3377 "Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother of a chicken." [Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays_]

2404 "...your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life." [Krishnamurti]

3739 "All politicak activity makes complete sense once the proposition that all government is basically a self-legalizing protection racket, is fully understood."

2595 "...I couldn't but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocracy, the intolerance, must consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the passing pleasures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle ashe murmurs: give the devil his due." [W. Somerset Maughman, "The Razor's Edge"]

3265 "There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one-- the pulpit. It yielded last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession-- at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery texts [in the Bible] remained; the practice changed; that was all." ["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.109]

1909 "Humanity sees its reflection in the mirrors that surround it, and thus gratified, calls this image perfect, good, merciful, omniscient, omnipresent, holy, just, and above all, love. So enchanted are these hairless apes with this, that they invent a special word for it: 'God'."

783 "The right question is more important than the right answer." -- Piers Anthony

3369 "Piety could do nothing better than imitate morality." [Lemuel K. Washburn, _Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays_]

1843 Losing your faith is a lot like losing your virginity you don't realise how irritating it was 'til it's gone.

2106 "...Jesus was not as peaceful as commonly believed, and that his actual teachings did not represent a fundamental break with the tradition of Jewish military messianism. A strong pro-zealot-bandit and anti-Roman bias probably pervaded his original ministry. The decisive break with the Jewish messianic tradition probably came about only after the fall of Jerusalem, when the original politico-military components in Jesus' teachings were purged by Jewish Christians living in Rome and other cities of the empire as an adaptive response to the Roman victory." [Marvin Harris, anthropologist, _Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches_]

225 "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea - massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."

2563 "The immortality of the soul ... was really an element foreign to Hebrew belief and Hebrew psychology which was never assimilated into the Old Testament or New Testament." [Dictionary of the Bible, by Jesuit priest John L. McKenzie]

3052 "Manila. Cardinal Jaime Sin yesterday ordered Roman Catholics who vote in next month's Philippine national elections to reject Communists and candidates who advocate divorce or abortion. ...Sin, who distributed copies of the letter at a press conference, insisted that church and state are separate in the Philippines." [San Francisco Chronicle, 23 April 1987 (Los Angeles Times)]

371 "If reason don't 'splain it, disdain it!"

2764 "It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented the things of heaven and the redeeming drops of blood: but even these sweet and dismal poisons they took from the body and the earth!" [Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra]

2356 "It can therefore be said that, from the viewpoint of the doctrine of the faith, there are no difficulites in explaining the origin of man, in regard to the body, by means of the theory of evolution." [Pope John Paul II, April 16, 1986]

632 "religion is a socio-political institution for the control of people's thoughts, lives, and actions; based on ancient myths and superstitions perpetrated through generations of subtle yet pervasive brainwashing."

172 "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." -- Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html

610 "If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good." --Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, defending the Bush energy plan and its proposed expansion of nuclear power

2414 "The Church has through the centuries, understood that ideas are really more dangerous than other weapons. Their use should be restricted." [Francis J. Lally, American Roman Catholic Monsignor, Mike Wallace Interview, Fund for the Republic, 1958]