Favorite Quotes
A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
- Abigail van Buren
The United States of America should have a foundation free from
the influence of clergy. -George Washington
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find
in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
- Longfellow
Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of
ourselves and how little we think of the other person. - Mark
Twain
Religion is what the common people see as true, the wise people
see as false, and the rulers see as useful. - Seneca
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end.
- Benjamin Disraeli
Our collective survival lies in recognizing that religion is not the
solution; neither is nationalism. Both are divisive,
embedding
in us false notions of superiority and arrogant pride that are
difficult to erase. We have but one choice: the path of secular
humanism, based upon the principles of logic and
reason. This
alone offers the hope of providing everybody on this globe with
the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
- Pervez Hoodbhoy
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god
than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all
the
other possible gods, you will understand why I
dismiss yours. -Stephen Roberts
The higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is
likely to be religious. - Paul G. Bell
When a woman steals your husband, there is no better revenge
than to let her keep him.- Author unknown
Most people get their panties all tied in
a knot when you challenge
them to use their brains and think outside the box
for a minute. It's more
comfortable for them to remain sheeple and shuffle
around bleating the
same, safe, old rhetoric as the rest of the flock. You're doing the world a
favor by elevating their blood pressure and enabling natural selection
to
weed out the weak-minded. I, for one, thank you for your efforts to
clean out the gene pool.
- from an old friend -
I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican
friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats,
we will stop telling the truth about them.
Adlai
E. Stevenson Jr
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent
perspiration. - Thomas Edison
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with
an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H. L.
Mencken
Never be a spectator to unfairness or stupidity - Christopher Hitchens |
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"The modern
conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy;
that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
John Kenneth Galbraith
Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a
patriotic fervour,
for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It emboldens the blood, just as it
narrows the mind.
And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the
mind
has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry.
Rather, the citizenry,
infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the
leader and
gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.
- Attributed to Julius Caesar:
Heros are people who rise to the occasion and quietly slip away. - Tom Brokaw
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire
history maybe the hijacking of morality by religion. -
Arthur C. Clark
Like most Westerners, Muslims main motivations are money and sex and a comfortable
life,
with a little religion on top for identity, consolation, companionship, and at
least the possibility
of a continuation of the same in an afterlife. Religion survives, and will probably
always survive,
not because it is true but because human beings are pathetic. - Ibn al-Rawandi
(author of Islamic Mysticism)
The wedding porn genre applies the Madonna-Whore complex to men: If he's sultry and
charismatic, he's dangerous, not a man you'd want to marry. But if he's soft and harmless
and borderline-laughable? Yes! Tag that wildebeest and track him until he's lost his will
to run, and his will to live, and is therefore ready to be propped up at assorted couples'
brunches and holiday dinners, presented to the world as the slightly deadened but
hopelessly devoted provider.
–excerpt from article by Heather Havrilesky
Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders. - Tom Peters
To achieve the impossible dream, try going to sleep. - Joan Klempner
Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,
totalitarian movements conjure a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the
needs of the human mind than reality itself. - Hannah Arendt
We live in a historical period when the fanaticism of America is on the right, and
it has
the apparatus to support it. - Bill Clinton
When you're in love, it's the most glorious two-and-a-half minutes of your life. - Richard
Lewis
You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. - Maya Angelou
Nothing tests your ethics like selling a used car. - Linda Hollan
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of
their parents. - H.L. Mencken
Only they who fulfil their duty in
everyday matters will fulfil them on great occasions. - C. Kingsley
We must respect the other
fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to
the extent that we respect his theory that his
wife is beautiful and his children smart. - H.L.
Mencken
The inspiration of the Bible depends on the ignorance
of the person who reads it. - Robert G. Ingersoll
With soap baptism is a good thing. - Robert G.
Ingersoll
A miracle: an event described by those to whom
it was told by men who did not see it. - Elbert
Hubbard
If you really care about a serious cause or a
deep subject, you may have to be prepared to be
boring about it. - unknown
When you are courting a nice girl an hour
seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot
cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
- Albert Einstein
With or without religion, you will have
good people doing good things and evil people
doing evil things, but for good people to do evil
things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg
If I have seen further it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants. - Isaac Newton
Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right. - Woody
Allen
The prostitute is the only honest woman left in
America. - Ti-Grace Atkinson
The big difference between sex for money and sex
for free is that sex for money usually costs a
lot less. - Brandan Francis
A philosophical opinion about the nature of the
universe, which is held by the great
majority of America's top scientists and probably
by the elite intelligentsia generally, is
so abhorrent to the American electorate
that no candidate for popular election dare
confirm it in public. If I am right, this
means that high office in the greatest country
in
the world is barred to the very people
best qualified to hold it, unless they are prepared
to lie about their beliefs. American political
opportunities are loaded against those who are
simultaneously intelligent and honest.
- Richard Dawkins -
Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured
by marriage. - Dr. Karl Bowman
The music at a wedding procession always reminds
me of the music of soldiers going into battle.
- Heinrich Heine
The only really happy folk are married women and
single men. - H.L.Mencken
When a girl marries she exchanges the attentions
of many men for the inattention of one. - Helen
Rowland
Husbands are like fires. They go out when unattended.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor
The surest way to be alone is to get married.
- Gloria Steinem
The
good or ill of a man lies within his own will.
Epictetus (50 AD - 138 AD)
"Will the promise
of biological immortality make people lazy and
slovenly in a similar way to how the promise of
a spiritual afterlife does?" author
unknown
"Question with boldness even the existence
of God; because, if there is one, he must more
approve of the homage of reason than that of blind
folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
"The optimist proclaims we live in the best
of all possible worlds: and the pessimist fears
this is true." - James Branch Cabell
"The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy
is to make others so." - Robert G. Ingersoll
"Dignity does not consist in possessing
honors, but in deserving them." - Aristotle
"A great man shows his greatness by
the way he treats little men." - author unknown
"The liar's punishment is, not in the least
that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe
anyone else." G.B. Shaw
"The first lesson of life is to burn our
own smoke; that is, not to inflict on others our
personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to
keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases."
author unknown
"Knowledge is the antidote to fear."
Emerson
"One kind word can warm three winter months."
Japanese proverb
"The more the fruits of knowledge become
accessible to men, the more widespread is the
decline of religious belief." Freud
"All that is human must retrograde if it
does not advance." Edward Gibbon
"With wisdom grows doubt." Goethe
"Conservatives walk backward, pretending
it is the future." George Seldes
"We are tattooed in our cradles with the
beliefs of our tribes." Oliver
Wendell Holmes
"A liberal education… frees a man from
the prison-house of his class, race, time, place,
background, family, and even his nation."
Robert Hutchins
"An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a
thrilling lie." Aldous Huxley
"A great many people think they are thinking
when they are rearranging their prejudices."
William James
"Generally, it may be stated that what people
consider to be good is really bad; and most of
the things that are considered bad are really
good." Maimonides
"He stripped off the armor of institutional
friendships to dedicate his soul to the terrible
deities of Truth and Beauty." Edgar
Lee Masters
"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping
common people quiet." Napoleon
"Live dangerously. Build your cities on the
slopes of Vesuvious." Nietzsche
"We forfeit three quarters of ourselves
in order to be like other people." - author
unknown
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully
as when they do it from religious conviction."
Pascal
"When war comes to a country, lies are as
plentiful as sand." author unknown
"To understand everything is to hate nothing."
Romain Rolland
"All men who deliberate on controversial
matters should be free from hate, friendship,
anger and pity."
Sallust
"If a man could kill all his illusions, he'd
become a god." Colin Wilson
"I have certainly known more men destroyed
by the desire to have a wife and child and to
keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed
by drink and harlots." William
Butler Yeats
"A child educated only at school is an uneducated
child." Santayana
"Evil flourishes when good men do nothing."
author unknown
"The first reaction to truth is hatred."
Tertullian
"Superstition… Religion which has grown
incongruous with intelligence." John
Tyndall
"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who
has read history, is man's original virtue. It
is through disobedience that progress has been
made; disobedience and rebellion."
Oscar Wilde
"The things one feels absolutely certain
about are never true. That is the fatality of
faith and the lesson of romance." Oscar
Wilde
"Sound common sense… the inherited stupidity
of the race." Oscar Wilde
"One should always be in love. That is the
reason one should never marry." Oscar Wilde
"At times to be silent is to lie." Miguel
De Unamuno
"The public is a ferocious beast; one must
either chain it up or flee from it." Voltaire
"Doubt is not a pleasant state, but certainty
is a ridiculous one." Voltaire
"Give your decisions, never your reasons;
your decision may be right, your reasons are sure
to be wrong." William Mansfield
"In great attempts it is glorious even to
fail." Longinus
"Individuals having no religious affiliation
show on the average less prejudice than do church
members." Gordon W. Allport
"Speak when you're angry and you'll make
the best speech you'll ever regret."
Laurence J. Peter
"The total absence of humor from the Bible
is one of the most singular things in all literature."
Alfred North Whitehead
"Nationalism is an infantile disease."
Einstein
"Faith may provide all the answers for some,
but it is the doubters who get an education."
I.C. Houghten
"Change… inevitable as knowledge accumulates."
author unknown
"The most welcome person is one who knows
when to go." author unknown
"The deepest trance of all is personality."
Thomas R. Condon
"Most of the trouble in the world is caused
by people wanting to be important."
T.S. Eliot
"You can be sincere and still be stupid."
Charles Kettering
People…"are singular and unrepeatable
centers of creativity and decision."
Turning East - Cox
"We can never say 'This is it'. We can only
say 'This is how I see it'.
Corita Kent
"He who knows most grieves most for wasted
time." Dante
"To be sure, life is not always fair. But
it is good and joyous nonetheless; and the most
courageous thing one can do is to snatch joy out
of the very path of pain."
Reader's Digest
"Never explain… your friends don't need
it, and your enemies won't believe you anyhow."
Elbert Hubbard
"I wonder how many Einsteins have been permanently
discouraged through competitive examinations and
the forced feeding of curricula." Carl
Sagan
"Some people get all their pleasures from
negative emotions." Ouspensky
"I have nothing to worry about. No one is
guilty." Ouspensky
"He dislikes none, he courts nothing. What
else can he do but what is good." Confucius
"Silence is a friend who will never betray."
Confucius
"Under peaceful conditions, a war-like man
sets upon himself." Nietzsche
"To understand everything is to forgive all."
author unknown
"My father didn't tell me how to live. He
lived, and let me watch."
Reader's Digest
"He knows that he cannot reveal himself to
anybody; he thinks it bad taste to become familiar;
and as a rule he is not familiar when people think
he is." Nietzsche
"Unhappiness is the worst kind of self-indulgence."
author unknown
"I am smart only in that I realize how stupid
I am." Rick Branch
"I
can't even be certain about my certainty that
nothing is certain." Rick Branch
"A free society cherishes non-conformity."
Commager
"A man's ethical behavior should be based
effectually on sympathy, education, and social
ties; no religious basis is necessary." Einstein
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