"The Essenses are not mentioned anywhere in the New Testament, although their numbers were at least as great as the Sadducees and Pharisees. This would suggest an element of intentional secrecy regarding the influence of the sect on the teachings and work of Jesus." ["The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth About the Resurrection" by Holger Kersten & Elmer R. Gruber p. 239]

"There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors." [J. Robert Oppenheimer, Life, 10 October 1949]

"An error? Impossible! My modem is error correcting."

"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."

"The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action." -- Einstein

"It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment." [Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies"]

"Man must learn to rely upon himself. Reading bibles will not protect him from the blasts of winter, but houses, fires. and clothing will. To prevent famine, one plow is worth a million sermons, and even patent medicines will cure more diseases than all the prayers uttered since the beginning of the world." [Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Gods", 1872]

"The fact that [the biblical book] Hebrews is not an epistle of St. Paul, or of any other apostle, is proved by what it says in chapter two...." [Martin Luther]

"Among all mental diseases that have been systematically inoculated into the human cranium, the religious pest is the most abominable." [Johann Most, "The God Pestilence",]

"HUMANISM: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society." [John Ralston Saul]

"Let the government deal with them in this respect, as I have suggested. But whether the government acts or not, let everyone at least be guided by his own conscience and form for himself a definition or image of a Jew." [Martin Luther,"On the Jews and Their Lies",1543]

"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. "

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the Sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."

"The conquering of fear is the beginning of wisdom" [Bertrand Russell]

"To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car." [Frank Zindler]

"Any being so vain as to require worship is far from worthy of it."

"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education." -- Wilson Mizner

"They were allowed to stay there on one condition, and that is that they didn't eat of the tree of knowledge. That has been the condition of the Christian church from then until now. They haven't eaten as yet, as a rule they do not." --Clarence Darrow

"It is a waste of words to talk about God and what he knows and what he does. No man knows that God does anything, that God knows anything, or that there is a God." [Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays_]

"Craig (1992:238) claims that it is 'philosophically unobjectionable' to conceive of God as causally prior to the Big Bang, since 'God's act of creation may be regarded as simultaneous with the origin of the universe'. However--as Grünbaum observes on several occasions--many of us find it hard to make any sense of this suggestion. It is true that there are contexts in which it clearly makes sense to speak of 'simultaneous causation'--e.g. as Craig notes, there is no impropriety in the claim that the downward pressure exerted by the otherwise unsupported head causes the indentation in the pillow--but this is compatible with the claim ü that, strictly speaking, causation must be local and mediated by finite signals. On this view, given a sufficient margin of error, causation can appear simultaneous--but there is no reason to think that there is any genuinely simultaneous causation." Graham Oppy, "Professor William Craig's Criticisms of Critiques of Kalam Cosmological Arguments By Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, And Adolf Grünbaum" (1995)