Collected Quotes A - E
Things people have written or uttered that have inspired me, made me feel emotional, made me laugh, despair or face-palm, made me think, or perhaps made me wish that I could write as well as this or be glad that I don't. And sometimes the irony and hypocrisy burn brightly. Internet comments have been left, grammatically, as found; bear in mind that some are undoubtedly examples of Poe's Law.
POE'S LAW: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article." (Nathan Poe)
And obviously, just because I've quoted someone doesn't mean I endorse (or would ridicule) everything they have to say........
In no particular order except alphabetically by surname or pseudonym.
A
•Scott Aaronson (1981 - ; American Computer Scientist)•
"Falsifiability shouldn’t be ‘retired.’ Instead, falsifiability’s portfolio should be expanded, with full-time assistants (like explanatory power) hired to lighten falsifiability’s load." (Scott Aaronson)
"Quantum mechanics is confusing and consciousness is confusing, so maybe they're the same." (Scott Aaronson)
"There's nothing so hyped that it doesn't have underappreciated aspects." (Scott Aaronson)
"The most beautiful equation is as happy as a clam for none of its solutions to have any physical reality, or any reality that's consciously experienced by anyone." (Scott Aaronson)
"If you want me to rush to the Singularity community's defense, the way to do it is to tell me that they're a weirdo nerd cult that worships a high-school dropout and his Harry Potter fanfiction, so how could anyone possibly take their ideas seriously? It's not just the invalidity of the ad hominem argument that will turn my eyes red - rather, it;s that this particular kind of ad-hominem ("these nerds violate our social norms, so we need not consider the truth or falsehood of what they say") has such an abysmal track record over the centuries." (Scott Aaronson)
"I confess I'm left cold by the interminable philosophical debates whether the universe "really is" a computation. Like, once you've signed onto the reductionist program at all, it's completely obvious and unremarkable that the universe can be regarded as some sort of computation, so the only interesting questions concern which sort! Quantum or classical?" (Scott Aaronson)
•Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001; English Author & Dramatist)•
"We don't have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it." (Douglas Adams)
"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." (Douglas Adams)
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." (Douglas Adams)
"For all my rational Western intellect and education, I was for the moment overwhelmed by a primitive sense of living in a world ordered by a malign and perverted god, and it coloured my view of everything that afternoon - even the coconuts. The villagers sold us some and split them open for us. They are almost perfectly designed. You first make a hole and drink the milk, and then you split open the nut with a machete and slice off a segment of the shell, which forms a perfect implement for scooping out the coconut flesh inside. What makes you wonder about the nature of this god character is that he creates something that is so perfectly designed to be of benefit to human beings and then hangs it twenty feet above their heads on a tree with no branches." (Douglas Adams)
"A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment." (Douglas Adams)
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" (Douglas Adams)
"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." (Douglas Adams)
"There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened." (Douglas Adams)
"………imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!" (Douglas Adams)
"There is a theory which states that if anybody ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." (Douglas Adams)
•Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975; German - American Political Theorist)•
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." (Hannah Arendt)
"In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true.......The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness." (Hannah Arendt)
•Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992; Russian - American Author & Biochemist)•
"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." (Isaac Asimov)
"......science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." (Isaac Asimov)
"Creationists make it sound as though a theory is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." (Isaac Asimov)
"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means “that my ignorance is just as good your knowledge”." (Isaac Asimov)
"Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold." (Isaac Asimov)
"So the universe is not quite as you thought it was? You’d better rearrange your beliefs then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe." (Isaac Asimov)
"Such folly smacks of genius. A lesser mind would be incapable of it." (Isaac Asimov)
“To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature and it remains premature today” (Isaac Asimov)
"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." (Isaac Asimov)
•Other A•
“My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, a worm that’s going to make him blind. And I ask them, ‘Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball?’ Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy.” (David Attenborough)
"If you breastfeed your sons, you are training them to be rapists when they grow up. You're basically teaching them that they can touch a woman's body whenever they want. If you oppose rape, stop breastfeeding boys!" (Shaykha Alia)
"It seems a terrible faith to be rounded up like cattle in some farm called heaven for infinity." (Sigmund Jarle Andersen)
"Yes sex at six can cause psychological damage. But thats only in rare occasions. Most girls are fine. Thats a scientific fact." (Internet commenter: ahmed2010)
"Harry beat Voldemort in seven books. The Bible is more than sixty books, and God still hasn't beat the devil." (Zachary Amaranth)
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." (Maya Angelou)
"When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes." (W. H. Auden)
"To most Christians, the bible is like a Software License. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click "I agree."" (Waleed Al-Husseini)
"Existence for eternity could get a little boring......especially towards the end." (Woody Allen)
"Purpose is a man-made fiction. Nobody on their deathbed gets a plaque that says “he focused on only one thing for his entire life!” Those are counterfeit thoughts in a counterfeit society." (James Altucher)
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." (Susan B. Anthony)
"Many Europeans think that their own countries are larger than, or at least as large as, the entire USA." (Dennis Arcand)
"One should build cities in the country, the air would be much cleaner!" (Alphonse Allaise)
"If your fundamentalists are faith healers, snake handlers, child abusers, sexists, racists and anti-gay bigots, there’s something wrong with your fundamentals." (Ronelle Adams)
"Jacob's son Esau was the father of the Edomites and he is said to be "red" Genesis 25:25. We might say of a ruddy complexion, as David was, 1 Samuel 16:12. This is why Blacks in the southern USA are sometimes observed spooning and eating red clay out of river banks. They are trying to get back to the original colour." (Internet commenter: alanorei)
"No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film." (Robert Adams)
"Nothing makes Trump supporters angrier than when you directly quote something he has said." (Travis Allen)
"There is a reason that “gay marriage’ was not adopted ten years ago, or a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand years ago. It does not work, and is concerned only with decimating the current population on the planet. Odd strategy. When it works in Saudi Arabia, I may then be persuaded of its value. The Irish may have an excuse - many of them were probably drunk when they voted." (Internet commenter: alloysteel)
"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept." (Ansel Adams)
"Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly." (Charles Addams)
"If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that thing down." (Todd Akin)
"Anyone who denies the Law of Non-Contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned." (Avicenna)
"All jokes about religion cause offence, so it's pointless apologising for them. You should really only apologise for a bad joke." (Rowan Atkinson)
"As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence." (Thomas Aquinas)
"Gay people do not need to be recruited. Straight couples have always done a bang-up job restocking our numbers." (Chuck Anziulewicz)
"Those who invalidate reason ought to seriously consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle they are trying to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument. (Ethan Allen)
"America was initially a country for white men of good character and their white women property." (Andrew Anglin)
"I'm an anti-vaxxer which is why I think we should just all get herd immunity by exposing ourselves to the virus to get antibodies, ideally a weakened version of the virus, in some sort of doctor's office or pharmacy." (Internet commenter: Megan Amram)
"There's an actual reason people from Europe aren't flocking to Arkansas." (Luke Anderson)
"People will come at us - usually atheists or people like that - they'll come at us and say, "Well, the Bible is wrong because the Bible condones slavery." We've all heard that before, right? But here's the thing about that, if the Bible condones slavery, then I condone slavery. Because the Bible's right about everything." (Steve Anderson)
"The United States Constitution guarantees us the right to worship God unimpaired by the United States government. It in no way shape or form guarantees us the right not to worship God." (internet commenter: ari)
"Plenty of cultural norms did indeed exist prior to religions entering certain regions, but that’s like saying Snow White, Aladdin, Ariel, etc. existed prior to Disney — sure, but they got codified and mass-produced and now are forever branded in association with this larger entity." (Amber Adamson)
B
•Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626; English Philosopher & Politician)•
"There is no thing of excellent beauty which hath not some strangeness in the proportion." (Francis Bacon)
"The General root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other." (Francis Bacon)
•R. Scott Bakker (1967 - ; Canadian Author)•
"If the world is a game whose rules are written by the God, and sorcerers are those who cheat and cheat, then who has written the rules of sorcery?" (R. Scott Bakker)
"The world is only as deep as we can see. This is why fools think themselves profound. This is why terror is the passion of revelation." (R. Scott Bakker)
"Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity." (R. Scott Bakker)
•Dan Barker (1949 - ; American Author, Musician & Ex-Preacher)•
"Theology is a subject without an object" (Dan Barker)
"If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits." (Dan Barker)
"Asking, “If there is no god, what is the purpose of life?” is like asking, “If there is no master, whose slave will I be?" (Dan Barker)
"Either in or out of time, the decision of a personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself. Even if the deciding and the acting happened simultaneously, it would still not be true that the acting was antecedent to the deciding. Imagine God saying, "Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I'd better decide to do it." (Dan Barker)
"Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, "Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it." (Dan Barker)
•John Barrow (1952 - ; English Mathematician & Cosmologist)•
"All of these formulae for dealing with the existence of the world are happy to establish some initial cause beyond which explanations will not be sought." (John Barrow)
"A universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind capable of understanding it." (John Barrow)
•Theodore Beale aka Vox Day (1968 - ; American Video Game Designer & Author)•
"Because they are the intellectual driving force of humanity, men will be fine.........It is written that women ruin everything." (Theodore Beale)
"Raping and killing a woman is demonstrably more attractive to women than behaving like a gentleman. And women, before all the inevitable snowflaking commences, please note that there is absolutely nothing to argue about here. It is an established empirical fact." (Theodore Beale)
"Women’s suffrage is completely incompatible with human liberty or a republic as described in the U.S. Constitution. The two cannot co-exist." (Theodore Beale)
"There is no such thing as marital rape. Once consent is formally given in public ceremony, it cannot be revoked." (Theodore Beale)
"Ironically, in light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban's attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable." (Theodore Beale)
•Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989; Irish Author & Nobel Laureate)•
"Ah yes, all lies, God and man, nature and the light of day, the heart's outpourings and the means of understanding, all invented, basely, by me alone, with the help od no one, since there is no one, to put off the hour when I must speak of me." (Samuel Beckett)
"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." (Samuel Beckett)
•Frankie Boyle (1972 - ; Scottish Comedian)•
"£3 million for the funeral of Margaret Thatcher? For £3 million you could have given everyone in Scotland a shovel and we could have dug a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person." (Frankie Boyle)
"Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people but they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers cry." (Frankie Boyle)
"We sent Prince Harry to Afghanistan because when you want to teach people about democracy and freedom, nothing screams democracy more than a prince shooting at you from a helicopter." (Frankie Boyle)
Ray Bradbury (1920 - 2012; American Author)
"We have our arts so we don't die of truth" (Ray Bradbury)
"You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." (Ray Bradbury)
•Paul Braterman (Scottish Chemist & Author)•
"If all the languages were created at Babel, how come Yiddish was created a thousand years before there were any Jews?" (Paul Braterman)
"The only non-organic food I’m aware of using is table salt." (Paul Braterman)
"If death came into the world only with human sin, then *all* extinct species must have coexisted with humans. Yet it is estimated that extinct species outnumber those still living by something like 100:1. Eden must have been a very crowded place." (Paul Braterman)
"We do not allow scientists to tell religious leaders how to teach religion, so why should we allow religious leaders to tell scientists how to teach science?" (Paul Braterman)
•David Brin (1950 - ; American Astrophysicist & Author)•
"The village is coming back, like it or not." (David Brin)
"Science is the first "priesthood" in history whose central catechism - repeated by every student - is "I might be wrong."" (David Brin)
"If facts are inconvenient, well then, why not damn those who live and work with facts? How's that working out?" (David Brin)
•Jacob Bronowski (1908 - 1974; Polish - English Biologist & Mathematician)•
"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." (Jacob Bronowski)
"It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false - tragically false. Look for yourself: This is the concentration camp and crematorium of Auschwitz. THIS is were people were turned into numbers. It was done by arrogance, by dogma, 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)
• Sye ten Bruggencate (1963 - ; Canadian Christian Pre-Suppositionalist)•
"Your free choices have been predetermined by God." (Sye ten Bruggencate)
"The proof of God's existence is that without Him you couldn't prove anything." (Sye ten Bruggencate)
"I have revelation from God and therefore I know, you don't have this same revelation and therefore you can't know. According to other worldviews, which admit that they might be wrong, I must be right because they admit they might be wrong." (Sye ten Bruggencate)
•Charles Bukowski (1920 - 1994; American Poet & Novelist)•
"I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all." (Charles Bukowski)
"My beer-drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world." (Charles Bukowski)
"What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die." (Charles Bukowski)
"They thought I had guts. They were wrong. I was only frightened of more important things." (Charles Bukowski)
"We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us" (Charles Bukowski)
"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead." (Charles Bukowski)
“There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock." (Charles Bukowski)
"Find what you love and let it kill you." (Charles Bukowski)
"I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age" (Charles Bukowski)
"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence." (Charles Bukowski)
"At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves." (Charles Bukowski)
"When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat." (Charles Bukowski)
"I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas." (Charles Bukowski)
"Dying should come easy: like a freight train you don't hear when your back is turned." (Charles Bukowski)
"Take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning." (Charles Bukowski)
"Each man's hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face." (Charles Bukowski)
•William S. Burroughs (1914 - 1997; American Author & Artist)•
"Anyone who believes he owns all the answers is a lunatic. And lunatics are dangerous to themselves and others. Spacecraft Earth is too small and too overcrowded to accomodate lunatic sects." (William S. Burroughs)
"Life is a vacation from two eternities." (William S. Burroughs)
•Robert Byers (Canadian Creationist)•
"Revealed religion is a way of knowing until proved wrong." (Robert Byers)
"I think math is useful. Just not much use in figuring out the universe. Its just a language of measurement. Math is not a intellectual subject but just a memory one. Unless one figures out some new detail about it. Even then it’s unsure. I support math in areas needed. Science however has little need of math." (Robert Byers)
•Other B•
"I'm a 35-year old, unemployed, whisky drinking, pot smoking Muslim who's dating a British girl. The only people I'm terrorising are my parents." (Faisal Butt)
"When "specified complexity" is cited as a criterion of design I always wonder how a ball bearing could be classified as a designed object.” (Matt Brooker)
"I would never read a book. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post." (Sam Bankman-Fried)
"It used to be thought that physics describes the universe. Now we know that physics only describes what we can say about the universe." (Niels Bohr)
"Horse chiropractors claim to be able to manipulate the vertebrae of horses, but I certainly would not like to shake hands with anyone with that much strength in his thumbs." (Peter Bowditch)
"Honestly, letting women vote in this country wasn't one of the best ideas. Females vote with emotion and overwhelmingly support Democratic feel-good policies that take away our ACTUAL rights. I'd rather lose my "right" to vote than lose my right to defend myself with a firearm!" (Kaitlin Bennett)
"Christian theism explicitly holds that the objects populating the universe bare the product of some unexplained activity of a supernatural consciousness and that they conform to that supernatural consciousness' will. The primary fundamental governing the universe, according to such a worldview, is not identity or causality, but somebody's wishing." (Dawson Bethrick)
"Liberalism promotes sexual perversion - especially homosexuality and miscegenation - which debases the White race. Neither homosexuals nor interracial couples, after all, produce White children." (Kyle Bristow)
"The "trickle-down" theory: The principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals." (William Blum)
""The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you. They are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor. They don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct. Unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy. Unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare. Unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike. They allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.....You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn." (Dave Barnhart)
"Any group who openly support Donald Trump on the basis of their basic beliefs have lost all credibility as representatives of Christ on Earth. Subversion into the kind of red necked gun toting evangelical bigots that support a mendacious and capricious narcissistic Plutocrat is equal to a strange kind of paganism that we neither understand nor tolerate." (Nigel Boon)
"Epigenetics is a useful word if you don’t know what’s going on — if you do, you use something else." (Adrian Bird)
"The quest for meaning itself only takes on meaning - indeed, it only takes place at all - because people are creatures whose lives, embedded in biology, are fundamentally lacking in meaning." (David P Barash)
"There is no greater misfortune in the world than the loss of reason." (Mikhail Bulgakov)
“Not using fossil fuels insults God.” (Calvin Beisner)
"I've lost the ability to write One, One Thousand, Fifty, Five and Five Hundred in Roman numerals. IM LIVID." (Simon Burnett)
“If you are Catholic and under the age of 60 or so, it is because the Church has been infiltrated by Marxist-homosexualists.” (Ann Barnhardt)
"Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flowerpots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing." (Brassaï)
“About the claim that Muslim communities nowadays “are not more or less violent than Christian or secular groups”, I would like to suggest to my colleagues the following experiment: take 1 Bible, 1 Quran and 1 Origin of Species. Make a campfire. Put the video footage online and wait for reactions. Good luck!” (Maarten Boudry)
"Prayers are to men as dolls are to children." (Samuel Butler)
“When time comes to push that (nuclear) button, I want whoever's making the decision to understand that once it's pushed, it's over. Finito. They're not gonna have lunch with Jesus. Won't be deflowering 72 virgins on the great shag carpet of eternity, or reincarnated as a cow. I want someone making that decision who believes life on this Earth isn't just a dress rehearsal for something better -- but the only shot we get.” (Quentin R Bufogle)
"Even if reason can take us only so far we ought to explore just how far" (Russell Blackstone)
"Ideas do not deserve dignity, people deserve dignity." (Peter Boghossian)
"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin." (St. Bellarmine)
"When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will." (Frederic Bastiat)
"Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is a classic example of science fiction." (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI)
"Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything." (Saul Bellow)
"White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people—a tremendous uneasiness. They don’t know what the Black face hides. They’re sure it’s hiding something. What it’s hiding is American history. What it’s hiding is what white people know they have done, and what they like doing. White people know very well one thing; it’s the only thing they have to know. They know this; everything else, they’ll say, is a lie. They know they would not like to be Black here." (James Baldwin)
"Thanking God for sparing you in a natural disaster is a bit like sending a thank you note to a serial killer for stabbing the family next door." (Betty Bowers)
"Dawkins may complain that it's special pleading, but that's the whole point of God. It is appropriate that God is the exception to the generally accepted rule of causation. That's the purpose of the construction of the notion of God." (Robert Bristow-Johnson)
"The last time I changed my camera was 50 years ago. All I need is a good face and the right light." (Jane Bown)
"In order not to feel the horrible burden of Time which breaks your shoulders and leans you towards the earth, you must get drunk constantly. But of what ? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you please. But get drunk." (Baudelaire)
"Give someone a neurotransmitter and they'll feel good for an hour; teach someone to grow more receptors and they'll feel good all the time." (Todd Becker)
"Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain. We support the Iraqi government in the fight against Islamic State. We don’t like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like. We don’t like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him. We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, who we want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win. If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might well be replaced by people we like even less. And all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out. Do you understand now?" (Aubrey Bailey)
"If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade.....if you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me - your quarrel, sir, is with my creator." (Peter Buttigieg)
"The REAL conspiracy — of which, naturally, only the truly enlightened are aware — is that the US government did carry out the Apollo missions, but then pretended to fake them so as to convince the Soviets that (1) the US would do anything necessary to win the propaganda war, and (2) had both a more advanced space program and more advanced video, production, and propaganda capabilities. In sum: the moon landing hoax WAS A HOAX." (Internet commenter: BJ)
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." (Ambrose Bierce)
"I'm fairly certain that the only reason I was born crippled was because God knew I wouldn't be able to resist the urge to become a stripper." (Ally Bruener)
"I would love to have the faith, but I have thoughts. And that can really fuck up the faith thing." (Lewis Black)
"Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of a truth.” (Ludwig Börne)
"In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade - which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to "How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?" is "Go fuck yourself"." (Josh Bazell)
“I can’t drive a Formula One car to work. It would be really cool to be able to do that, and I could probably cut my commute time by a lot. Hey, I’m a good driver, a responsible Formula One owner. You shouldn’t be scared to be on the freeway next to me as I zip around you at 140 mph, leaving your Mazda in a cloud of dust! Why are you scared? Cars don’t kill people. People kill people. Doesn’t this sound like bullshit? It is bullshit, and everybody knows.” (Anastasia Bernoulli)
C
•Albert Camus (1913 - 1960; French Author & Philosopher)•
"Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable." (Albert Camus)
".....integrity has no need of rules." (Albert Camus)
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." (Albert Camus)
•Stan Carey (Irish Author & Editor)•
"If verbing weirds language, nouning is its weirdification." (Stan Carey)
"People who complain about nouns being verbed may not be aware that CHOCOLATE was converted into a verb in 1850. So let's chocolate and chat." (Stan Carey)
•George Carlin (1937 - 2008; American Comedian, Actor & Author)•
"If God didn't want you to masturbate, he would have given you short arms." (George Carlin)
"I've begun worshiping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks me for money., I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to 'God' are all answered at about the same 50% rate." (George Carlin)
"I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am." (George Carlin)
"What if there are no hypothetical questions?" (George Carlin)
"I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose." (George Carlin)
"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little." (George Carlin)
"Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body." (George Carlin)
"I don't get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I see them as symbols, and I leave them to the symbol-minded." (George Carlin)
"Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established." (George Carlin)
"Catholics and other Christians are against abortions, and they're against homosexuality. Well who has less abortions than homosexuals? Leave these fucking people alone for Christ's sake. Here is an entire class of people, guaranteed to never have an abortion!" (George Carlin)
"When I was a kid they used to tell me to remove my hat before I entered the church, I had to remove my hat to show my respect to God, but they also told me that God was everywhere! So I thought, why even own a fucking hat?" (George Carlin)
"Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of ‘em are stupider than that." (George Carlin)
"As powerful as anyone may claim God to be, somehow he always needs money." (George Carlin)
"Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet and they have to touch it to be sure." (George Carlin)
"Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money." (George Carlin)
"Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being." (George Carlin)
"There are women named Faith, Hope, Joy, and Prudence. Why not Despair, Guilt, Rage, and Grief? It seems only right. "Tom, I'd like you to meet the girl of my dreams, Tragedy." These days, Trajedi." (George Carlin)
"If you're preborn, you're fine. If you're preschool, you're fucked." (George Carlin)
"Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure." (George Carlin)
"We're so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody's going to save something now. save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these people kidding? Save the planet? We don't even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven't learned how to care for one another. We're gonna save the fuckin' planet?.......And, by the way, there's nothing wrong with the planet in the first place. The planet is fine. The people are fucked! Compared with the people, the planet is doin' great.It's been here over four billion years.......The planet isn't goin' anywhere folks. We are! We're goin' away. Pack your shit, we're goin' away.......Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake." (George Carlin)
•Tucker Carlson (1969 - ; American Political Commentator)•
"The majority of the left have Berg or Stein in their names. Along with unusually large noses." (Tucker Carlson)
"Almost every nation on Earth has fallen under the yoke of tyranny—the metric system." (Tucker Carlson)
"Obama thinks it’s fine for women to die in combat, but won’t let their husbands beat them? Is he protecting women or not?" (Tucker Carlson)
"They hate nicotine. They love THC. Why do they hate nicotine? Because nicotine frees your mind and THC makes tou compliant and passive." (Tucker Carlson)
•Sean M. Carroll (1966 - ; American Theoretical Physicist & Author)•
"Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment." (Sean M. Carroll)
"Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It’s not well-defined, it’s completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding." (Sean M. Carroll)
"The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe." (Sean M. Carroll)
"My real problem with the falsifiability police is: we don’t get to demand ahead of time what kind of theory correctly describes the world." (Sean Carroll)
"God is not described in equations." (Sean M. Carroll)
"The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it." (Sean M. Carroll)
•Cassiterides (Internet Commenter)•
"Gravity is a theory, not a proven fact. The effects of gravity can be explained by other theories. An example would be the acceleration theory which asserts the earth is actually moving 'upward' at a constant rate of 1g (9.8m/sec^2). This produces the same effect as "gravity". See there are different theories for the same phenomena - and none are facts, they are just theories." (Cassiterides)
"So a light year = the distance light travels in a year. You mentioned the figure 11 million light years away. So my question is how are we observing this light 11 million light years away now? I'm not 11 million years old, I'm 20..............If it takes 11 million years to travel to earth then the viewer would need to be 11 million years old." (Cassiterides)
•Raymond Chandler (1888 - 1959; American Novelist)•
"I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it." (Raymond Chandler)
"There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science and the second is art." (Raymond Chandler)
"…..big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public." (Raymond Chandler)
"Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had." (Raymond Chandler)
•Noam Chomsky (1928 - ; American Cognitive Scientist & Author)•
".....jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them." (Noam Chomsky)
"A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized." (Noam Chomsky)
"There are lots of things I don't understand, say the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeve, etc. - even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest - write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) I won't spell it out." (Noam Chomsky)
"I often have to arrange talks years in advance. If I am asked for a title, I suggest “The Current Crisis in the Middle East.” It has yet to fail." (Noam Chomsky)
"The God of the Bible – not only did He order His chosen people to wipe out every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and donkey, but after all, the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on Earth because some humans irritated him. That’s beyond genocide – you don’t know how to describe this creature." (Noam Chomsky)
•Emil Cioran (1911 - 1995; Romanian Philosopher & Essayist)•
"Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure. Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure." (Emil Cioran)
"Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone." (Emil Cioran)
"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one." (Emil Cioran)
"Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?" (Emil Cioran)
"Tears do not burn except in solitude." (Emil Cioran)
"I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction." (Emil Cioran)
"Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.......the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla." (Emil Cioran)
"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities." (Emil Cioran)
"Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive." (Emil Cioran)
"The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic." (Emil Cioran)
•Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008; English Inventor, Futurist & Novelist)•
"I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent." (Arthur C. Clarke)
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." (Arthur C. Clarke)
"A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets." (Arthur C. Clarke)
•Francis Collins (1950 - ; American Geneticist)•
"As somebody who has watched our own DNA sequence emerge, our own instruction book over the course of the last few years, all three billion letters of our code, and watched how it compares with that of other species, the evidence that comes out of that kind of analysis is overwhelmingly in favor of a single origin of life from which various forms were then derived by a process which seems entirely consistent with Darwin’s view of natural selection." (Francis Collins)
"Darwin’s framework of variation and natural selection, but especially Darwin’s picture of a Tree of Life—the common ancestry of all organisms on Earth—is unquestionably correct. Universal common descent by natural processes is scientifically non‐negotiable. The theory of neo‐Darwinian evolution cannot rationally be doubted by any educated person." (Francis Collins)
•Ray Comfort (1949 - ; New Zealander Preacher)•
"I don’t have a blind spot in my eye. Both of them see very well and I am thankful for the 137 million light sensitive cells that make sight possible. Do you have a blind spot in your eye? If you do, I suggest that you see an optician and see if he can either fix it, or get you another eye." (Ray Comfort)
"If Cancer is the chastening tool of God, then doctors who are fighting cancer are fighting against the work of God. If a preacher or a Christian believes the sickness is a means of chastening, then he should never pray for relief from the sickness, but rather pray that the cancer will continue to grow until the chastening is completed." (Ray Comfort)
"How could dogs evolve when the male dog would have to wait millions of years for the female dog to evolve and then magically have matching genitalia?" (Ray Comfort)
"The Bible says that the earth is immoveable. It cannot be moved. So now is your chance to prove your point. Run outside and move the Earth. Perhaps you and your friends could jump on it, or find a rocky outcrop and push it together. Maybe after that little experiment you will concede that the Earth is immoveable." (Ray Comfort)
"If the Bible isn’t God-inspired, explain why how the writer of the Book of Job knew 3000 years ago that “the earth hangs upon nothing” (Job 26:7). It wasn’t until thousands of years later that science discovered that gravity doesn’t exist in space, and that this massive does indeed hang upon nothing." (Ray Comfort)
"Atheists don’t hate fairies, leprechauns and unicorns because they don’t exist. It is impossible to hate something that doesn’t exist. Atheists – like the painting experts hated the painter – hate God because he does exist." (Ray Comfort)
•Brian Cox (1968 - ; English Physicist & Musician)•
"Science is different to all the other systems of thought because you don’t need faith in it, you can check that it works." (Brian Cox)
"I developed a deep irritation with the intellectual vacuity of those who actively seek to deny the reality of evolution and the science of biology in general. So empty is such a position, in the face of evidence collected over centuries, that it can only be politically motivated; there is not a hint of reason in it. And more than that, taking such a position closes the mind to the most wonderful story, and this is a tragedy for those who choose it, or worse, are forced into it through deficient teaching." (Brian Cox)
"I don’t mind creation stories presented as mythology, but to suggest there is any debate that Earth is 4.54 billion years old is pure shit." (Brian Cox)
•Other C•
"I believe that anyone claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too." (Samantha Black Crow)
"Republicans and the Christian right spent decades warning us about the AntiChrist, and when he finally shows up, they vote for him." (Alex Cole)
"Photography makes one conscious of beauty everywhere, even in the simplest things, even in what is often considered commonplace or ugly. Yet nothing is really 'ordinary’, for every fragment of the world is crowned with wonder and mystery, and a great and surprising beauty." (Alvin Langdon Coburn)
"If you just turn these decisions over to a bunch of public health bureaucrats, of course the only thing they're gonna consider is what they think is in the best interest of public health." (Tom Cotton)
"I like the portrait that doesn't pander. I like the portrait that doesn't wink and rather bruises. The portrait hot knife between the ribs of your personal pain. The portrait that affects and not of affection." (Alex Coghe)
"Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one." (Ta-Nehisi Coates)
"God is amazing. Not only does he guarantee the reliability of the laws of logic, but we can even use WRONG physical laws, and God still guarantees that we get reliable results. One would almost think that our science had been developed by naturalistic processes of trial and error." (Steven Carr)
"A Freudian slip occurs when you say one thing while thinking amother." (Cliff Claven)
"Our REAL problem is that many men have no choice but to rape because they have no opportunities to date attractive women." (Ann Coulter)
"My neighbor gave my 8-year-old toy dinosaurs. I am a little shocked. She says she is a Christian, but the Bible doesn’t say anything about dinosaurs. Should I let him keep them, as long as he understands that dinosaurs aren’t real? Even the PBS shows that he watches talk about dinosaurs and evolution, and how scientists found these “bones” but the Bible doesn’t say that God ever created them, and the earth is only 6,000 years old, not old enough to have “bones” that they say are MILLIONS of years old! I know that Satan tries to trick us in many ways, and this is one way that he tries to fool man into believing that there isn’t a God who created the universe. How can they be bones when they are made out of ROCKS. I told my son that dinosaurs are one of Satan’s many ways of tricking man, and he must talk to God before he plays with them. Am I handling this right? My first 3 were all girls, and I adopted boys, and lots of mothers tell me that boys are often attracted to these dinosaurs. So I don’t know what to do. Is this just harmless fantasy play for him, or should I be worried that he may go on to believe things like evolution?” (Muriel J Compton)
"I think the prostate was designed by a novice demiurge, with a penchant for mischief, working as a subcontractor under tight budgetary constraints." (Gabe Czobel)
"In America, a hero is something you label somebody when they do something you don't want to compensate them fairly for." (Nate Copley)
"How sad it must be - believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty." (Internet commenter: christophurious)
"Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours." (Grover Cleveland)
"How do jet airplanes work? Where do they keep their fuel? How do they get the fuel to the airports? Why don't we have massive traffic jams going to all airports from the thousands of fuel trucks necessary to fuel the jets? I have driven to a lot of airports but not once have I seen a fuel truck driving there. The Denver airport has only one main road going to it and you will never see a fuel truck on it. Magic or science?" (Tom Carberry)
"Programming is like magic. You write very specific instructions in arcane languages to invoke commands, and if you get it even a little bit wrong you risk unleashing demons and destroying everything." (Diana Carrier)
"In science a falsified hypothesis gets tossed on the scrap heap; in religion, a falsified hypothesis becomes a metaphor." (Jerry Coyne)
"If only America had more churches than secular schools! Then there'd be less shootings!...........Oh, wait....." (Internet commenter: CanuckAmuck)
"It's not that Donald Trump is all that perfect of a guy. We all know he's not. And we know that he's not necessarily perfect in every way that we would like. That's not how God works. He works through the ones he chooses. We don't choose them. All we have to do is recognize them and when you recognize a chosen one and you have the discernment to know that they've been chosen and know that that's the will of God, then your life will be blessed. And if you come against the chosen one of God, you are bringing upon you and your children and your children's children curses like you have never seen. It puts the holy fear in me." (Mary Colbert)
"Desert dwellers have severe, austere and dry gods; suffering and oppressed people have loving and merciful gods; farmers have gods of rain and fruitfulness; and I have never met a liberal who believed in a conservative God or a conservative who believed in a liberal one." (Andrew Copson)
"Our economic system in the US is based mainly on recreating the state of nature that Hobbes described as "nasty, brutish, and short" as an incentive to increase personal effort, paired with a lack of understanding that personal effort alone is often not enough." (Edward Conway)
"Theists give several 'proofs' of the existence of God. These are really just arguments, because if there were convincing proof just one would suffice." (Marcel Conche)
"Since the mid 20th century the British have been trying to replace murderous imperialistic bombast with self-aggrandising pedantic smugness as our defining national characteristic. I trust everyone will agree that this is an improvement?" (Internet commenter: cartomancer)
"When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist." (Noah Cicero)
"When defenders of capitalism frequently compare socialist East with the industrialized West, they choose the richest and most liberal capitalist countries for the comparison. This is analogous to defending feudalism by drawing attention to the happy condition of the nobility." (Alan Carter)
"If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong." (Francis Crick)
"I'm no political scientist, but if you have 12 "key speakers" at your [Republican National] convention, and 6 of them have the same last name as the leader, your party might just be floating into North Korean territory." (Christian Christensen)
"Spirit is Life. It flows thru the death of me endlessly like a river unafraid of becoming the sea." (Gregory Corso)
"Saying that you don’t believe in magic but do believe in god is a bit like saying you don’t have sex with dogs, except labradors." (Jimmy Carr)
"If the motivation for legalized abortion really is to save the lives of women, why don’t we legalize rape? After all, it is not uncommon for a woman to be killed by a rapist to keep her from identifying him to the authorities. Legalizing rape would save those women by taking away that motivation. We could even issue licenses to rapists requiring them to undergo routine testing for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases." (Internet commenter: catholicwifeandmother)
"Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly. Yet the striking fact is that this does not worry Christians." (Tim Crane)
"Even if I had an objective proof that you don't find it unpleasant when you stick your hand in a fire, I still think you’d pull your hand out at the first opportunity." (John K Clark)
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." (Lewis Carroll)
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." (John Cage)
"Allegedly, the only thing that makes humans more than droids is this "soul" thing, created by this "God" thing. Which thereby uses the output to predict the input, which in turn predicts the output." (Alec Cawley)
"The greatest flaw in conservatives is their terror of empathy — in themselves, or anyone else." (Suzy McKee Charnas)
"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense." (Chapman Cohen)
"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it." (Steve Colbert)
“Where can I wear a t-shirt that says ‘atheist’ and have no problem walking down the street? That is what I care about. I can do it in lots of countries in utter safety, in some, I could not. In the one’s I could not? There lies the problem.” (Colin Christian)
"At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of a different color, or women, please do this one favor for us - leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows, and don't buy our records." (Kurt Cobain)
"Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost." (Charles Caleb Colton)
"We follow the Bible so closely we kill our pastor after Church for working on the Sabbath!" (Ken Comfort)
"When I told the people of Northern Ireland I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?" (Quentin Crisp)
"When the machine's broke down you don't call a metaphysician, you need a mechanic. After its fixed you have the leisure to wonder why machines exist at all." (Jim Culleny)
"The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort." (Mason Cooley)
"Today's so-called "Christians" would not crucify Christ. They would rape him." (Timmy Crowley)
"Theists are essentially the unquestioning gestapo of whatever monster manufactured the universe. Or rather, whatever monster some men made up and duped them into thinking it made the universe." (Richard Carrier)
"Sadly, we live in a distorted society where women are educated beyond their intelligence. They don't seem to understand they are female." (Nancy Campbell)
"Saying you're "worried about left wing anti-Semitism" is like saying you're worried about anti-Semitism committed on a Wednesday - it kinda just sounds like you don't really give a shit." (Geoffrey Cohen)
"3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is experimental error." (John Cowan)
"If science and religion are compatible because some people do both, then drinking and driving are also compatible because some people do both." (Internet commenter: Cath the Canberra Cook)
D
•Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882; English Naturalist & Geologist)•
"From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful & most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved" (Charles Darwin)
"I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men." (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)
•Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert 1931 - 2019; American Psychologist & Author)•
"In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight." (Ram Dass)
"All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion." (Ram Dass)
•Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913 - 1994 ; Columbian Catholic Philosopher)•
"In the Christian obsessed with "social justice" it isn’t easy to discern whether charity is flourishing or faith is expiring." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
"Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
"Egalitarian ideas distort our perception of the present and, in addition, mutilate our vision of the past." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
"Those who proclaim that the noble is despicable end up by proclaiming that the despicable is noble." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
"To have a dialogue with those who do not share our basic premises is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
"Poetry has died, asphyxiated by metaphors." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
""To be useful to society" is the ambition, or excuse, of a prostitute." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
"To be intelligent without ideas is the privilege of the artist." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
"There is nothing more common than transforming a duty which inconveniences us into an "ethical problem."" (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
•Richard Dawkins (1941 - ; English Zoologist, Ethologist & Author)•
"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not knowing." (Richard Dawkins)
"Science is interesting. If you don't agree you can fuck off." (Richard Dawkins)
"There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point…...The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it." (Richard Dawkins)
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." (Richard Dawkins)
"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we ARE apes." (Richard Dawkins)
"What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye..." (Richard Dawkins)
"Be thankful you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire to have a second one." (Richard Dawkins)
"How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that wherever you happen to be born, the local religion turns out to be the true one." (Richard Dawkins)
"Scientists love not knowing because they can go to work on it. The history of science’s increasing knowledge, especially during the past four centuries, is a spectacular cascade of truths following one on the other. We may choose to call it a cumulative increase in the number of truths that we know. Or we can tip our hat to (a better class of) philosophers and talk of successive approximations towards yet-to-be-falsified provisional truths. Either way, science can properly claim to be the gold standard of truth." (Richard Dawkins)
"When they say "I'll pray for you," give that wonderful reply: "I'll think for you."" (Richard Dawkins)
"If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference?" (Richard Dawkins)
"If a time machine could serve up to you your 200 million greats grandfather, you would eat him with sauce tartare and a slice of lemon." (Richard Dawkins)
•Dan Dennett (1942 - ; American Philosopher)•
"John Searle once told me about a conversation he had with the late Michel Foucault: "Michel, you're so clear in conversation; why is your written work so obscure?" To which Foucault replied, "That's because, in order to be taken seriously by French philosophers, twenty-five percent of what you write has to be impenetrable nonsense." I have coined a term for this tactic, in honor of Foucault's candor: eumerdification." (Dan Dennett)
"There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion." (Daniel Dennett)
"It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us." (Dan Dennett)
"Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners." (Dan Dennett)
"It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why." (Dan Dennett)
"There's no invisible boss in the brain, no central meaner, no unitary self in command of our activities and utterances. There's no internal spectator of a Cartesian theater in our heads to applaud the march of consciousness across its stage." (Dan Dennett)
"If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win." (Dan Dennett)
".......there could be talking bunny rabbits, spiders who write English messages in their webs, and for that matter, melancholy choo-choo trains. There could be, I suppose, but there aren't - so my theory doesn't have to explain them." (Dan Dennett)
".......there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness." (Dan Dennett)
"When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions are yet. Once you get the questions right, then you go answer them, and that's typically not philosophy, that's one science or another. Anywhere in life where you find that people aren't quite sure what the right questions to ask are, what they're doing, then, is philosophy." (Dan Dennett)
"Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity." (Dan Dennett)
".......religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity." (Dan Dennett)
"I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra." (Dan Dennett)
"The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern." (Dan Dennett)
"I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics." (Dan Dennett)
"What you can imagine depends on what you know." (Dan Dennett)
"Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares." (Dan Dennett)
"The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians." (Dan Dennett)
"If nobody cares, then it doesn't matter what happens to flowers." (Dan Dennett)
".......if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability." (Dan Dennett)
"The only meaning of life worth caring about is the one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it." (Dan Dennett)
•Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982; American Science-Fiction Author)•
"Giving me a new idea is like handing a cretin a loaded gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang, bang." (Philip K. Dick)
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." (Philip K. Dick)
"Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, what is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing." (Philip K. Dick)
"Reality denied comes back to haunt." (Philip K. Dick)
"We all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people." (Philip K. Dick)
•Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870; English Novelist & Essayist)•
"If the world goes wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right." (Charles Dickens)
"The universe makes rather an indifferent parent, I'm afraid." (Charles Dickens)
• Edsger Dijkstra (1930 - 2002; Dutch Computer Scientist)•
"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." (Edsger Dijkstra)
"Having seen the Hitlerjugend in action suffices for the rest of your life to be very wary of "team spirit". Very." (Edsger Dijkstra)
•Eric Drexler (1955 - ; American Nanotechnologist)•
"Predicting the weather, predicting the folding of membrane proteins, predicting how particular molecules will fit together to form a crystal - all of these problems are long-standing areas of research that achieved substantial, but only partial success. In each of these cases, the unpredictable objects of study result from a spontaneous process - evolution, crystallization, atmospheric dynamics - and none has the essential features of engineering design." (Edward Drexler)
"Beware of judging designs as if they were theories in science. An esthetic that demands uniqueness and simplicity is simply misplaced." (Edward Drexler)
•Steve Dutch (American Geologist)•
"What am I going to use to lash out against the parents who made me eat my peas, the cop who gave me a traffic ticket, the teachers who gave me bad grades, and all the other authority figures who thwart my will, If I can't boast of having access to some kind of ultimate authority?" (Steve Dutch)
"If you believe a "theory" is unproven, don't drive across any bridges. The engineers used Stress Theory to design the bridge." (Steve Dutch)
"When some philosopher of science points out that we cannot prove that the sun will rise tomorrow, I say he's absolutely right. There is no way to prove axiomatically that the sun will rise tomorrow, and nobody in science cares in the slightest. When the sun doesn't rise as scheduled, call me." (Steve Dutch)
"If good design argues for intelligent design, bad design argues against it. You'd certainly expect a designer who created man in His image to give females bigger pelvic openings." (Steve Dutch)
•Other D•
"Mind is a verb not a noun." (John Dewey)
"Ever since Gödel showed that there does not exist a proof of the consistency of Peano's arithmetic that is formalizable within this theory (1931), political scientists had the means for understanding why it was necessary to mummify Lenin and display him to the "accidental" comrades in a mausoleum, at the Center of the National Community." (Régis Debray)
"In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there’s this moment and in between there is nothing. Photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology." (Geoff Dwyer)
"You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes everyday — unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour." (Sukhraj Dhillon)
"Science's greatest triumph appears to lie in the increasing speed with which an idiot can transport his idiocy from one place to another." (Nicolas Gomez Davila)
"Leftists are always calling me stupid. Well, if supporting Trump, opposing action on climate change and identifying cultural Marxism in primary schools makes me stupid, call me the dumbest man in Australia." (Rowan Dean)
"Nobody should ever walk out of a science museum less in touch with reality than they went in." (Thomas DeGregori)
"I still have no idea what "he died for your sins" even means. As one comedian put it, "I hit myself with a shovel for your mortgage."" (Mike Doolittle)
"While visiting my local supermarket I was disgusted to find the best parking spaces nearest the door are now reserved for "Parent and Child Parking". If you are fit enough to produce offspring, you should jolly well be able to walk across a carpark into the supermarket. The best spaces should be reserved for people with the most expensive cars. It is us who are likely to spend the most money in the supermarket, and to have the most shopping to carry back to our cars." (Diana Davenport)
"Some things can not be explained by science. Take for example, rainbows. Rainbows are a mystery and you can not touch them, just like God. Despite this fact, they are still there even though there is no scientific explanation for them. So next time you find yourself doubting your faith, think of God as a rainbow." (Internet commenter: Dro)
"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." (Peter DeFries)
"Paleontologists should have invented a system for measuring the characters of fossils, entering them into a comuter in the form of a matrix, constructing a phylogenetic tree with numerical methods, then testing said tree by various statistics e.g. scrambling the data randomly and seeing if an equally robust tree can be constructed. Nah - paleontologists would never think of that. Good thing we've got creationists to teach church audiences what really goes on in the science labs they will never enter." (Internet commenter: Diogenes)
"When we teach mathematics to beginners, we don’t do them any service by making claims about beauty and elegance if what they are experiencing is anything but………..it’s surely better to let them know that the messiness, the uncertainty, the repeated stumbles, and the blind allies they are encountering are part of the package of doing mathematics that the pros experience all the time, whether the doing is trying to prove a theorem or using mathematics to solve a real-world problem." (Keith Devlin)
"Asserting existential truths without evidence is unacceptable in any serious thought." (Glen Davidson)
"If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims." (Dalai Lama)
"Who gave life to the Mold that became Penicillin? Who created herbs and the host of medicines derived through them? Who heals God or science? Science only clears the way for God to heal using antibiotics, or splints, or surgery. Come to think of it, God even gave us surgery in circumcision." (Internet commenter: Dave_L)
"Slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many others ever tried to escape." (Dinesh D’Souza)
"If you're not a Christian, you're going to hell. It's not unloving to say that. it's unloving not to say that." (Mark Driscoll)
"The Bible has forbidden God from changing his designs, it has forbidden God from telling something different, and it has forbidded you from thinking differently. Even if God would wish to tell humans something new, something different, Christians have inocculated themselves against hearing any new voice." (Internet commenter: Delft)
"Intelligent design readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, Intelligent Design is just the logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of Information theory." (William Dembski)
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." (Peter Drucker)
"Theologians might be able to talk the hind legs off a donkey, but only science can explain why critters like donkeys have hind legs - and just the right length to reach the ground!" (Tony D'Arcy)
"A single Christian woman, having no God-given partner with whom she can consummate sexual desire, simply has no legitimate reason for pursuing sexual fantasy at all." (Erin Davis)
"Given the infinite ways in which God’s Holy Word has proven true in physics, biology, mathematics, cosmology, geology and the other sciences which study the reality of Gods creation, I will not be surprised when glacierists find that prayers really have been controlling the ebb and flow of the glacier." (Jack David)
E
•Chuck Easttom (1968 - ; American Computer Scientist)•
"God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That's not free will. It's like a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath. When god says the same we call him "loving" and build churches in his honor." (Chuck Easttom)
"Young earth creationism is essentially the position that all of modern science, 90% of living scientists and 98% of living biologists, all major university biology departments, every major science journal, the American Academy of Sciences, and every major science organization in the world, are all wrong regarding the origins and development of life....but one particular tribe of uneducated, bronze aged, goat herders got it exactly right." (Chuck Easttom)
•Michael Egnor (American Neurosurgeon & Intelligent Design Proponent)•
"The Inquisition was a disaster. Because it was too timid and limited. Every culture needs to defend itself, and the failure of central and northern Europe to mount a rigorous Inquisition was catastrophic." (Michael Egnor)
"From the standpoint of metaphysics - of a logical chain of causation - astrology has the same logical grounding as materialism." (Michael Egnor)
"……….it is man, and only man, who learns." (Michael Egnor)
"Materialism is nonsense, because if matter and energy are all that exist, then truth doesn’t exist (it’s neither matter nor energy). If truth doesn’t exist, then materialism can’t be true." (Michael Egnor)
•Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882; American Essayist & Philosopher)•
"The Earth laughs in flowers." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
•Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955; German - American Physicist)•
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." (Albert Einstein)
"The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing." (Albert Einstein)
"He who marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice." (Albert Einstein)
"Where the world ceases to be a stage for personal hopes, aspirations, and desires, and we stand before it as free creatures, full of admirations, questions and contemplation, we enter the realm of art and science. If we describe what we see and experience in the language of logic, we do science; if we convey connections through forms that are inaccessible to the rational mind, but intuitively recognisable as making sense, we do art." (Albert Einstein)
•Other E•
"There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time." (David Eagleman)
"If solipsism is true, there are no solipsists, since I am not one." (A C Ewing)
"God created the sun, the stars, the heavens and the earth, and then made Adam and Eve. The Bible never says anything about dinosaurs. You can't say there were dinosaurs when you never saw them. Somebody actually saw Adam and Eve eating apples. No one ever saw a Tyrannosaurus rex." (Carl Everett)
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." (Umberto Eco)
"If there is a God (intelligent designer), scientists only have to revise their science books. If there is no God (intelligent designer), Christians have to throw out their Christian book. Science could live with a designer, Christianity would die without one. That is why Christianity fights so hard for what it claims is a scientific idea." (David Eller)
"Sexual orientation is a self-asserted sex-based identity narrative that is based on a series of naked assertions and unproven faith-based assumptions that are implicitly religious." (Ed Emory)
"If the universe could be different then blah blah blah" is not an argument, it's a speculation. There is **zero** evidence that the universe can be any different than it has been observed to be." (Steven Evans)
"In my lectures, I talk about how water and water crystals are 10 percent goodness, 10 percent evil, and the rest - 80 percent - is opportunist. When the 10 percent that is goodness and the 10 percent that is badness in water crystals fight, then the 10 percent that is goodness wins and overpowers evilness. So, if the 10 percent of goodness would carry past that fight to the 80 percent that is opportunist, than the 80 percent will follow the goodness, not the badness. Likewise, 10 percent of people are positive and believe in this, 10 percent are skeptical, and the other 80 percent are looking to see who wins!" (Masaru Emoto)
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies; the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." (John Erlichman)
".....religions do not and cannot progress the way that, say, science can progress. When science progresses, it abandons old and false ideas. Once we discovered oxygen and the principles of combustion, we stopped thinking that there was a substance called phlogiston. Once we discovered that the earth is round, we stopped thinking that it is flat. Science and reason are SUBSTITUTIVE and ELIMINATIVE: new ideas replace old ideas. Religion is ADDITIVE and/or SCHISMATIC: new ideas proliferate alongside old ideas. For instance, the development of Protestantism did not put an end to Catholicism, and the development of Christianity did not put an end to Judaism. With science, we get BETTER. With religion, we get MORE." (David Eller)
"If it were real, evolution would be the leading cause of death in the world." (Internet commenter: Erix19)
"In pushing other species to extinction humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches." (Paul Ehrlich)
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." (Susan Ertz)
"Had there been a lunatic asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum." (Havelock Ellis)
"My students sometimes ask: what is a fundamentalist? I give them a very simple definition. A fundamentalist is no fun, too much damn, and not enough mental." (Bart Ehrman)
"What a man axiomatizes in the privacy of his own home is between him and his god." (internet commenter: enlambdment)
"What we are afraid of is seeing our daughters trash their sexual economic value." (Geoff Edevane)
Collected Quotes F - J
"Either the laws of nature will break down unpredictably or they won’t. If they do, there’s nothing we can do about it. If they don’t, it would be stupid not to use predictions to improve our lives."
(Sabine Hossenfelder)
Collected Quotes P - T
"I would be quite proud to have served on the committee that designed the E. coli genome. There is, however, no way that I would admit to serving on a committee that designed the human genome. Not even a university committee could botch something that badly."
(David Penny)
Collected Quotes K - O
"A psychopath may make many morally horrendous choices, but they will not include choosing the brain of a psychopath."
(Raoul Martinez)
Collected Quotes U - Z
"Ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance."
(Eliezer Yudkowsky)
