793 "Proof establishes knowledge; knowledge inspires belief; belief in any other context is mere sentiment."

3714 "Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night." Philip K. Dick [what the dead men say, 1964]

3290 "The world was created on 22d October, 4004 B.C. at 6 o'clock in the evening." [James Ussher (1581-1656; Archbishop of Armagh), Annals of the World: 1650-1654]

3315 "When he that speaks, and he to whom he speaks, neither of them understand what is meant, that is metaphysics." [Voltaire]

2140 "It never ceases to amaze me at how many religions depend upon circumsized penises." [Dawn Henderson]

3666 "If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed." -- Adolf Hitler

2405 "There must be a Silicon Heaven. Where do all the calculators go?" [Kryten, "Red Dwarf"]

1328 Biblical higher criticism "is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer. So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand. In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance." Bishop John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 12.

2370 "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]

1143 "No wild beasts are as hostile to men as Christian sects in general are to one another." -- Emperor Julian

3624 "The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality." -- Arnold Toynbee

1162 "Inspired? The Bible is not even intelligent. It is not even good craftsmanship, but is full of absurdities and contradictions." -- E. Haldeman-Julius, The Meaning Of Atheism

734 "More and more people care about religious tolerance as fewer and fewer care about religion." -- Alexander Chase, Perspectives

3087 "Many years ago Christian pioneers had to fight savage Indians. Today missionaries of these former cultures are being sent via the public schools to heathenize our children." [Phylis Schlafly's Eagle Forum]

3114 "It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief." [George Bernard Shaw]

1054 "My thoughts will not cater to priest or dictator; No person can deny, Die Gedanken Sind Frei!" -- 16th century German peasant song

1260 "No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously." Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, (First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 245.

3091 "Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all lands and in all ages, in splendour and vastness, testify to the metaphysical need of man, which, strong and ineradicable, follows close upon his physical need. Certainly whoever is satirically inclined might add that this metaphysical need is a modest fellow who is content with poor fare. It sometimes allows itself to be satisfied with clumsy fables and insipid tales. If only imprinted early enough, they are for a man adequate explanations of his existence and supports of his morality. Consider, for example, the Koran. This wretched book was sufficient to found a religion of the world, to satisfy the metaphysical need of innumerable millions of men for twelve hundred years, to become the foundation of their morality, and of no small contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and most extended conquests. We find in it the saddest and the poorest form of Theism. Much may be lost through translation; but I have not been able to discover one single valuable thought in it. Such things show that metaphysical capacity does not go hand in hand with the metaphysical need. Yet it will appear that in the early ages of the present surface of the earth this was not the case, and that those who stood considerably nearer than we do to the beginning of the human race and the source of organic nature, had also both greater energy of the intuitive faculty of knowledge, and a truer disposition of mind, so that they were capable of a purer, more direct comprehension of the inner being of nature, and were thus in a position to satify the metaphysical need in a more worthy manner. Thus originated in the primitive ancestors of the Brahmans, the Rishis, the almost superhuman conceptions which were afterwards set down in the Upanishads of the Vedas." [Schopenhauer, "World as Will and Idea"]

3355 "If man had no knowledge except what he has got out of the Bible he would not know enough to make a shoe." [Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays_]

1184 "What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice." -- Ursula K. LeGuinn, The Day before the Revolution