Note: The following quotes got chosen for the message and not for historical purposes. Unlike other areas in the Freethinkers site, no one here has thoroughly checked the sources. If you wish to use these quotes as reliable sources, please research them for accuracy, especially the quotes without citations. If you find a citation error, please let me know. Ed.

Creationists are always looking for “the missing link,” but evolution doesn’t work by a single link. A specie evolves from at least two reproductively isolated groups from the same specie. The isolated groups are then driven by genetic drift or adaptive pressures until they can no longer reproduce, even if they were no longer isolated. So at what point do you label this group a new specie? At the point of isolation or at some point in time after isolation where they begin to look different? If you claim the new specie at the time of initial separation, the Creationists scream “but they’re the same specie,” and if you claim the new specie when they begin to look differently, the Creationists will yell, “But where is the missing link?” The same goes with the evolution of language. People who spoke Latin were isolated into various groups. They began to speak in accents but they could still understand each other. When the accents became so undecipherable to the point of no communication, they became different languages, a different specie of language so to speak. Thus we have French, Spanish, Italian, and all the other romance languages. Where are their missing links?

--Ignots Pistachio

My cat, Val, cannot possibly know that she is a mammal and all the amazing ways that mammals have come up with, or rather – evolved into – on this planet. There is great joy in understanding even that little thing. She cannot. And I can. And anyone, any human, can too - who is willing to look into it. And yet we, as a society, have chosen to lie to our children – in my mind, keep them animals of a different sort – keep them blind and looking only a few feet away instead of seeing even a little bit bigger picture.

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grader, more subtle, more elegant”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

Today, we have this even larger federal government, more and more of it being war-related, surveillance-related. I mean it's gone beyond our wildest Clinton administration dreams. I think progressives can't just be seen as pro-big-government when big government has gotten so nasty. Katrina's a perfect example of how militarized the government has gotten even when it's supposedly trying to help people. The initial response of the government was a military one. When they finally got people down there, it was armed guards to protect the fancy stores and keep people in that convention center – at gunpoint.

I believe there's something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government.

Part of empire is the way it's penetrated our society, the way we've become dependent on it. … The military budget is starting to bankrupt the country. It's got so much in it that's well beyond any rational military purpose. It equals just less than half of total global military spending. And yet here we are, stymied by two of the smallest, poorest countries on Earth. Iraq before we invaded had a GDP the size of the state of Louisiana, and Afghanistan was certainly one of the poorest places on the planet. And yet these two places have stopped us.

The good things of the Roman Empire are what we remember about it – the roads, the language, the laws, the buildings, the classics. … But we pay very little attention to what the Roman Empire was to the people at its bottom – the slaves who built those roads … the oppressed and occupied peoples who were brought into the empire if they submitted, but radically and completely smashed if they resisted at all. … We Americans are full of our sense of ourselves as having benign imperial impulses. That's why the idea of the American Empire was celebrated as a benign phenomenon. We were going to bring order to the world. Well, yes… as long as you didn't resist us. And that's where we really have something terrible in common with the Roman Empire. … We must reckon with imperial power as it is felt by people at the bottom. Rome's power. America's.

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religion have evolved – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal – God is the Omnipotent Father – hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.

[Iraq] is one of the great foreign policy debacles of American history. There's an enormous amount at stake in the oil Gulf and Bush is throwing grenades around in the cockpit of the world economy. So I think he has dug his own grave with regard to Iraq policy.

There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where to they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.

If America ever gets hit again by another suicide bomber or a nuclear bomb, it won’t be because our enemies hate our freedoms. Rather, it will be for revenge from the United States military killing their innocent citizens, or destroying their land, or threatening them by calling them “evil.” George Bush hasn’t made us safer; he has created enemies that will continue to hate us for generations.

I came to the conclusion that, given the technology of modern warfare, war is inevitably a war against children, against civilians. When you look at the ratio of civilian to military dead, it changes from 50-50 in World War II to 80-20 in Vietnam, maybe as high as 90-10 today. … When you face that fact, war is now always a war against civilians, and so against children. No political goal can justify it, and so the great challenge before the human race in our time is to solve the problems of tyranny and aggression, and do it without war.

--Howard Zinn

It's always been my view that the people of this part of the Earth would like some of our democracy. They would like a few packets of human rights off our supermarket shelves. They want freedom. But they want another kind of freedom - freedom from us. And this we do not intend to give them. Which is why our Middle East presence is heading into further darkness. Which is why I sit on my balcony and wonder where the next explosion is going to be. For, be sure, it will happen. Bin Laden doesn't matter any more, alive or dead. Because, like nuclear scientists, he has invented the bomb. You can arrest all of the world's nuclear scientists but the bomb has been made. Bin Laden created al-Qa'ida amid the matchwood of the Middle East. It exists. His presence is no longer necessary.

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world.

[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Traditional Christianity teaches that morality comes from religion, but this is demonstrably false even from a Biblical standpoint. For example, the story of Abraham where God’s order to murder his son must be obeyed was not immoral because it was written before the Mosaic law had been established. Yet Abraham knew it was wrong because he instinctively felt it was wrong. Morals come out of biological instinct, not religion. Abraham knew murder was wrong, even without his faith. But with faith, he gained the ability to murder.

--Ignots Pistachio

BTW, doesn't it seem odd that the "evidence for the existence of god" is completely hidden from the greatest human minds who spend their professional lives exploring how the universe functions, yet it is perfectly clear to uneducated simpletons who have access to internet-linked terminals?

By asking priests to deny their own sexual needs, to expect them to hate themselves if they feel sexual feelings for those of the same sex, (or anyone for that matter), by compounding the problem by attracting men who are underdeveloped sexually and therefore have something to be gained by becoming a priest (I'm not saying that all men who become priests are this way, I'm saying the institution of the church allows for and even inadvertently encourages this type of priest) it creates an environment that makes this sort of abuse happen. And it will definately continue to happen, so long as priests are expected to be celibate.

You need a society that understands and wants liberty before they can have a democracy.

Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will never even stop to learn.

If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

Religious moderation is a relaxation of the standards of adherence to ancient taboos and superstitions. That’s really all it is. Moderate Christians have agreed not to read the bible literally, and not read certain sections of it at all, and then they come away with a much more progressive, tolerant and ecumenical version of Christianity. They just pay attention to Jesus when he’s sermonizing on the Mount, and claim that is the true Christianity. Well that’s not the true Christianity. It’s a selective reading of certain aspects of Christianity. The other face of Christianity is always waiting in the book to be resurrected. You can find the Jesus of Second Thessalonians who’s going to come back and hurl sinners into the pit. This is the Jesus being celebrated in the Left Behind novels. This is the Jesus that half the American population is expecting to see come down out of the clouds.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

Thanks to Christianity I turned to Buddhism. Thanks to Buddhism, I began to doubt. Thanks to doubt, I became an atheist. Thanks to atheism, I became a nonbeliever. Thanks to nonbelief I turned to science. Thanks to science I learned how to think.

We just cannot adopt toward ourselves the same attitudes that we adopt easily and in fact, reflexively, when others commit crimes. No matter how strong the evidence.

[I]n the Bullshit Department, the businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. Cause I gotta tell ya the truth, folks, when it comes to bullshit, big time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe, in awe, of the all time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: religion!…No contest, no contest!!

When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One’s convictions should be proportional to one’s evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn’t--indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable--is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and refused to make them his own.

[P]rescientific people… could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.

[W]e shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

--Lynn White, Jr. ("The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis", Science V. 155 No. 3767 (10 March 1967), pp. 1203-1207.)

In one Gospel Jesus says, “Whoever is not against me, is with me.” And in another Gospel he says, “Whoever is not with me, IS against me.” I mean – isn’t that direct contradiction?

The thing to reiterate is that every Christian knows exactly what it’s like to be an atheist with respect to the beliefs of Muslims, for instance. Muslims have the same reasons for being Muslim as Christians have for being Christian. They have a book they’re sure was written or dictated by the creator of the universe–because the book says that it was written or dictated by the creator of the universe. Christians look at Muslim discourse and find it fundamentally unpersuasive. Christians aren’t lying awake at night worrying about whether they should convert to Islam. Why not? Because Muslims can’t really back up their claims. They are clearly engaged in a style of discourse that is just not intellectually honest. It’s not purposed to genuine inquiry into the nature of the world. It is a reiteration of dogma, and they are clearly committed to a massive program of self-deception. Every Christian recognizes this about every religion other than Christianity. So every Christian knows exactly what it is like to be atheist. They just don’t turn the same candor and intellectual honesty on to their own faith.

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

--George Santayana

[T]he religious, at least many of the ones who write to me, seem to feel that this world is not of our concern, that this world is bad and hedonistic, and that there is another world where God is where there is perfect harmony and caring. And this secular world is bad, and this world of God is good. I guess to me, I think it’s exactly the opposite. I think the Universe is a cold abyss. A fascinating, profoundly awe-inspiring, majestic, beautiful, terrible, heartless, unfathomable, large abyss. And I think that this world, where I live amongst people I care about deeply, to be lovely and small and sweet and painful and poignant.

For those who support and agree (but regrettably) of Israel’s killing of Lebanese civilians in order to get to Hezbollah, I want to ask you this question:

If Hezbollah were hiding amongst civilian Jews in Israel, would you support the bombings and collateral killings of Israel civilians to get at Hezbollah the way you support the killing of civilians in Lebanon?

I didn’t think so.

--Pelican the Politician

If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.

--Sam Harris (An Atheist Manifesto)

Freethinkers were the only consistent opponents of censorship from the 1870s until the First World War; nearly a half century before there was an American civil Liberties Union, without a body of judicial precedent to bolster their argument, freethinkers spoke out in defense of those accused of obscenity and blasphemy...

--by Susan Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism)

New scanning technologies show that perception activates the same brain areas as imagination. Perhaps for this reason, the brain cannot reliably distinguish between recorded experience and internal fantasy.

--Thomas Lewis, M.D., et al (A General Theory of Love)

That is, long before there were such institutions as states and governments, or such concepts as laws and rights, religion emerged as the social structure to enforce the rules of human interactions. The history of the modern nation-state with constitutional rights and protection of basic human freedoms can be measured in mere centuries, whereas the history of organized religion can be measured in millennia, and the history of the evolution of moral sentiments can be measured in tens of millennia.

--Michael Shermer (The Science of Good and Evil)

No more harmful nonsense exists than this common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.

--Stephen Jay Gould (I Have Landed)

Obscenity is not a quality inherent in a book or picture, but is solely and exclusively a contribution of the reading mind, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the qualities of a book or picture.

--Theodore Schroeder

If atheism is a religion then abstinence is a form of sex.

--Karl Johanson

Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself--of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

--Sam Harris (An Atheist Manifesto)

Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

--Allan Watts

Don't get me wrong: I love nuclear energy! It's just that I prefer fusion to fission. And it just so happens that there's an enormous fusion reactor safely banked a few million miles from us. It delivers more than we could ever use in just about 8 minutes. And it's wireless!

--William McDonough, leading ecological thinker (upon being asked why some green thinkers neglect to mention nuclear energy as a viable renewable energy source.)

Isn't it ironic? One of the favorite themes of the Christian Conversion Corps is that, if we don't worship a deity, we must be worshiping ourselves. Yet it seems that this is precisely what, in fact, the theists themselves are doing. They worship a God with the same views, ideals, even personality traits as themselves - the God in the mirror.

--Rosa Williams

There's no reason, in theory, why god's presence couldn't be measured or detected in some way. The only reason that believers claim that god "can't" be detected in this way is because god isn't detected, and so a vast and intricate rationale has to be devised to explain this vast, loving, eternal, all-powerful "something" which is, in every external, objective respect, indistinguishable from nothing.

--NMS

Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail.

--Sam Harris (An Atheist Manifesto)

But what gets me is when religion encourages no questioning, blind faith, and then when it’s taught to children I go nuts. Children should not be taught about religion at all. They have no real critical thinking skills, they can’t. It’s really abusive, in my mind, that people teach children about God without letting them know the arguments for the other side and explaining that they will make their own decision about these matters when they are skilled at critical thinking.

--Julia Sweeney (Julia Sweeney blog 16 May 2005)

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

--Allan Watts

In a reversal of all historic and even prehistoric precedent, it is normal today to consider people who are more concerned with cosmic reality than with making money, to be out of touch and unrealistic. As a people, we now have the scientific ability to see so much more deeply into the universe than ancient people, yet we experience it so much less and connect with it almost not at all. This widespread cultural INDIFFERENCE TO THE UNIVERSE is a staggering reality of our time – and possibly our biggest mental handicap in solving global problems.

--Joel R. Primack (The View from the Center of the Universe)

He walks, He talks. He loves the smell of beef cooking. He hates Gay people and shellfish. He's a serial killer. And in the sequel He even knocks up a teen-age chick.

--Robert Anton Wilson, talking about the Biblical God (Email to the Universe)

[I]f there are any lessons to be learned from history, it is that we should be skeptical of all points of view, including those of the skeptics. No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith. One must view with caution the promises of any new secular priest who might emerge promising a brave new world-- if only his path to clarity and truth is followed. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to temper the intemperate and to tame the perverse temptation that lurks within.

--Paul Kurtz (The Transcendental Temptation)

Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

--Potter Stewart

It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.

--F.A. Hayek (The Constitution of Liberty)

The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic cleanser, urging his people on to acts of genocide.

--Richard Dawkins (The Root Of All Evil?, Part 2)

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

--Christopher Hitchens

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

--Allan Watts

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

--Will Durant

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.

--Bertrand Russell

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

--Clarence Darrow

[I]t took me so many years to distinguish between believing in things that were real and not real. Not just God, but in other things too: synchronicity, destiny, fate, pre-ordained coincidence. But life is not any less wonderful for not letting myself succumb to those fantasies. In fact it’s more wonderful.

--Julia Sweeney (Julia Sweeney blog 18 May 2005)

When George Bush tries to make a joke and people laugh, he doesn’t realize that the people aren’t laughing at his joke but at him for acting like a complete idiot.

--Pelican the Politician

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

--John Adams

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

--Voltaire

The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worthwhile. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.

--John Dewey

Whenever a Christian says that something is absurd, I just laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

--Ignots Pistachio

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

--John Stuart Mill

Seems to me that Christians worship the incredible shrinking god. I mean at one time it was supposedly capable of flinging thousands of billions of galaxies into existence with a mere thought. By the time of Noah, it was reduced to flooding an insignificant speck in the cosmos. By the time of Moses, its best trick was moving a tiny portion of a minor sea aside for a short while. By the time of Jesus, it has to send a delegate on its behalf who leaves behind only rumors that he was able to turn water into another beverage, or render himself extra buoyant. Now it counts as a miracle if a water stain grows mold that kind of looks like a bearded face which could be claimed to resemble this supposed delegate. How much more pathetic can this god get? How do Christians manage to sing praises of its glory and greatness without feeling like fools--or at best, like new parents gushing over their toddler's ability to make a pee.

--Kronk

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

--Lord Acton

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

--Mark Twain (Notebook, 1935)

We should allow only one kind of censorship: self-censorship. Devices for implementing self-censorship exist on all devices. TVs and radios have off-knobs; books have covers. Even the human body has built-in self-censorship devices: closed eyelids, fingers to plug ears, and closed minds to prevent one from even thinking about things.

--Pelican the Politician

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

--James Joyce

Second order effects, such as belief in belief, makes fanaticism.

--Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)

As for the [9/11 conspiracy] theories, I don't think they can be taken very seriously. I think they are based on a misunderstanding of the nature of evidence, and also failure to think through the issues clearly.

--Noam Chomsky (interview)

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

--Henry Steele Commager

There are many reasons why people believe weird things, but certainly one of the most pervasive is that most people have never heard a good explanation for the weird things they hear or read about.

--Michael Shermer (Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown)

G’head. Believe whatever crazy-ass no-evidence-for-it thing you like. The sky is bright red and Martians live in the ground. Fine! My evidence doesn’t add up that way. But if yours does, then, just please don’t live near me or keep telling me about it.

--Julia Sweeney (Julia Sweeney blog 28 April 2005)

Any religion that sports an instrument of torture and death as its symbol, I want to stay far away from.

--Ignots Pistachio

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

--James Madison

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

--Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

The history of Christianity has been largely written in blood, the blood of those whom it has sought to proselytize as well as that of those Christians who did not share the theology or ambitions of the male clerical oligarchy that has always wielded power in Christendom. This ignoble distinction is not nor has it ever been the exclusive prerogative of any particular denomination or sect; it is a living legacy of horror that is tragically common to the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox bodies of Christian churches.

--John J. Dunphy

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

--Dr Who

People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding.

--Glenn T. Seaborg ( US physicist, 1912, Elements of the Universe)

When we liberate people from the constraints of geographical control, opportunities for specialization arise and the access to everything which you can’t make yourself grows.

--Johan Norberg

It’s always been so curious to me, the Church’s stand on communism. If you read the Bible, outside of a couple of passages, and one parable that I can think of, Jesus is constantly admonishing people to give up everything they have for the poor right and left. Jesus would TOTALLY have been a communist.

--Julia Sweeney (Julia Sweeney blog 21 April 2005)

[Those] who have an excessive faith in their theories or in their ideas are not only poorly disposed to make discoveries, but they also make very poor observations.

--Claude Bernard (French physiologist, 1865)

I often say . . . that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

--Lord Kelvin

If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender, it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.

--Robert G. Ingersoll

No matter what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and planes and modern artillery some defenseless black population, there will be no lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to invent the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To this righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a war to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can decently be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty becomes an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind.

--John T. Flynn (As We Go Marching)

Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.

--Academician Prokhor Zakharov (For I Have Tasted The Fruit)

To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light, but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress.

--Albert Einstein

If a god told George Bush to start the Iraq war, then god must be an idiot too.

--Pelican the Politician

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion.

--Justice Robert H. Jackson

Don’t believe everything you think.

--Ignots Pistachio

There is a story about Clare Booth Luce complaining that she was bored with hearing about the Holocaust. A Jewish friend of hers said he perfectly understood her sensitivity in the matter; in fact, he had the same sense of repetitiousness and fatigue, hearing so often about the Crucifixion.

--Herbert Gold (Selfish Like Me)

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience tells them it is wrong.

--Walter Bagehot

Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships.

--Andrei Sakharov

War is the most striking instance of the failure of intelligence to master the problem of human relationships.

--Harry Elmer Barnes

When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.

--Dresden James

It is seldom that liberty of any kinds is lost all at once.

--David Hume

Tis nobler to lose honor to save the lives of men than it is to gain honor by taking them.

--David Borenstein

The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognize his superiority to yourself.

--Joseph Sobran

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

--Thomas Paine

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

--Justice Robert H. Jackson

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.

--Clive Bell

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.

--Mohandas Gandhi

As a classical liberal, I am in favor of capitalism, not capitalists. There’s a big difference. I believe very firmly in the separation of politics and economics. Politicians ought to make laws (laws that penalize fraud, for example). Corporations ought to make money. That is not the case in a mixed economy, where roles are so undefined that politicians interfere in business, and corporations can seek (and attain) political benefits and privileges.

--Johan Norberg

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

--Bertrand Russell

Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.

--Lord Herbert Louis Samuel

Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it.

--Woodrow Wilson

--Thomas Paine

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

--John Adams (1772)

Every christian who tries to escape the path of a speeding bullet with fear in his eye is an example of a "foxhole conversion" to atheism and proves they don't really believe in a heavenly paradise in the hereafter. There are a hell of a lot more of those conversions than there are of atheists to christians.

--Darrell Plank

Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.

--James Madison (Detached Memoranda, 1820)

Leave the matter of religion to the family, the altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.

--Ulysses S. Grant, 1875

If one of the requisites for emotional health is acceptance of ambiguity and uncertainty, then divinity-oriented religiosity is the unhealthiest state imaginable: since its prime reason for being is to enable the religionist to believe in god-commanded certainty.

--Dr. Albert Ellis (from "The Case Against Religiosity")

War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.

--Alexander Berkman

During the whole Nazi period religious education in the schools was never forbidden, but on the contrary was generously encouraged. Despite this, after the war the churches demanded, more or less as compensation, that there must be Catholic schools and religion classes, so that "something like that" never happened again. In fact, however, one has to ask oneself if the religion classes before and during the Nazi period didn't contribute substantially to Christian support for the war as the "work of God," through their inculcation of the doctrine of "obedience to the authorities."

--Johann Neumann (1945: The German churches before and afterwards)

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

--Joseph Conrad

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief.

--George Bernard Shaw

Christianity is so frightening and depressing that Christians have to steal the fun and laughter from the pagan holidays just to make their religion palatable.

--Reagan the Pagan

The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system.

--Richard Dawkins (from edge.org)

I live in a culture that wholeheartedly embraces the idea that man is inherently evil, and that human beings will not behave themselves unless they live their short lives under the constant threat of immanent and eternal agony. Such a premise affects me very much; I have to live with these people, who one way or another are in constant fear of (not for) their own souls. I don't want my children associating with people who are trained from birth to loathe themselves. It strikes me as very unhealthy.

--Elf Sternberg

Propaganda has become a bad word thanks to Adolf Hitler and the Catholics who invented the term. So instead of using this bad word, politicians today simply use other terms like: spin doctoring, talking points, etc.

--Pelican the Politician

Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticize them, you're a mile away, and you have their shoes.

Believing means I'm unsure. If something is true, then either I know it or I don't know it. Therefore, I don't need to believe in anything.

--Ignots Pistachio

Good scientific methodology is not an abstract set of rules dictated by philosophers. It is conditioned by, and determined by, the science itself and the scientists who create the science. What may have constituted scientific proof for a particle physicist of the 1960's-namely the detection of an isolated particle-is inappropriate for a modern quark physicist who can never hope to remove and isolate a quark. Let's not put the cart before the horse. Science is the horse that pulls the cart of philosophy.

--Leonard Susskind

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

With the defeat of the Nazis, the German Reich with its complete infrastructure collapsed, leaving only the two large churches with their practically undamaged organisational structure. All the other organisations, the political parties, the freethinkers' organisations and the unions had been forbidden and broken up.

--Johann Neumann (The Churches in Germany Before and After 1945)

In any other field, you can argue about politics, taste in music, poetry. There's never the feeling that you're supposed to tiptoe away. You're just not allowed to criticize someone's belief if it's a religious belief, though you're perfectly allowed if it's about politics.

--Richard Dawkins (Religion for Dummies)

We first fought...in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.

--Serj Tankian

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

--Don Hirschberg

The Wizard of Oz is more believable. And more fun.

--James Randi on "Why I Deny Religion" (online newsletter, 25 July 2003)

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

--International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1946

You laugh at me because I am different; I laugh because you are all the same.

--Daniel Knode

Stay cool, and don't believe anything the Bush administration tells you. In fact, play it safe: don't believe anything anybody tells you.

--George Carlin (georgecarlin.com)

A survey of all the evidence forces us to conclude that Hitler believes himself destined to become an Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be the New Deliverer of Germany and the Founder of a new social order for the world. He firmly believes this and is certain that in spite of all the trials and tribulations through which he must pass he will finally attain that goal. The one condition is that he follow the dictates of the inner voice that have guided and protected him in the past.

--Walter Langer, psychoanalyst (in his psychological profile of Adolf Hitler) [Italics added]

[T]he claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.

--Richard Dawkins (from "Intelligent Thought")

(I had) a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies. It was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude which has never again left me.

--Albert Einstein (Autobiographical Notes, 1949)

Men rarely (if ever) dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

--Robert Heinlein (Time Enough for Love)

Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.

--Mahatma Gandhi

It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

--Richard Dawkins (responding to The Edge's 2005 question)

We cannot tolerate war in this world anymore. Wars are not only disastrous for the societies directly involved but also fatal for all of mankind.

--Whitney Harris (a principle prosecutor in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial)

A deep unfaltering belief signals an alarm that you have great ignorance about something.

--Ignots Pistachio

Three weeks ago my mother died. At the end of her funeral the priest left us with these words as a final reminder of what had been said repeatedly in a variety of ways for the past two days: "We who leave here in sorrow know that we will one day be reunited with her in joy." My concern here is not with the truth or falsity of this preposterous belief, but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a way to deprive death of its finality. And of the terror that prospect entails. The function of guarantees is to enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic. There is much that we can face apparently only when we can deny it through the working of what we'll soon see is an entire system of guarantees. Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it means to be a human being, to remain a child of one's needs and desires disguising that fact in the form of ideas and concepts.

--Walter A. Davis (Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium. Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq, 10 Oct. 04)

The power of the executive to cast a man in prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist.

--Sir Winston Churchill (In a telegram by Churchill from Cairo to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, 21 Nov. 1943)

One of the reasons I find the Bible incredulous is that when god speaks to people, nobody ever really freaks out and questions their sanity. I find that awfully convenient. Or, when these preachers on TV say god spoke to them, what the fuck? Shouldn't this be front-page news? Either god is speaking to them and we have a modern day prophet and the newfound words should be published everywhere, or they are criminals for swindling their donations.

--Howard Campbell (Poker Without Cards)

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

--James Madison, letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822

In the Middle East, the Bronze Age people of Canaan--the ancient region between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean that roughly corresponds to Israel--also failed to adapt to the drying out of their lands around 2200 BC(E). In their case, says Arlene Rosen of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, "it was their beliefs that were their undoing. In Canaan, people believed that environmental disasters were caused by a deity unhappy with the people," she says. Like the Mayans, the Canaanites could have coped with the new conditions by introducing new irrigation systems for their crops.

Instead, they attributed the shift in climate to the wrath of the gods, built more temples and prayed for better times. Within a short time, the cities and towns were abandoned and the people became nomadic hearders.

--'Rigid' cultures caught out by climate change (article in the 5 March 1994 edition of New Scientist)

The orthodox attempt to explain the divinity of Jesus in terms of an inherent metaphysical substance within him seems to me quite inadequate. To say that the Christ, whose example of living we are bid to follow, is divine in an ontological sense is actually harmful and detrimental. To invest this Christ with such supernatural qualities makes the rejoinder: "Oh, well, he had a better chance for that kind of life than we can possible have." In other words, one could easily use this as a means to hide behind his failures. So that the orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied.

--Martin Luther King, Jr. ("The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus," 1950)

We live in a twisted world, where right is wrong and wrong reigns supreme. It is a chilling fact that most of the world's leaders believe in nonsensical fairytales about the nature of reality. They believe in Gods that do not exist, and religions that could not possibly be true. We are driven to war after war, violence on top of violence to appease madmen who believe in gory mythologies. These men are called Christians, Muslims and Jews.

--Cenk Uygur (If You're a Christian, Muslim or Jew - You are wrong)

Be comforted that we have each other to depend on! When waters rise and swallow crops, we count on one another to plant those crops again, to rebuild homes, to care for our sick! Some blame God and demand we make sacrifice to Him. If your village was being flooded would you, Erasmus, butcher your daughters like Abraham tried with Isaac, because some priest told you God demanded it? Or would you try to build canals to divert the water, understanding that there is a mechanism to why floods happen and no God has anything to do with it.

--Hypatia (from Brian Trent's novel, "Remembering Hypatia")

The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.

--Will Durant

In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.

--Justice Robert H. Jackson

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

--Albert Camus

People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.

--Hippocrates

The great progress that has been made in medicine and in science has not necessarily been made by men and women who don't believe in anything supernatural but it has been made by men and women who when they are studying it refuse to believe that there is anything supernatural.

--Dr. Sherwin Nuland (author of "How We Die," in an interview on C-Span's "Book TV")

Korzybski suggested dozens of reforms in our speech and our writings, most of which I try to follow. One of them is if people said 'maybe' more often, the world would suddenly become stark, staring sane. Can you see Jerry Falwell saying: "Maybe God hates gay people. Maybe Jesus is the son of God.' Every muezzin in Islam resounding at night in booming voices: 'There is no God except maybe Allah. And maybe Mohammed is his papa. Think about how sane the world would become after a while.

--Robert Anton Wilson (Premature Illumination)

This is the most incompetent government in U.S. history.

--Jerry Springer (On Air America, 21 Sept. 2005)

The philosophical reason why "fair trade" is not in fact fair, comes from the definition of justice. For me, justice is acting in harmony with reality, making decisions on the basis of what reality and the standard of human life require. Oxfam's notion of "fair trade" is the opposite of this: they advocate paying prices for coffee which are in direct conflict with supply and demand, and with the competence and efficiency of the coffee producers, i.e. in conflict with reality. Any departure from reality, for any reason whatsoever, has disastrous consequences.

--Johan Norberg

When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.

--Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)

What's wrong with this picture:

1. On 20 Oct. 2005, Lashaun Harris heard voices that told her to dump her three young children into the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay so that she could feed them to the sharks. The people of San Francisco and the world were shocked and outraged. She was promptly arrested and charged with murder.

2. George W. Bush heard the voice of God telling him he should invade Iraq. He lied to Congress and the American people and in 2003, he started an illegal war which resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent children (and adults). The world was outraged yet this murderer has not been arrested and to this day remains a free man.

To recapitulate a historical fact that took over 50 years to rescue from myth: the United States did not bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki "to end the war and save countless lives." It did so for four reasons (and in the knowledge that a defeated Japan was pursuing terms of surrender through several diplomatic channels): (1) to avenge Pearl Harbor, (2) to justify the amount of money spent developing the Bomb, (3) to create a laboratory whereby our scientific, medical, and military personnel could study its effects, and (4) to impress the Russians -and the world- with this opening salvo of the Cold War. In short, Hiroshima was the first act of global terrorism. That story couldn't be told, however, and still encounters strenuous resistance from most Americans, because it exposes too many of the guarantees we want to have about our Nation and its actions in history.

--Walter A. Davis (Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium. Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq. 10 Oct. 04)

It is the Christian attitude that gradually empties the world of its substance... since the substance resided in a conglomeration of symbols.

--Jaspers (quoted by Albert Camus in "The Rebel")

When the thunderous clouds of fascists past and corporatists present finally dissipate over the vast lands of the United States, leaving in its wake a nation recovering from the violent downpours of mass lunacy, fear and collective schizophrenia that have caused a dustbowl-style drought of humanity in the nation of gluttonous undertakings, it will finally be seen, beyond the enveloping haze of post 9/11 hypnosis hindering American visibility, the devastation of what was done to us and what has been done to the world in our name, oftentimes with our willing consent and through our complicit guilt through silence and acquiescence.

--Manuel Valenzuela (Rise of the Amerikan Nazis Part III of III: Amerikan Terrorists, American Tragedy)

Brother will kill brother

Spilling blood across the land.
Killing for religion.
Something I don't understand.

--"Holy Wars The Punishment Due" by Megadeth

People who talk of outlawing the atomic bomb are mistaken - what needs to be outlawed is war.

--Leslie Richard Groves

We have a Department of Defense (once called the Department of War), but it is really a Department of Offense, and we don't have a Department of Peace. Without a department to balance the warmongers, we will forever continue as a nation of war.

--Pelican the Politician

The Catholic Church was the first organization to recognize that gamering consensus was an effective path to ruling people. The church was the first to employ this tactic. Using this tactic means that they recognized that if you seize the mind, the body will follow.

--Howard Campbell (Poker Without Cards)

As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.

--Richard Dawkins (from the edge.org)

There's something problematic when any religion is taken literally and when people try to impose it on others. It was true for Christianity and Europeans, who historically were happy to go the Holy Land and slaughter religious infidels there. Just 400 years ago in Europe, we had wars on religious grounds. The key was that Europe figured out ways of having different beliefs without slaughtering one another. It was secularization that saved the West, and the same thing has to happen with Islam. People don't have to give up religion, but they have to confine it to a private sphere and not try to impose it via force.

--Johan Norberg

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

--Adam Savage (from MythBusters)

Christians, Islamics, and Jews make the best soldiers. They make themselves feel good about killing others, or sacrificing their lives for someone, or something else. They will even commit the ultimate sacrifice for the tiniest scrap of superstition, with the full confidence that their Sacred Scripts allow such conduct.

--Pelican the Politician

Faith is a reason to become stupid: 'From this point forward, I will remain stupid.' To me, faith-based organizations are responsible for everything I see wrong with this planet. Research-based organizations are responsible for everything I like about it. Before the French Revolution, the average life expectancy was 37 years. Now it's 78 years. All due to research-based organizations. Not at all due to faith-based organizations. All faith-based organizations give you is George Bush. Research-based organizations give you cures for disease.

--Robert Anton Wilson (Premature Illumination)

I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

--Christopher Marlowe

How to start your day with a positive attitude:

1. Create a "new folder" on your computer.
2. Name it "George W. Bush".
3. Send it to the trash.
4. Empty the trash.
5. Your computer will ask you: "Do you really want to delete "George W. Bush"?
6. Calmly answer, "Yes", and press the mouse button firmly...

[From Robert A. Wilson's Jokes, Limericks, & Off-Color Tales]

We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.

--Thomas Jefferson

The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man. But it is a lovely work if you can stomach it.

--Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein

Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.

--A pirate, from St. Augustine's "City of God"

If religionists applied reason and science to their faith, their religion would simply die. That's why faith must oppose science for its very survival.

--Ignots Pistachio

--Richard Dawkins (from the Edge.org)

I suggest that we might want to depose this incumbent God and start dealing with The Real World. He's proven time and again to be cruel, capricious, and vindictive. He drowns, crushes, burns, and starves millions of us every day. He created cancer, viruses, and germs to invade and destroy our bodies as He sees fit, and uses them very effectively. In His wisdom, He directed those in charge to impede stem cell research so that such a powerful approach would not be available to us and He wouldn't have to strain the Divine Intellect to disarm that defense. We amuse Him as we flail about vainly trying to appease Him. I vote that we dump Him.

--James Randi (on his weekly newsletter, 02 Sept. 2005)

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.

--Richard Dawkins (citing a maxim when explaining the evolution & creationism debate)

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

--John Quincy Adams

You've got to be taught to hate and fear,
You've got to be taught from year to year,
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear-
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade-
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught, before it's too late!
Before you are six, or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate-
You've got to be carefully taught,
You've got to be carefully taught!

--Oscar Hammerstein II (from Rogers & Hammerstein's South Pacific)

Obviously I'm using a metaphor to describe what is essentially a comprehensive assault on scientific expertise. I don't mean a literal war, but I'm referring to the fact that scientific expertise has been undermined very systematically by the Bush Administration and by the Republican Congress on issues ranging from evolution to global climate change to embryonic stem cell research. I think that it's appropriate to talk about this comprehensive assault, using that kind of figurative language.

--Chris Mooney

The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week.

--Matt Wells (New Orleans crisis shames US)

Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy needs to stand trial before congress today... Take whatever idiot they have at the top, give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot.

--Aaron Broussard (president of Jefferson Parish)

In passing, I have to ask if our President has seen fit to blame God for the thousands of dead innocents, the loss of property that made millions homeless, the displacement and separation of families, the destruction of fine buildings and the general damage to our way of life which took place and continues to take place despite his assurance that he'd prayed to God begged for mercy about the situation. One Reverend on TV thanked God for diverting Katrina slightly east so that New Orleans didn't receive it directly; what it did to Mississippi as a result of that divine response, wasn't mentioned. The governor of Louisiana declared a Day of Prayer, with no noticeable effect.

--James Randi (on his weekly newsletter, 02 Sept. 2005)

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.

--Ramsey Clark

If you want someone or organization to prey on you, here's what you do: Don't think. Believe. Have some strong faith in something, anything. Let other people think for you. The quickest way, however, is just to become a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew.

--Ignots Pistachio

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?

--Mahatma Gandhi

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

--Kahlil Gibran

Those who choose to abstain from beliefs have great wisdom, for belief in even one false premise can lead to unimaginable disasters.

--Spatch Pentameter

The fundamental defect in the present state of democracy is the assumption that political and economic freedom can be achieved without first freeing the mind. Freedom of mind is not something that spontaneously happens. It is not achieved by the mere absence of obvious restraints. It is a product of constant, unremitting nurture of right habits of observation and reflection.

Until the taboos that hedge social topics from contact with thought are removed, scientific method and results in subjects far removed from social themes will make little impression upon the public mind. Prejudice, fervor of emotion, bunkum, opinion and irrelevant argument will weigh as heavily as fact and knowledge. Intellectual confusion will continue to encourage the men who are intolerant and who fake their beliefs in the interests of their feelings and fancies.

--John Dewey (Science, Belief, and the Public, 1924)

It occurs to me that the primary agenda of the powers that be is to induce FAITH. Faith means you are obligated to not think stuff through-- whatever they tell you not to think through.

--"Ben Mack" (Poker Without Cards)

You cannot reason with those to whom reason is a stranger, or with those driven by fear and ignorance.

--Steve Champeon

To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.

--Ludwig von Mises

Conservatives who hate liberalism should contemplate whether conservatism or liberalism would better the world. Fascists and Islamic terrorists are hard-line conservatives. Do you really think their conservative nature makes things better? Now imagine if they all became liberals. They would no longer harbor an ideology that promotes war. Science would progress. Education and medical care would dominate their concerns. They might even see the benefit of a government similar to the first secular government in the world: the Constitutional government as founded by American liberals.

--Pelican the Politician

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only doing their duty, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

--George Orwell

It's liberty for all, democracy's our style, unless you are against us, then it's prison without trial.

--Mick Jagger

I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.

--Charles Darwin

To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of.... I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!

--Andr Breton (Surrealism and Painting, footnote, 1928)

You can't try to change the administration's course by appealing to facts and argument: they've rejected facts and argument, on principle... Most people seem not to understand that when we deal with the Bush administration, we are dealing with something unique, and uniquely dangerous: an administration which is fully committed to an ideology --an ideology that is entirely self-contained and completely self-referencing. It is not concerned with facts, evidence, logic and argument. It is concerned only with its own internal vision of the world, and how that world should be constructed and how it should operate.

--The Light Of Reason

Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying... The confounding of truth and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a distinction, and a labor of Sisyphus to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge... [marks] the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.

--Theodor Adorno (Minima Moralia)

The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.

--Marcus Tullius Cicero

The First World War was wholly Christian in origin. The three emperors were devout and so were the more warlike of the British Cabinet.

--Bertrand Russell

In contrast to the ancient world, the unity of the Christian and Marxist world is astonishing. The two doctrines have in common a vision of the world which completely separates them from the Greek attitude. Jaspers defines this very well: "It is a Christian way of thinking to consider that the history of man is strictly unique."

--Albert Camus (The Rebel)

I will not swear on God. I will not swear on God, because I don't believe in the conceptual sense and in this nonsense. What I will swear on is my children and my grandchildren.

--Marlon Brando (refusing to recite a religious oath while testifying at his son Christian's trial, 1990. Source: Who's Who in Hell edited by Warren Allen Smith)

I note with interest that more and more commentators and columnists are getting around to asking questions about the basic rights that Americans are supposed to have about worshipping - or not worshipping - any of the hundreds of different varieties of deities that our species has invented to make the human condition more bearable and less confounding; having a "God did it" explanation to fall back on, allows us not to think about heavy matters. Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion, but that's getting increasingly difficult to achieve.

--James Randi (in his weekly online newsletter)

"Fundamentalism" might have been revived even if the Great War had not occurred. But it is reasonable to suppose that it would have not assumed such an intolerant and vituperative form, if so many educated men, in positions of leadership, had not deliberately cultivated resort to bitter intolerance and to coercive suppression of disliked opinions during the war... Until highly respectable and cultivated classes of men cease to suppose that in economic and political matters the importance of the end of social stability and security justifies the use of means other than those of reason, the intellectual habit of the public will continue to be corrupted at the root, and by those from whom enlightenment should be expected.

--John Dewey (Science, Belief, and the Public, 1924)

Now must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in god on the minds of children, producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off the ir belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.

--Charles Darwin

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be...surer of the noose than a private homicide.

--H. G. Wells

By analogy, imagine an archaeologist looking for the transition from the horse-drawn carriage to the automobile in a large lot where carriages and automobiles have been dumped for the past 150 years. On the bottom layer, he would find many carriages, and above, he would find many autos and auto parts starting with the first popular car - the Model-T Ford. But what are his chances of finding one of the first experimental cars that looked like a carriage with a motor attached - the automotive missing link?

--David W. Briggs (in response to creationists bleating about the lack of transitional life-forms in the fossil record)

Tis nobler to lose honor to save the lives of men than it is to gain honor by taking them.

--David Borenstein

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

Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence!

--Immanuel Kant (What Is Enlightenment? 1784)

Divine ordination is a very dangerous idea, especially when combined with military power (the United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons, with military bases in a hundred different countries and warships on every sea). With God's approval, you need no human standard of morality. Anyone today who claims the support of God might be embarrassed to recall that the Nazi storm troopers had inscribed on their belts, "Gott mit uns" ("God with us").

--Howard Zinn (The Power and the Glory)

The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected [Washington; Adams; Jefferson; Madison; Monroe; Adams; Jackson] not a one had professed a belief in Christianity.... Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.

--The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson (an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, in a sermon preached in October, 1831)

Strange- we brought Clinton to Impeachment over a sexual indiscretion, but Bush can get away with everything- wars, treason, lies, and crimes against humanity- he never takes a licking, and just keeps on ticking.

--Eric Blumrich (BushFlash.com)

If you make peaceful change impossible... you make violent revolution inevitable.

--President John F. Kennedy

Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?

--Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner (on the Ten Commandments ruling, June 27, 2005)

Every new & successful example of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters is of importance.

--James Madison (letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822)

War and religion; one cannot exist without the other.

--Pelican the Politician

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

--Will Durant (Story of Civilization, Vol IV: Ag e of Faith)

In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in god and in personal immortality.

--Clarence Darrow

So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that "evil" woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman, it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity.

--Frank Zappa

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

--Sir R. F. Burton (Arabian Nights, vol. 10)

You don't have to give the Republicans Hell. All You have to do is tell the truth, and they'll think that it's Hell.

--Harry Truman

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

--Bertrand Russell

I'm a nonbeliever. I don't believe in the existence of a God. I don't believe in the Christian dogma. I find it horrifyingly silly. The intolerance that flows from organized religion is the most dangerous thing on the planet.

--Jane Rule (Brave Souls: Writers and Artists Wrestle with God, Love, Death and the Things that Matter, by Douglas Todd)

Not only is war a form of legalized murder, but it is mass serial killing. Take all the infamous serial killers throughout history (including Jack-the-Ripper, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer) and a single war makes them all look like rank amateurs. So if you support any offensive war, consider yourself just as culpable of murder as the most insane serial killer.

--Sarah Bellum

If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.

--Thomas Jefferson (letter to William Short, 28 July 1791)

There is only one religion that exists throughout all history, the belief in eternity. This belief is a deception.

--Albert Camus (The Rebel)

The creationists' fondness for "gaps" in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don't work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away.

--Richard Dawkins (Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant)

What you don't know isn't the problem; it's what you do 'know' that just isn't so.

--Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley)

In a world of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

--George Orwell

Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways. There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else he's forgotten all about us.... How much reverence can you have for a Supreme being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in his divine system of creation? What in the world was going through that warped, evil, scatological mind of his when he robbed old people of the ability to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain? ... Why couldn't he have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of red-and-blue neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead? ... What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power he had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess he made of it instead, his sheer incompetence is almost staggering.... Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like him as even a shipping clerk!

--Yossarian to Lt. Scheisskopf's wife (Catch 22, by Joseph Heller)

Senator [Coleman], in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right, and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people have paid with their lives, 1600 of them American soldiers, sent to their deaths on a pack of lives, 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies. If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, who's dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened, to President Chirac, who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens, you are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

--George Galloway (member of Briton's Parliament, in a US Senate hearing)

As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances.

--Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them.

--Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist monk)

My respect for the Abrahamic religions went up in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th. The last vestige of respect for the taboo disappeared as I watched the 'Day of Prayer' in Washington Cathedral, where people of mutually incompatible faiths united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place: religion. It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say 'Enough!' Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.

--"Time to Stand Up" (written for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Sept. 2001)

We evolved as a social primate species whose language ability facilitated the exchange of such association anecdotes. The problem is that although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the overall phenomenon has endured the winnowing process of natural selection.

--Michael Shermer (Turn Me On, Dead Man)

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.

--Voltaire (from the Essay on Tolerance)

At the time of its Founding, the United States seemed to be an infertile ground for religion. Many of the nation's leaders - include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin - were not Christians, did not accept the authority of the Bible, and were hostile to organized religion. The attitude of the general public was one of apathy: in 1776, only 5 percent of the population were participating members of churches.

--Ian Robertson (Sociology, 3rd edition)

Every man, who reasons, soon becomes and unbeliever.

--Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach

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

--John Burroughs

'Believing' cannot tip the scales in making a historical judgement about whether something really happened. I can choose to believe that George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock, but my believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether or not he really did do it. So also with the story of Jesus walking on water: Believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether he really did do it. 'Belief' cannot be the basis for historical conclusions; it has no direct relevance.

--Marcus J. Borg ("Faith and Scholarship," August, 1993, BIble Review)

Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.

--Nathaniel Branden (Ph.D. Psychologist, author The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem)

All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.

--Henry Clay (Address, U.S. House of Representatives, March 24, 1818)

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

--Saul Bellow

Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.

--Richard Dawkins (Time to Stand Up)

Whenever religion is involved, terrorists kill more people.

--Dr. Bruce Hoffman (director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University, Scotland)

You mean you LIKE the thought that you've been created especially to worship your creator, and after you die you'll honor it throughout eternity? That's your purpose in existence--to be a cosmic cheering squad for a deity so vain and insecure that it needs constant reassurance that it's supreme? No thank you!

--Aviva (on alt.atheism)

One also has to understand that the legacy of the black church has hardly been progressive. While it did help blacks weather the storms of slavery and postslavery racism, it also hindered them from developing a modern outlook and keeps some of them locked in a religious provincialism (victimized by hucksters) allowing a patriarchal authoritarianism to take root along with a hostility to ideas and other means of self-assertion that wasn't even challenged until the civil rights era.

--Norman Kelley (The Head Negro In Charge Syndrome)

QUESTION: But, how does (fill in the blank) actually (work, do what you claim, etc.)?

ANSWER: It's so complex I can't explain it, you wouldn't understand.

REBUTTAL: That's not correct. If you won't explain it, I won't understand. But if you can't explain it, then you don't understand!

Q: Is anti-Semitism integral or incidental to Christianity?

PF: That's a heartbreaker. In modern middle-class America, is it intrinsic? No. But anti-Semitism has been integral to Christianity. When you think about it, the Holocaust was the greatest, most energetic, most spontaneous Christian ecumenical movement since the Crusades: Lithuanian Orthodox, German Lutherans, Catholic Frenchmen - everybody pitched in to kill Jewish civilians, children.

--Paula Fredriksen (historian of early Christianity in an interview)

It is the true believer's ability to "shut his eyes and stop his ears" to the facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacle nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence.

--Eric Hoffer, (The True Believer, response to Martin Luther's faithful shutting-out of contrary evidence, in Table Talk, Number 1687)

History aside, the almost universal opinion that one's own religious convictions are the reasoned outcome of a dispassionate evaluation of all the major alternatives is almost demonstrably false for humanity in general. If that really were the genesis of most people's convictions, then one would expect the major faiths to be distributed more or less randomly or evenly over the globe. But in fact they show a very strong tendency to cluster... which illustrates what we all suspected anyway: that social forces are the primary determinants of religious belief for people in general. To decide scientific questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy would therefore be to put social forces in place of empirical evidence...

--Paul Churchland (Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind)

I don't know. And I think that's a great way to end an interview. 'I don't know.' There's more that I don't know, than there is that I do know.

--Robert Anton Wilson (in an interview)

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

--Stephen W. Hawking (Der Spiegel, 1989)

A religious person is a dangerous person. He may not become a thief or a murderer, but he is liable to become a nuisance. He carries with him many foolish and harmful superstitions, and he is possessed with the notion that it is his duty to give these superstitions to others. That is what makes trouble. Nothing is so worthless as superstition....

--Marilla M. Ricker (Science Against Creeds," I Am Not Afraid Are You?")

Violence has come to be regarded by ever larger sectors of the population... as a legitimate instrument, indeed as the only instrument to change reality and achieve progress and development. This, to put it simply, is madness. A good part of this violence proceeds from a political fiction, from the idea that through a system and a body of ideas you can capture reality in its entirety and express it, organize it and reform it in a perfectly logical way. Every ideology leads ultimately to fanaticism, and fanaticism is fiction trying to impose itself on reality in the name of science.

--Mario Vargas Llosa (Fictions that Breed Violence)

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

--William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

--Alexis de Tocqueville

When you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion. The Catholic Church may espouse its opinion on abortion to the members of its congregation. But they are in violation of separation of church and state when they try to proselytize their abortion politics on people who are not Catholics.

--John Irving (interview in Mother Jones, May/June 1997)

The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and to seek peace like intellectual pygmies.

--Basil O'Connor

Technology disappeared and the Church became the most cohesive power in Western society. The extensive aqueduct and plumbing systems vanished. Orthodox Christians taught that all aspects of the flesh should be reviled and therefore discouraged washing as much as possible. Toilets and indoor plumbing disappeared. Disease became commonplace as sanitation and hygiene deteriorated. For hundreds of years, towns and villages were decimated by epidemics.

--Helen Ellerbe (The Dark Side of Christian History)

If we, who live outside asylums, act as if we lived in a fictitious world-- that is to say, if we are consistent with our beliefs-- we cannot adjust ourselves to actual conditions, and so fall into many avoidable semantic difficulties. But the so-called normal person practically never abides by his beliefs, and when his beliefs are building for him a fictitious world, he saves his neck by not abiding by them. A so-called "insane" person acts upon his beliefs, and so cannot adjust himself to a world which is quite different from his fancy.

--Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)

It is pure illusion to think that an opinion which passes down from century to century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.

--Pierre Bayle (Thoughts on the Comet, 1682)

The clergy, no less than the capitalist class, lives on the backs of the people, profits from the degradation, the ignorance and the oppression of the people.

--Rosa Luxemburg (Socialism and the Churches,1905)

There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.

--Mark Twain ("Bible Teaching and Religious Practice," Europe and Elsewhere, 1923)

But we, wretched unbelievers, we bear our own burdens; we must say, 'I myself did it, I. Not God, not Satan; I myself!'

--Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm)

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

--Erich Fromm (Man for Himself, 1947)

The nearest I can make it out, 'Love your Enemies' means, 'Hate your Friends.'

--Benjamin Franklin

[I am] not just an atheist, but a total nonbeliever.

--David Cronenberg (interview in Esquire magazine, Feb. 1992)

Masochistic self-sacrifice is an integral part of most major organized religions... Orthodox religions deliberately instill guilt (self-damnation) in their adherents and then give these adherents guilt-soothing rituals to (temporarily) allay these kind of self-damning feelings.

--Dr. Albert Ellis (The Case Against Religiosity)

The Bible is not the verbally inspired, inerrant word of God; it is just a collection of contradictory, discrepant books that were written by superstitious ethnocentrics who thought that the hand of God was directing the destiny of the Hebrew people.

--Farrell Till (former minister and missionary for the Church of Christ)

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration -- courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

--H.L. Mencken

This I should consider as the nearest approach to a pure republic, which is practicable on a large scale of country or population. And we have examples of it in some of our States constitutions, which, if not poisoned by priest-craft, would prove its excellence over all mixtures with other elements; and, with only equal doses of poison, would still be the best.

--Thomas Jefferson (Letter to John Taylor, 28 May 1816)

The Religious-Right wants to keep deformed fetuses and vegetable state victims (the undead) alive while they approve of the killing of innocent women, children, and men in their "moral" wars, and thorough their cutting of social services. Their plan, taken to the extreme, would result in the earth filled with brainless, zombies. Hey wait a minute, I'm describing the mental condition of the Religious-Right!

--Bloatus the Obvious

We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn't been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake.

--Catherine Fahringer

'Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not.'

--Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)

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

--Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard, 1758)

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

--Isaac Asimov

Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.

--Mark Twain

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

--Isaac Asimov

We conjurors are never more amused than when we hear that canard, "Seeing is believing." We, above all others, know well that such a claim is not necessarily true...!

--James Randi (From Randi's Newsletter)

One of Bush Sr's numerious lies to the American people:

"I can tell you this: If I'm ever in a position to call the shots, I'm not going to rush to send somebody else's kids into a war."

--George H. W. Bush

President Bush said that the people who are attacking our forces in Iraq are getting more and more desperate because we're making so much progress. So just remember, the worse it gets, the better it is.

--Jay Leno

It is clearly not human nature that causes people to hurt one another. People of gentler cultures share the same human nature as we of Western civilization; it is our beliefs that differ.

--Helen Ellerbe (The Dark Side of Christian History)

Ideas that cannot be defended by reason and evidence can lead anywhere, and, if there is no warrant for one's belief, there is no telling where it will end.

--Paul M. Pfalzner, medical biology physicist

The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind.

--Ayn Rand

The worst criminals are not half so immoral as the creators and perpetrators of the unquestionable hell of Christian theology.

--M.M. Mangasarian (Morality Without God, 1913)

Richard Nixon crossed the line when he began murdering foreigners in the name of "family values"- and George Bush crossed it when he sneaked into office and began killing brown skinned children in the name of Jesus and the American people.

--Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear)

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

--Mark Twain (Autobiography of Mark Twain)

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

--H. L. Mencken

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

--William Kingdon Clifford

The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by some people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.

--Bertrand Russell

Is it even vaguely possible that some New Age Republican whore-beast of a false president could actually make Richard Nixon look like a liberal?

--Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear)

The Church had devastating impact upon society. As the Church assumed leadership, activity in the fields of medicine, technology, science, education, history, art and commerce all but collapsed. Europe entered the Dark Ages.

--Helen Ellerbe (The Dark Side of Christian History)

If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost.

--Robert Ingersoll

Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

--Ludwig Feuerbach

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

--Noam Chomsky

We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

--Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man "Knowledge or Certainty")

If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family -- you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn't black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green -- you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same public facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society -- you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances. The country we know and love today was built by those victories for liberalism -- with the support of the American people.

--Joe Conason

There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter our civil affairs, our government would soon be destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be destroyed.

--Supreme Court of Wisconsin, Weiss vs. District Board, March 18, 1890

How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated, we do not know; nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the minds of men; but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.

--Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man)

Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.

--Albert Einstein

Men become superstitious not because they had too much imagination, but because they were not aware that they had any.

--George Santayana

Facism is a religious concept.

--Benito Mussolini (Facism, Institutions And Doctrines)

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

--Robert A. Heinlein

The US military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution.

--Senator Ted Kennedy

Devout deity-inspired religionists tend to sacrifice human love for godly love (agape) and to withdraw into monastic and holy affairs at the expense of intimate interpersonal relationships. They frequently are deficient in social competance. They spend immense amounts of time, effort, and money on establishments rather than on social welfare. They foment religious fights, feuds, wars, and terrorism...They encourage charity that is highly parochial and that is linked to god's glory more than to the alleviation of human suffering. Their altruism is highly alloyed with egotistically proving to god how great and glorious they can be as human benefactors.

--Dr. Albert Ellis (The Case Against Religiosity)

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; 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

I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do.

--D. Dale Gulledge

Where is it written that if you don't like religion you are somehow disqualified from being a legitimate American? What was Mark Twain, a Russian? When did it become un-American to have opinions about the origin and meaning of the universe that come from sources other than the body of dogma of organizations approved by the federal government as certifiably Judeo-Christian? Is it American to believe that God ordered Tribe X to abjure port, or that he caused Leader Y to be born to a virgin, why is it suddenly un-American to doubt the prime mover of this unimaginably vast universe of quintillions of solar systems would likely be obsessed with questions involving the dietary and biosexual behavior of a few thousand bipeds inhabiting a small part of a speck of dust orbiting a third-rate star in an obscure spiral arm of one of millions of more or less identical galaxies?

--Hendrik Hertzberg

It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

--Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man "Knowledge or Certainty")

The only thing that guarantees that (sufficiently complex) beliefs actually represent the world, are chains of evidence and argument linking them to the world. Only on matters of religious faith do sane men and women regularly dispute this fact.

--Sam Harris, Neuroscientist (responding to The Edge's 2005 question)

In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available... in America right now.

--Merle Haggard

PROPAGANDA: New Latin, first used in the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, an organization established by Pope Gregory XV in 1622.

1) The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.2) Ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect.

Before the Christian dismisses atheism as irrational or condemns the atheist as immoral, he should consider the disturbing possibility that the God of Christianity is himself an atheist. And if this is true, it means that the Christian worships, obeys, and has devoted his life to an atheistic being who does not believe in any power superior to himself, never prays, is utterly without faith, and who does not acknowledge any authority, either cognitive or moral, external to himself.

Satan is not an atheist--that much is clear--for he believes in the God of Christianity. We thus have the intriguing spectacle of a battle between two titans, with God the Atheist on the side of good, and Satan the Theist on the side of evil. And if the Bible is to be believed, the Atheist will ultimately triumph over the Theist.

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.

Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

When the sacrifice of several generations has proved insufficient, we must then embark on an infinite period of universal strife one thousand times more destructive than before, then the conviction of faith is needed in order to accept the necessity of killing and dying. This new faith is no more founded on pure reason than were the ancient faiths.

When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything--you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

--Robert Anton Wilson (Thought of the Month, 3.11.93 Jia Shen, Year of the Monkey)

To those who warn that it would be inhumane and wrong to leave Iraq soon, I ask: What's so humane about sticking around and killing again and again?

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.