Quotes
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"Faith is believing what you know ain't so." -- Mark Twain *** "I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe that there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people." --Katherine Hepburn *** "As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion." -- Butterfly McQueen *** "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction." -- Richard Dawkins *** "In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star upon which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of 'world history' -- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die." Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" *** "Christ came, and Christianity arose...But originating in Judaism, which knew women only as a being bereft of all rights, and biased by the Biblical conception which saw in her the source of all evil, Christianity preached contempt for woman." -- August Bebel, Women and Socialism *** "I don't hate people. I just like it a lot better when they're not around." -- Henry in "The Barfly" *** "I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious - for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: 'Oh, but you forget the good God.' Apparently they conceive of the Deity as a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes. This view strikes me as curious." -- Bertrand Russell *** "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" -- William S Burroughs *** "It is good to know that God is on our side, but a little confusing when you find the enemy equally convinced of the opposite." -- Bertrand Russell, Essays on Skepticism *** "The belief in the goodness of God is inversely proportional to the evidence." -- Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell Speaks his Mind *** "The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason." -- Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian *** "But philosophy is not poetry. It is the clarification of meanings through logical analysis; and picture language has no place in it." -- Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy *** "Atheists are here to stay now. We are ready to take over the culture and to move it ahead for the benefit of all human kind. Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason, and anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is time now for reason, education, and science to take over." -- Madalyn O'Hair, Atheists: The Last Minority *** "And 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." -- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams *** "O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drawn the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rages and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the cy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it." -- Mark Twain, The War Prayer *** "When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. " -- David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding *** "There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol...there was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality...but they used to take morphia and cocaine...Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178...Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug...Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant...All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects...Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology. - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World *** "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Treaty of Tripoly, article 11 "Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it." "But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed." "What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because of suspected heresy? Remember the Index Expurgato-rius, the Inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter, and the guillotine; and, oh! horrible, the rack! This is as bad, if not worse, than a slow fire. Nor should the Lion's Mouth be forgotten. Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years." letter to John Taylor, 1814, quoted in In God We Trust and 2000 Years of Disbelief -- John Adams *** "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." Joseph Lewis quoting Lincoln in a 1924 speech in New York "My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them." -- Abraham Lincoln *** "What you should say to outsiders is that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it." -- Susan B. Anthony: A Biography, by Kathleen Barry *** "Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separated." -- Ulysses S. Grant *** "The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind." A History of God -- Sigmund Freud *** I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough - I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race." -- Friedrich Nietzsche *** "'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true." "It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand." "Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of." "There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad." Mark Twain in Eruption "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" Reflections on Religion, 1906 -- Samuel Clemens /Mark Twain ***
-- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason *** "...when a physiologist looks at another man's brain, what he sees is in his own brain and not in the other man's brain. I have not so far found any philosopher who knew what I meant by this statement." -- Reply to criticism of Mr Nagel on Russell's PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
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