2037 "Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought." [Graham Greene, 1981]

742 "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

436 "The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives in America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place." -- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

1278 "Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction -- in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years." Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. xviii-xix.

3624 "Web based forums are like subscribing to 10 different newspapers and having to visit 10 different news stands to pickup each one. Email list-server groups and USENET are like having all of those newspapers delivered to your door each morning."

2746 "This indictment of Christianity I will write on all walls, wherever there are walls--I have letters to make even the blind see." [Nietzsche]

874 "Playing God, at least while you're alive, is very difficult. You must do absolutely nothing." -- ZZ

466 "It was the schoolboy who said, 'Faith is believing what you know ain't so.'." -- Mark Twain, Following the Equator

3676 "Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate."

1160 "Ignorance is the mother of devotion." -- Dean Henry Cole

1902 "Belief in heaven is impossible in the absence of a greedy desire for it."

414 "There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven." -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)

3636 "After asparagus, broccoli is my all time favorite non-meat, non-carb, non-legume, non-wine, non-beer, non-fruit, non-salted-anything, digestible food thing product."

1502 "It could be argued that the greatest confidence trick in the history of philosophy is the attempt to make the various arguments for the existence of God support each other by using the same term for the entity who existence each is supposed to establish. In fact, almost all of them bear on entities of apparently quite different kinds, ranging from a Creator to a moral Lawgiver. The proofs must, therefore, be supplemented with a further proof or set of proofs that shows these apparently different entities to be the same if the combination trick is to work. Otherwise the arguments must be taken separately, in which case they either establish or fail to establish the existence of a number of remarkable but unrelated entities." Michael Scriven, "God and Reason" Critiques of God (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997) p. 112.

3342 "Whatever tends to prolong the existence of ignorance or to prevent the recognition of knowledge is dangerous to the well-being of the human race." [Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays_]

62 "Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it." -- Henry Ford

967 "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)

3652 "While most Americans believe that getting rid of religion is an impossible goal, much of the developed world has already accomplished it. Any account of a ”god gene“ that causes the majority of Americans to helplessly organize their lives around ancient works of religious fiction must explain why so many inhabitants of other First World societies apparently lack such a gene. The level of atheism throughout the rest of the developed world refutes any argument that religion is somehow a moral necessity. Countries like Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on Earth. According to the United Nations’ Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. Conversely, the 50 nations now ranked lowest in terms of human development are unwaveringly religious." --Sam Harris (An Atheist Manifesto)

2367 "It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui." [Helen Keller]

1582 "Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists---especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God." Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?