Quotes

Thomas Jefferson Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion ...
Posted May 31, 2011, 12:55 AM by Garrett Fogerlie
Charles Darwin I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who ...
Posted May 25, 2011, 5:17 AM by Garrett Fogerlie
Garrett Fogerlie My personal #1 reason that I don't like religion is because I like knowledge, I crave information like a crack addict craves crack! And Religion suppresses knowledge; not just ...
Posted Jul 25, 2011, 2:32 PM by Unknown user
American Taliban George Bush Sr. (President of the United States) "I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God ...
Posted May 6, 2011, 1:03 PM by Viva Paco
Stephen Hawking Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a ...
Posted May 13, 2011, 3:25 AM by Garrett Fogerlie
Penn Jillette Before you can read, you know the difference between a story and reality. And, of course, by the time you're old enough to do any real damage with an ...
Posted May 13, 2011, 3:17 AM by Garrett Fogerlie
Christopher Hitchens That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.Christopher HitchensThe only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a ...
Posted May 27, 2011, 9:02 AM by Viva Paco
Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. Arthur C. Clarke ...
Posted May 13, 2011, 3:21 AM by Garrett Fogerlie
Richard Dawkins A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the ...
Posted May 16, 2011, 5:10 AM by Viva Paco

Showing posts 1 - 9 of 9. View more »

Thomas Jefferson

posted May 31, 2011, 12:52 AM by Garrett Fogerlie

Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
Thomas Jefferson

We are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is. All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.
Thomas Jefferson

Charles Darwin

posted May 25, 2011, 5:12 AM by Garrett Fogerlie

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
Charles Darwin

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
Charles Darwin

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.
Charles Darwin

A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.
Charles Darwin

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
Charles Darwin

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.
Charles Darwin

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.
Charles Darwin

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.
Charles Darwin

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
Charles Darwin

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.
Charles Darwin

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.
Charles Darwin

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.
Charles Darwin

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Charles Darwin

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.
Charles Darwin

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
Charles Darwin

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
Charles Darwin

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
Charles Darwin

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
Charles Darwin

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
Charles Darwin

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
Charles Darwin

Garrett Fogerlie

posted May 14, 2011, 6:14 AM by Garrett Fogerlie [ updated Jul 25, 2011, 2:32 PM by Unknown user ]

American Taliban

posted May 6, 2011, 1:02 PM by Viva Paco

George Bush Sr. (President of the United States)
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

George W. Bush (President of the United States)
	"I don't think that witchcraft is a religion. I wish the military would rethink this decision."* "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." "This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while."
	*Comment about Wiccans in the military

Ann Coulter

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
"Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims."
"Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity, as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of 'kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed'"

Pat Robertson (Christian Coalition)

"The Islamic people, the Arabs, were the ones who captured Africans, put them in slavery, and sent them to America as slaves. Why would the people in America want to embrace the religion of slavers?"
"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different...More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."
"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together."
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."
"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."
"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."
"[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers."
"[Planned Parenthood] is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism – everything that the Bible condemns."

Bailey Smith
"With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."

Beverly LaHaye (Concerned Women for America)
	"Yes, religion and politics do mix. America is a nation based on biblical principles. Christian values dominate our government. The test of those values is the Bible. Politicians who do not use the bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office."

Bob Dornan (Rep. R-CA)
"Don't use the word 'gay' unless it's an acronym for 'Got Aids Yet'"

David Barton (Wallbuilders)
	"There should be absolutely no 'Separation of Church and State' in America."

David Trosch
"Sodomy is a graver sin than murder. – Unless there is life there can be no murder."

Fob James (Governor of Alabama)
	"Behind this judicial wall of separation there is a tyranny of lies that will fall... I say to you, my friends, let it fall!" "A good butt-whipping and then a prayer is a wonderful remedy."

Fred Phelps (Westboro Baptist Church)

"If you got to castrate your miserable self with a piece of rusty barb wire, do it."
"Hear the word of the LORD, America, fag-enablers are worse than the fags themselves, and will be punished in the everlasting lake of fire!"
"You telling these miserable, Hell-bound, bath house-wallowing, anal-copulating fags that God loves them!? You have bats in the belfry!"
"American Veterans are to blame for the fag takeover of this nation. They have the power in their political lobby to influence the zeitgeist, get the fags out of the military, and back in the closet where they belong!"
"Not only is homosexuality a sin, but anyone who supports fags is just as guilty as they are. You are both worthy of death."

Gary Bauer (American Values)
	"We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe."

Gary North (Institute for Christian Economics)
"The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion–must be denied citizenship." "This is God's world, not Satan's. Christians are the lawful heirs, not non-Christians."

Gary Potter (Catholics for Christian Political Action)
	"When the Christian majority takes over this country, there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil."

Henry Morris (Founder, Institute for Creation Research, died 2006)
"When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data."

J. B. Stoner (White Supremacist) (1924 - 2005)

"We had lost the fight for the preservation of the white race until God himself intervened in earthly affairs with AIDS to rescue and preserve the white race that he had created.... I praise God all the time for AIDS."
"AIDS is a racial disease of Jews and Niggers, and fortunately it is wiping out the queers. I guess God hates queers for several reasons. There is one big reason to be against queers and that is because every time some white boy is seduced by a queer into becoming a queer, means his white bloodline has run out."

James Dobson (Focus on the Family)
"Those who control the access to the minds of children will set the agenda for the future of the nation and the future of the western world." "State Universities are breeding grounds, quite literally, for sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV), homosexual behavior, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, alcoholism, and drug abuse." "Today's children... They're damned. They're gone."

James Kennedy (Center for Reclaiming America)
	"The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ."

James Watt (Secretary of the Interior)
"We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand."*
*Secretary of the Interior in the Reagan Admin. Responsible for National Policy regarding the Environment

Jay Grimstead (Coalition on Revival)
	"We are to make Bible-obeying disciples of anybody that gets in our way."

Jerry Falwell (1933 - 2007)

"We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism...we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today...our battle is with Satan himself."
"AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah's chariotters."
"The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc."
"AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."
"If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."

Jesse Helms (Senator R-NC, 1973-2003)

"The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian."
"All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction."
"Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade-school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping and murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior."
"Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches."

Jimmy Swaggart (Jimmy Swaggart Ministries)

"The Media is ruled by Satan. But yet I wonder if many Christians fully understand that. Also, will they believe what the Media says, considering that its aim is to steal, kill, and destroy?"
"Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest."
"Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it...Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory."

John Ashcroft (Attorney General)
	"Civilized people – Muslims, Christians, and Jews – all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator."

John Whitehead (Rutherford Institute)
"The [Supreme] Court, by seeking to equate Christianity with other religions, merely assaults the one faith. The Court in essence is assailing the true God by democratizing the Christian religion."

Joseph McCarthy (1908 - 1957)(Senator, R-WI, 1947-1957)
	"Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic Atheism and Christianity."

Joseph Morecraft (Chalcedon Presbyterian Church)
"Nobody has the right to worship on this planet any other God than Jehovah. And therefore the state does not have the responsibility to defend anybody's pseudo-right to worship an idol."

Joseph Scheidler (Pro-Life Action League)
	"I would like to outlaw contraception...contraception is disgusting – people using each other for pleasure."

Kay O'Connor (Kansas Senate Republican)
"I'm an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women today, we wouldn't have to vote."

Keith A. Fournier (Catholic Way)
	"We need a legal strategy which protects the rights of those of us who hold Christian convictions which will afford us the opportunity to contend once again for the mind of this culture."

Laura Schlessinger
"I want to coin a phrase here, and I don't mind help. What would be the communication version of "ethnic cleansing?" Because that's what in particular the homosexual activists try to do."

Stephen Hawking

posted May 6, 2011, 12:08 PM by Viva Paco [ updated May 13, 2011, 3:25 AM by Garrett Fogerlie ]

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?
Stephen Hawking

God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
Stephen Hawking

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.
Stephen Hawking

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.
Stephen Hawking

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.
Stephen Hawking

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.
Stephen Hawking

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
Stephen Hawking

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.
Stephen Hawking

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
Stephen Hawking

Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
Stephen Hawking

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.
Stephen Hawking

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.
Stephen Hawking

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
Stephen Hawking

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
Stephen Hawking

There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.
Stephen Hawking

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
Stephen Hawking

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

Penn Jillette

posted May 6, 2011, 12:05 PM by Viva Paco [ updated May 13, 2011, 3:17 AM by Garrett Fogerlie ]

Before you can read, you know the difference between a story and reality. And, of course, by the time you're old enough to do any real damage with an Uzi, you've learned that difference.
Penn Jillette

But it's much more exciting to make Die Hard. One of the reasons that I think that movie is so successful is it deals with those very important blue-collar relationship themes. But it's more visually beautiful to show things blowing up. It just gives you more on the screen.
Penn Jillette

Every nut who kills people has a Bible lying around. If you're looking for violent rape imagery, the Bible's right there in your hotel room. If you just want to look up ways to screw people up, there it is, and you're justified because God told you to.
Penn Jillette

I'm a big fan of huge populations of people, so you'd think with 300 million people in the country, you don't even have to please 1% to be phenomenally successful.
Penn Jillette

I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association.
Penn Jillette

I've never had a drink of alcohol or any drug in my life.
Penn Jillette

If I go out to dinner with you and you order wine, I leave. I won't be around drugs and alcohol at all.
Penn Jillette

In my private life, I'm not around any drugs or alcohol.
Penn Jillette

It wasn't success, because Teller and I, by the time Asparagus Valley got together - within a year, we had achieved all our goals. I mean, our goal was to earn our living doing exactly what we wanted. Which is many people's goal.
Penn Jillette

Janet Reno, during her confirmation hearings, said she would come down harder on porno, and lately she's talked about how violence on television has an effect on violence in the real world.
Penn Jillette

One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality.
Penn Jillette

Teller and I worked Renaissance Festivals and street performing - actually more real, no kidding around, Philadelphia street performing than we did Renaissance Festivals.
Penn Jillette

The fact is that violence gives you a rush.
Penn Jillette

The First Amendment says nothing about your getting paid for saying anything. It just says you can say it. I don't believe that if a corporation pulls all the money out of you or a network pulls their money away or you get fired, you're being censored.
Penn Jillette

The medium is not the message - the message is the message.
Penn Jillette

The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing.
Penn Jillette

The skills that we have are the actual magic skills - not the performing skills. We have to separate those. But the actual skills that make the tricks work, we don't get to use again.
Penn Jillette

We aren't people who believe that just because we're performers our opinions on everything need to be known.
Penn Jillette

We knew that we were kind of odd and creeps, and we wanted to do odd, creepy stuff for people who wanted to see that.
Penn Jillette

When you're watching Psycho, there' s that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you're not, and that's where the celebration comes in.
Penn Jillette

Whereas you have someone like Houdini, who works really, really hard to get really, really famous, and then has actual intellectual ideas that he puts into the culture that stay there.
Penn Jillette

Christopher Hitchens

posted May 6, 2011, 12:01 PM by Viva Paco [ updated May 27, 2011, 9:02 AM ]

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
Christopher Hitchens

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer)

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me.
Christopher Hitchens

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.
Christopher Hitchens

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer)

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
Christopher Hitchens

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.
Christopher Hitchens

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

[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.
Christopher Hitchens

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me.
Christopher Hitchens

Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)
tags: atheism, atheist, god, noremorse, science

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

The noble title of dissident must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
Christopher Hitchens (Letters to a Young Contrarian)

What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch-22: A Memoir)

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody-not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms-had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think-though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one-that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim--so modestly and so humbly--to possess. It is time to withdraw our respect from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer)

To choose dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

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

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and --since there is no other metaphor--also the soul.
Christopher Hitchens

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
Christopher Hitchens

Nothing optional--from homosexuality to adultery--is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in 'King Lear', the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

Organised religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch-22: A Memoir)

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch-22: A Memoir)

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.
Christopher Hitchens

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?
Christopher Hitchens

...owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.
Christopher Hitchens

And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch-22: A Memoir)

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch-22: A Memoir)

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.
Christopher Hitchens

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.
Christopher Hitchens

Arthur C. Clarke

posted May 6, 2011, 11:50 AM by Viva Paco [ updated May 13, 2011, 3:21 AM by Garrett Fogerlie ]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
Arthur C. Clarke

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke

I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical.
Arthur C. Clarke

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.
Arthur C. Clarke

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Arthur C. Clarke

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Arthur C. Clarke

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
Arthur C. Clarke

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.
Arthur C. Clarke

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?
Arthur C. Clarke

CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
Arthur C. Clarke

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along.
Arthur C. Clarke

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.
Arthur C. Clarke

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
Arthur C. Clarke

I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.
Arthur C. Clarke

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
Arthur C. Clarke

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!
Arthur C. Clarke

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
Arthur C. Clarke

Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come here. Well, it can't hide forever - one day we will overhear it.
Arthur C. Clarke

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
Arthur C. Clarke

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading manuals without the software.
Arthur C. Clarke

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
Arthur C. Clarke

The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
Arthur C. Clarke

The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.
Arthur C. Clarke

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Arthur C. Clarke

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
Arthur C. Clarke

Richard Dawkins

posted May 6, 2011, 11:47 AM by Viva Paco [ updated May 16, 2011, 5:10 AM ]

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.
Richard Dawkins

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
Richard Dawkins

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Richard Dawkins

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
Richard Dawkins

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Richard Dawkins

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
Richard Dawkins

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
Richard Dawkins

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

Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?
Richard Dawkins

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
Richard Dawkins

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
Richard Dawkins

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.
Richard Dawkins

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
Richard Dawkins

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.
Richard Dawkins

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Richard Dawkins

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
Richard Dawkins

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.
Richard Dawkins

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Richard Dawkins

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
Richard Dawkins

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkins

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
Richard Dawkins

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
Richard Dawkins

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.
Richard Dawkins

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?
Richard Dawkins

1-9 of 9

	Search this site