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"Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks." "The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned." "Heredity is nothing but stored environment." "I am not so much for the freedom of religion as I am for the religion of freedom." "Be the change you want to see in the world." "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." "Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority." "The environment is a moral issue." "Ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to prefabricated answers for all circumstances." "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." "The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds." "A man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe." "A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." "The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." "The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself." "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." "During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." "Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." "We Americans have no commission from God to police the world." "RESPONSIBILITY, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star." "It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end as superstitions." "There must be Religion. Otherwise the poor would murder the rich." Mahatma Ghandi's Seven Deadly Sins: "Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Age." "Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism." "There is nothing politically right that is morally wrong." "Prayer has no place in the public schools, just like facts have no place in organized religion." "If atheists are deaf to the word of God, then theists are blind to the ways of man." "I still say a church steeple with a lightening rod on top shows a lack of confidence." "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, & the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." "Faith is believing something you know ain't true." "Religion consists of a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of." "Man is a marvelous curiosity ... he thinks he is the Creator's pet ... he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea." "I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." "No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means." "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." "If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?" "Thus I came...to a deep religiosity, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached a conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.... against every kind of authority grew out of this experience...an attitude which has never left me." "We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." "It is said that men may not be the dreams of the Gods, but rather that the Gods are the dreams of men." "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." "Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned." "Only Sheep need a shepherd!" Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense." "If god does exist, he must be an underachiever." "Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition." IF ATHEISM IS A RELIGION, THEN: * Silence is a language. * Dead is a state of mind. * Hunger is a gourmet meal. * Health is a disease. * Bald is a hair colour. "For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman inefficiency." "Eternal nothingness is OK if you happen to be dressed for it." "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." "I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong." "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." "The absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence." "A Buddhist Monk walked up to a hot dog vendor and said 'Make me one with everything.'" |
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