quoteable quotes

[boonw]

This is a thread in which you can post any great quote you found online or some of your favorites. I came across this one a few minutes ago.


"Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess, with a pigeon , it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory." - Scott D. Weitzenhoffer.


"To be sure, Darwin's theory is imperfect. However, the fact that a theory cannot offer a satisfactory explanation on every issue should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypotheses, grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well established scientific propositions." John E. Jones (Dover vs Kitzmiller judge)

 

[Aught3]

^lol that's awesome.

How about: "Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof." - Ashley Montague

Or: "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands." - Douglas Adams

"The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers." - William Shakespeare

 

[enterman]

Collection of my random favs in the order I found them.

"Existence is Suffering" - Budda

"Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power." - Eric Hoffer

"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." - Alan Dean Foster

"If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done." - Peter Ustinov

"Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You" - Eleanor Roosevelt

"Cruel Leaders Are Replaced Only To Have New Leaders Turn Cruel" - Che Guevara

"We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released" - Jean Houston

"When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion." - Abraham Lincoln

"Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen." - John le Carre

"Cogito Ergo Nom" - Jeph Jacques

"Life - A sexually-transmitted, terminal disease." - Unknown

"None are so busy as the fool and knave." - John Dryden

"He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave." - Sir William Drummond

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way." - Bertrand Russell

 

[irmerk]

I think I got carried away... However, I think every single one of these quotes is as important as the prior and the next. I strongly recommend reading all of them, since I presume most have not been read before by most. Actually, I would have had more, but I have only scanned through half of my source.

In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong.

I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator; by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord. "¦ I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people. "¦

Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Is it to you or to God I am to confess? "To God." In that case, man, begone!

I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' 'No,' said the priest, 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why,' asked the Eskimo, 'did you tell me?'

Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity.

Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day. Give him a religion and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.

If forgiveness is divine, why is there a hell?

If God doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you.

Morality is doing what is right no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told no matter what is right.

Organized religion is like organized crime; it preys on peoples' weaknesses, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. God is all-powerful.

The mind of the fundamentalist is like the pupil of the eye: The more light you pour on it, the more it will contract.

Why be born again, when you can just grow up?

Radical Muslims are to Islam as Christians are to Christianity.

Science is like a big apple. At first, it looks delicious, but it's probably blasphemous.

Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, dirty thing on the face of the earth and you should save it for someone you love.

Christian fundamentalism in 'cafeteria style' has chosen which parts of Jesus' teachings it chooses to honor and which not. "¦ Little attention is given to the Sermon on the Mount and the many passages where Jesus condemns the wealthy and the religious leaders of his time for their callous, hypocritical, mean-spirited absence of compassion. In fact, theologians who pay much attention to Jesus' teachings on compassion are viewed as bleeding hearts, unorthodox, and not really Christian.

Fellowship with God means warfare with the world.

Just consider for a moment what their [the devout's] heaven looks like. Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.

I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.

Every man knows when his life began. "¦ If I did not exist in the past, why should I, or could I, exist in the future [after death]?

If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, 'yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down. "¦ Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

We think the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. What if the president declared a National Day of Cursing God because He failed us on September 11? "¦ That's how we feel when he promotes prayer.

The very concept of sin comes from the Bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.

To a scientific rationalist, there is no distinction between believing in leprechauns, alien abductions, ESP, reincarnation, or the existence of a God - each equally lacks objective evidence. ... Separating out the latter two beliefs and labeling them as religion - thereby exempting them from critical analysis - is intellectually dishonest. ... [Indeed] the most widespread and sacredly guarded superstitions [are] the most important ones to oppose, for they have the greatest influence and can therefore do the most harm.

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.

The first chapter of Genesis "¦ tells us [in Hebrew], in verses one and two "¦ '[In the beginning] created the gods (Elohim) these skies "¦ and this earth. "¦' Here we have the opening of a polytheistic fable of creation, but, so strongly convinced were the English translators that the ancient Hebrews must have been originally monotheistic that they rendered the above as follows: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. "¦' (Italics added)

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their ues"¦.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

Praying is like a rocking chair, it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere.

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.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

A belief is not true because it is useful.

If I knew for a certainty that some man was coming to my house with the conscious intention of doing me good, I would run for my life.

If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.

If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being.

The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.

A belief in an afterlife has the unavoidable effect of making this life less unique and precious. "¦ Good luck finding an atheist willing to strap a bomb to his or her back, or fly a plane into a building. "¦

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.

Agreement to disagree is masturbation of the inadequate and failed mind.

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

It is high time that scholars of all godly religions united to confront the forces of immorality in the present day under various names such as secularism, human rights, freedom of speech.

I suspect that many who reject the scientific outlook "¦ confusedly think that if the scientific world picture is true, then their lives must be futile because "¦ man has no purpose given him from without. These people mistakenly conclude that there can be no purpose in life because there is no purpose of life; that men cannot themselves adopt and achieve purposes"¦

The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

People go to church for the same reason they go to a tavern: To stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.

If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.

If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good.

I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get.

That 'religion is inherently irrational' is surely true. Why one set of beliefs that are offered without argument or evidence rather than another?

If you see a blind man, run up and kick him. Why should you be kinder than God?

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good "¦ I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy during which it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.

An actually existent fly is more important than a possibly existent angel.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

The god of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. "¦ You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.

There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.

With soap, baptism is a good thing.

Hands that help are far better than lips that pray.

Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. "¦ It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.

The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know.

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

The Pope may act outside the law, above the law, and against the law.

Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.

How comforting would it be to hear the President of the United States assure us that almighty Zeus is on our side in our war on terrorism? "¦

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

The 'person' who is supposed to control the empirical world [but] is not himself located in it "¦ is not an intelligible notion at all. We may have a word which is used [the G word], as if it named this 'person,' but "¦ it cannot be said to symbolize anything. "¦ The mere existence of the noun is enough to foster the illusion that there is a real, or at any rate a possible entity corresponding to it.

Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme.

Perhaps God chose me to be an atheist.

You can change your faith without changing gods. And vice versa.

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy afternoon.

You see, madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push!

Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.

Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies.

You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, even months over-analyzing a situation, trying to put the pieces back together, justifying what could've, should've and would've happened -- or you can leave the pieces on the floor and move the fuck on.

I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools.

Anyone without a sense of humor is at the mercy of everyone else.

 

[Ozymandyus]

These are only somewhat quotable... but they are among the few quotes I actually know off the top of my head and love.

"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand."
-Bokonists in Kurt Vonnegut's 'Cat's Cradle'

Go then, there are other worlds than these.
-Stephen King, Dark Tower

My first thought was, he lied in every word.
-Browning, Child Roland unto the Dark Tower Came

And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works. Ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains.
-Shelley, Ozymandias

This one is especially long.. but it had a big effect on me when I was a teenager for some reason.

The look bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man's life. It said: "See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!" and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey's trick.
-Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

 

[nasher168]

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
-Buddha

"Do unto others as you would have done unto thyself"
-Jesus
That's pretty much the basis of my entire "moral code".

 

[Aught3]

^Nice.

But I have to say I prefer Confucius' version - "Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself."

 

[GoodKat]

^Nice.

But I have to say I prefer Confucius' version - "Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself."

"Treat other in the manner in which you would expect to be treated were you in their position".

-my version.

 

[Fartoholic]

There is no wealth like knowledge; no poverty like ignorance. Ali ibn Abi-Talib

 

[desertedcities]

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
-H.P. Lovecraft; The Call of Cthulhu

"a facility for quotation covers up the absence of original thought."
-Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L. Sayers)

"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898 (Mark Twain)

"Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile."
-Hippocrates (Should be in Greek, though)

"After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
-Aldous Huxley

"Nec mortem effugere quisquam nec amorem potest."
-Publilius Syrus, Maxims


"In the long run men hit only what they aim at."
- Thoreau

"...[A] number is the essence of all things, and the metaphysical principle of rational order in the universe."
-Pythagoras (Not really, but this is what Pythagoreans tended to believe)

"The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented."
- Dennis Gabor

"When men are arrived at the goal, they should not turn back."
- Plutarch

"Advance in science comes by laying brick upon brick, not by sudden erection of fairy palaces."
- J. S. Huxley

"I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go."
- Captain Cook

"Where there is no vision, the people perish."
- Proverbs 29:18

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken."
- John Keats

"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and reality of tomorrow."
- Robert Goddard

"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
- Albert Einstein

"There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between is exploration."
-Anonymous

"A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms."
-George Wald

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-Ernest Hemingway

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
-John Lennon

"The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half."
-Fyodor Dostoevsky

"In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better."
-Ellen DeGeneres (attributed)

"I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed."
-James Thurber

"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."
-George Carlin

"The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously."
-Henry Kissinger

"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy."
-Richard Feynman

"There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously."
-Thomas Sowell

"...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion."
-Robert Chapman

"Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely."
-Hesketh Pearson

"Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow."
-Oscar Wilde

"The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid."
-Art Spander

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
-Albert Einstein

"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"I hope that when I die, people say about me, 'Boy, that guy sure owed me a lot of money.'"
-Jack Handey

"Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."
-Mark Twain

"Always get married early in the morning. That way, if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted a whole day."
-Mickey Rooney

"If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it."
-Emerson Pugh

"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."
-Tom Robbins

"I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants."
-A. Whitney Brown

"From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
-Groucho Marx

"Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done."
-Andy Rooney

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."
-Eric Hoffer

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office."
-H. L. Mencken

"Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."
-George Orwell

"[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system."
-Dan Quayle

"With or without religion, you would 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

"The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers."
-Scott Adams

"The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'."
-Larry Hardiman

"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress."
-John Adams

"A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students."
-John Ciardi

"I'm thirty years old, but I read at the thirty-four-year-old level."
-Dana Carvey

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities."
-Dr. Seuss

"To my embarrassment I was born in bed with a lady."
-Wilson Mizner

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."
-Nathaniel Borenstein

"Drive-in banks were established so most of the cars today could see their real owners."
-E. Joseph Cossman

"A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad."
-Bob Edwards

"Language is the source of misunderstandings."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money."
-Jules Renard

"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible."
-Jean Kerr

"Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?"
- Richard Feynman

"There's no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn't tell you about it?"
-Kin Hubbard

"It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off."
-Woody Allen

"A kleptomaniac is a person who helps himself because he can't help himself."
-Henry Morgan

"Cockroaches and socialites are the only things that can stay up all night and eat anything."
-Herb Caen

"I phoned my dad to tell him I had stopped smoking. He called me a quitter."
-Steven Pearl

"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."
-George Bernard Shaw

"One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar."
-Oscar Wilde

"The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews."
-William Faulkner

"People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust."
-E. B. White

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
-James Thurber

"Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions."
-Cullen Hightower

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."
-Peter De Vries

"After an access cover has been secured by 16 hold-down screws, it will be discovered that the gasket has been omitted."
-De la Lastra's Corollary

"If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong."
-Mo Udall

"A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors."
-William Ralph Inge

"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning."
-Sir Winston Churchill

"Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water."
-W. C. Fields

"By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."
-Socrates

 

[GoodKat]

"We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against
the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
- Adolf Hitler, Speech in Berlin, October 24, 1933

"Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the
stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook."
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 5

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself
against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

"Now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies."
-Voltaire on his deathbed when asked by a priest if he renounced Satan

"In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and
without examination."
-Mark Twain

"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means."
-George Bernard Shaw

"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"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

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
-Denis Diderot

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
-George Bernard Shaw

"The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers."
-Denis Diderot

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious
basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of
reward after death."
-Albert Einstein

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated.
I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me
which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our
science can reveal it."
-Albert Einstein

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then
blames them for his own mistakes."
-Gene Roddenberry

"If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe."
-A church sign in Northern Ireland

"I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I
go to hell?' 'No,' said the priest, 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why,' asked the Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell
me?'"
-Annie Dillard

"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith, must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding,
and whatever it sees it must put out of sight, and wish to know nothing but the word of God"

-Martin Luther

"Religious suffering is, at the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
It is the opium of the people."

-Karl Marx

"Religion is the world's most divisive label of group identity and hostility."

-Richard Dawkins

 

[Mafiaaffe]

------------------------------ ----------
"If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease"

-Clark Adams
------------------------------ ----------
"They must find it difficult...Those who have taken authority as the truth,rather then truth as the authority"

-Gerald Massey
------------------------------ -----------
"Religion is the end of love and honesty, the beginning of confusion; faith is a colorful hope or fear, the origin of folly."

-Tao Te Ching
------------------------------ -----------
"Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon , it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory."

-Scott D. Weitzenhoffer
------------------------------ -----------
"An error can never become true however many times you repeat it. The truth can never be wrong, even if no one hears it."

-Mahatma Gandhi.
------------------------------ -----------
"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."

-Thomas Paine
------------------------------ -----------
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

-Douglas Adams
------------------------------ -----------
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding"

"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder"

"Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds."

"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning."

"Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either."

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish"

-Albert Einstein
------------------------------ -----------
"The true beauty of a self-inquiring sentient universe is lost on those who elect to walk the intellectually vacuous path of comfortable paranoid fantasies."

"Ignorance is not a form of prove"

-Thunderf00t
------------------------------ -----------
"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world"

"There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

-Richard Dawkins
------------------------------ -----------
"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something special."

-Stephen Hawking
------------------------------ -----------
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without religion, good people would do good things, and evil people would do evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion."

-Steven Weinberg
------------------------------ -----------
"The inspiration of the bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it."

-Robert G. Ingersoll
------------------------------ -----------
"Wisdom is found only in truth. "

"The phrases that men hear or repeat continually, end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence."

-J.W.v.Goethe
------------------------------ -----------
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it,
or who said it, no matter if I have said it,
unless it agrees with your own reason
and your own common sense"

-The Buddha (Siddhartha Gotama)
------------------------------ -----------
"Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open. "

-Thomas Dewar.
------------------------------ -----------
"Never look down on anybody unless you helping him up."

-Jesse Jackson.
------------------------------ -----------
"You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say. "

-Martin Luther.
------------------------------ -----------
"Admiration is the daughter of ignorance."

"The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason. "

"Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn."

-Benjamin Franklin
------------------------------ -----------
"Better to be unborn than untaught, for ignorance is the root of all misfortune."

-Aristotle
------------------------------ -----------
"What Can Be Asserted Without Evidence Can Be Dismissed Without Evidence."

-Hitchens
------------------------------ -----------
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography"

-Ambrose Bierce
------------------------------ -----------
"God did not create man. Man created God."

"If you cannot change your mind, are you sure you still have one?"

"You can't find out when you right if you don't admit when you are wrong."

"The one who first resorts to violence shows that he has no more arguments."
Anon.

 

[Dark Evil Emu]

"Treat other in the manner in which you would expect to be treated were you in their position".

-my version.

"Be excellent to each other."

Bill and Ted's version.

 

[AzureInsanity]

Dragonlance

Raistlin Majere

* "If I am to be judged by those who come after me, let me be judged by the truth."

* "Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it."

* "I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open." (Response when he was asked if he had any hope.)

* "If we stop living because we fear death, then we have already died."

* "I will do this. Nothing in my life matters except this. No moment in my life exists except this moment. I am born in this moment, and if I fail, I will die in this moment."

* "Learn to control the power. Never let it control you!"

* "Bow only in reverence, never in subservience."

* "So dark. Endless darkness, eternal. It was not the absence of light that was so frightening as the absence of thought, of knowledge, of comprehension. Our lives, the lives of the living will go on. The sun shines, the moons rise, we will laugh and talk, and he will know nothing, feel nothing. Nothing. So final. It will come to us all. It will come to me"

* "I sacrificed myself for myself!"

Kitiara Uth Matar

* "I am what I have made myself. In a world where most are ignorant peasants, I have made myself a warrior. I take what I can and give when I like. I don't need you, dragon. I don't need anyone!"

* "Fear can turn you inside out or you can make fear work for you. Use it like another weapon. Fear is a funny thing. It can make you weak-kneed, make you pee your pants, make you whimper like a baby. Or fear can make you run faster, hit harder."

 

[Raistlin Majere]

Raistlin Majere
* "Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it."

* "I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open." (Response when he was asked if he had any hope.)

I actually combined the two and used them for my senior quote

 

[ImprobableJoe]

As near as I can tell, I'm responsible for the whole "atheism is a religion the way not collecting stamps is a hobby" thing...

If not me, can someone source that one? Otherwise, I've got a half-dozen requests to use it in books.

 

[AzureInsanity]

More Dragonlance

heh...probably my favorite


'A man that stares into the light is as blind as a man that dwells in darkness' (Rhys Mason)

 

[digitalbuddha48]

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."

This, for a number of reasons, is the best quote I have come across in a long time.

Here is another one I like:

Even an empty threat deserves a response you won't soon forget
I must destroy everything that tries to infect

 

[Joe]

"For the children" is just below "Counterrevolutionary" and " National security" in terms of implied bad shit. Whenever anybody busts out those bad boys, it's time to get leery.
-Poster "E0157H7"

Instead of science, they believe in crazy hocus pocus. Like in Kansas.
-Prof. Farnsworth, Bender's Game

"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do."
-- Bertrand Russell

Dr. Yvonne Fulbright - "It was seen as if you masturbated, then that took away your love for God, and for Christ"
Penn Jillette - "Sure worked for me"

"Religion is not the opiate of the masses, it is the placebo of the masses"
-Dr. Gregory House

Epistemological relativism may be true for you, but it isn't true for everyone.
-Jesus and Mo

 

[DmKrispin]

Never trust the people who've only got one ****ing book -- Billy Connolly