non-existence of God? If not, why not?"
"In clinical studies children who are spanked tend to INCREASE the offending behavior as opposed to children who are otherwise disciplined. It's not effective. It leads to fascist tendencies and bad behavior. I do not physically punish my children (this also teaches them it's right to beat smaller weaker people) this does not mean I treat them as equals in fact most people who know me consider me rather strict. A spanking is a lazy parent's way out."
"It's better to light a candle that to make up myths about the darkness."
"The following talk show contains no dysfunctional families, no humiliating stereotypes, no lewd behavior, and absolutely no confrontational violence... we apologize for any inconvenience."
"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!" -- Adolph Hitler 1935
"To believe in God and his word takes an ability to suspend logic and common sense."
One sign of emotional maturity is doing what you want to, even if everybody is telling you to do it.
Cigarette smoking is allowed on the second and fourth Tuesdays of every week.
"Nothing that would invent a mosquito is worthy of anything but hate."
from Archie on an episode of "All In The Family": "You can never buy beer, only rent it."
"When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and suddenly realized that I was talking to myself."
"A dyslexic agnostic insomniac - one who lies awake at night wondering if there really is a dog..."
"There's a sucker born-again every minute..."
"If a god such as yours proved his existence and if such a god allowed free will (yours, from what you say, does not) I would be obligated as a human to detest such a thing."
"Religion," he says, "imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner - which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them is a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more." -- Freud
"Our royal flush beats your full house." - Roto-Rooter
"We're here on your account." - a bank in Tyler
"Keeping current in your life." - an electric utility
"Think First" - First National Bank. Notice that the words also mean what advertisers want you NOT to do.
In Mexico hotel lobby: "The manager has personally passed all the water served here."
In religious store: "If you're interested in life after death, try robbing this store."
In cocktail lounge: "Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar."
In dry cleaners: "Drop your pants here."
Forget about life after death, is there life before death?
"The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind in both theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity." -- Bakunin
"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
"The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible" - Mark Twain
"Why would I give a rat's ass about you? I let my only son die on a cross!!!" - God
"I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." - Galileo Galilei
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE *Any Item In Our Store* Buy First Item at Double the Regular Price, Get Second Item Of Equal or Lesser Value ABSOLUTELY FREE! No Limit!!"
"Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment." - Alan Watts
"'God' so to speak is the crutch of 33% of the world population. It is symbolic for the ignorance that perpetuates like the worst thought contagion known to man. Only people who are strong-willed or lucky enough to not be born into such a disease escape it's grasps."
"Politicians and diapers have one thing in common. They should be changed regularly, and for the same reason." -- Gerry Brooks (in the Toronto Globe and Mail)
"The evaporation of 4 million [people] who believe in this crap [Christian Rapture] would leave the world a better place." -- Andrei Codrescu, on the NPR program "All Things Considered", Dec 19 1995
"The _root_ meaning of 'service' is like what the bull does to the cow"
"Because even Christianity isn't powerful enough to destroy the good in humanity, try as it might."
"And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter," -- Thomas Jefferson
"There are none more ignorant and useless, then they that seek answers on their knees, with their eyes closed."
"I could not believe that anyone who had read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God? Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly uninformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naiveté?"
"God, Invisible Pink Unicorns, belly button lint from a one-eyed giant, they're all equally acceptable answers."
"Did I remember to feed my cat?" -- Erwin Schrödinger
"To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies; that one has no rational arguments to offer." -- Ayn Rand
"Dream what you want to dream, go where you want to go, be what you want to be, because you have only one life and one chance to do all the things you want to do."
"I give money for church organs in the hope that the organ music will distract the congregation's attention from the rest of the service." -- Andrew Carnegie
"You didn't hear it
You didn't see it..."
...how absurd it all seems without any proof"
-- from "Tommy" by 'The Who'
"Beer, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's little problems." -- Homer Simpson
"Logical thinking empowers the mind in a way that no other kind of thinking can. It frees the highly educated from the habit of presuming that every claim to be true until proven false. It enables average Americans to stand up against the forces of political correctness, see through the chicanery, and make independent decisions for themselves. And it is the bulwark against intellectual servitude for the underprivileged." -- Marilyn vos Savant
"Warning: end of message imminent. Stop reading now."