Collected Quotes F - J
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.
F
•Evan Fales (American Philosopher)•
"Some apologists tell us that God remains hidden from us so as not to coerce our worship. But God is not hiding out of solicitude for our freedom. We have not forgotten Job: therefore we understand that God is hiding out of cowardice. God is in hiding because He has too much to hide. We do not seek burning bushes or a pillar of smoke. No: we wish to see God. Can God stand before us; can God see the face of suffering humanity - and live? J'accuse." (Evan Fales)
"If God is freely responsible for the laws of logic, he could have made them other than they are. So he could have made the law of noncontradiction false. So he could have made it to be true both that God exists and that he does not, and that the laws of logic depend upon him and that they do not. But that entails that it is possible for God not to have existed and for the laws of logic not to have depended upon him. But if the laws of logic depend upon God, then necessarily they do so. So they don’t depend upon God. So presuppositionalism is self-defeating." (Evan Fales)
"If God can see fit to allow small children to die of terrible diseases for some greater good we cannot imagine, might He not have given us radically different cognitive systems, and allowed us to be lulled into thinking them largely reliable, also for some unimaginable reason?" (Evan Fales)
•John Fante (1909 - 1983; American Novelist & Screenwriter)•
"Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?" (John Fante)
"I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed." (John Fante)
•Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988; American Physicist)•
"I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion.......the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith." (Richard Feynman)
"But I don't have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things. By being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell." (Richard Feynman)
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." (Richard Feynman)
•John Fugelsang (1969 - ; American Comedian & Actor)•
"Only in America can you be pro-death penalty, pro-war, pro-unmanned drone bombs, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-guns, pro-torture, pro-land mines, and still call yourself 'pro-life'." (John Fugelsang)
"Gay rights isn't special rights, it's equal rights. Special rights are for political churches who don't pay taxes." (John Fugelsang)
•Other F•
"It’s very dear to me the issue of gay marriage or, as I like to call it: ‘marriage’. You know, because I had lunch this afternoon, not gay lunch. I parked my car; I didn’t gay park it." (Liz Feldman)
"The shift from pictographic use to writing sounds was the only real giant leap man has ever made apart from the development of the electric guitar." (Irving Finkel)
"I have long concluded that established religions of any kind are in general the supreme example of forms created to meet no longer existing conditions." (John Fowles)
"If you are not wearing a mask because you are afraid your brain won't get enough oxygen, I'm sorry to tell you, that ship has sailed." (Chip Franklin)
"I love mistakes in photography. Sometimes they work." (Robert Frank)
"We're giving children free health care, we're giving them free food, free emotional support.......that's dangerous. That's communism when you think about it." (Rebecca Friedrichs)
"Its almost as if the vaccinated can just as easily catch and spread the virus as the unvaccinated. The only thing your experimental therapeutic shots do is help keep you from dying or hospitalization." (Matt Furrer)
"The internet is great for propaganda; for rationality, not always so much. But then I remember, "Hey, free midget porn!" (Internet commenter: fifthdentist)
"The Taliban is going to ban abortion, vaccines, and gay marriage.......maybe we were fighting on the wrong side for 20 years." (Nicholas J. Fuentes)
"If oil goes any lower, Exxon Mobil might have to layoff some members of Congress." (Joseph Fahmy)
"Philosophy is a bit like a computer with a memory leak. It starts well, dealing with significant and serious issues that matter to anyone. Yet, in time, its very success slows it down. Philosophy begins to care more about philosophers’ questions than philosophical ones, consuming increasing amount of intellectual attention. Scholasticism is the ultimate freezing of the system, the equivalent of Windows’ “blue screen of death”; so many resources are devoted to internal issues that no external input can be processed anymore, and the system stops." (Luciano Floridi)
"Our brains live in a dark, quiet, wet place. That is the reality. It is only by means of our senses that we get the illusion of being out there in the world. In a way, our bodies are a form of telepresence, operated by our brains, huddling safe in their little caves of bone." (Hal Finney)
"The Holiness of God is not evidenced in women when they are brash, brassy, boisterous, brazen, head-strong, strong-willed, loud-mouthed, overly-talkative, having to have the last word, challenging, controlling, manipulative, critical, conceited, arrogant, aggressive, assertive, strident, interruptive, undisciplined, insubordinate, disruptive, dominating, domineering, or clamoring for power. Rather, women accept God's holy order and character by being humbly and unobtrusively respectful and receptive in functional subordination to God, church leadership, and husbands." (James Fowler)
"Homosexuals are not interested in making other people homosexuals. Homophobes are interested in making other people homophobes." (Stephen Fry)
"Maybe a good rape might make her a little more manageable around the house." (Internet commenter: Feynman and Coulter's Love Child)
"There is no such thing as homophobia. It is not a fear. It is you being an asshole." (Morgan Freeman)
"There's only one thing that leftists hate as much as America, and that's the millions of fact-based, faith-based conservatives who are the human embodiment of everything that makes America and the entire Western world far superior to every other country and culture that has ever existed." (Jeffrey Ford)
"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books." (Sigmund Freud)
"I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of discernment." (Anatole France)
"You say what's going to happen on this earth when the Rapture occurs? You'll be riding along in an automobile; you'll be the driver, perhaps; you're a Christian; there'll be several people in the automobile with you, maybe someone who is not a Christian. When the trumpet sounds, you and the other born-again Christians in that automobile will be instantly caught away, you'll disappear, leaving behind your clothing and physical things that cannot inherit eternal life. That unsaved person or persons in the automobile will suddenly be startled to find that the car is moving along without a driver, and suddenly somewhere crashes. Those saved people in the car have disappeared." (Jerry Falwell)
"Somehow I can't help but question a worldview in which radiometric dating is met with the greatest skepticism, but sex with your blood relatives is OK in the proper context." (Tyler Francke)
"Man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognise that it is he who is asked." (Victor Frankl)
"What if at school you had to take an 'art class' in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso? Would that make you appreciate art? Would you want to learn more about it? I doubt it..........but this is how math is taught and so in the eyes of most of us it becomes the equivalent of watching paint dry. While the paintings of the great masters are readily available, the math of the great masters is locked away." (Edward Frenkel)
"I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary's laundry, and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It's a generous medium, photography." (Lee Friedlander)
"Philosophy debates God, maths ignores him, climatology doesn’t need him, physics can’t find him, biology contradicts him, logic kills him." (Bill Flavell)
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting the rest.........We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors." (R Buckminster Fuller)
"Grown-up nations do not need, as head of state, a woman - however nice - who lives across a large ocean in a castle in a foreign country." (Allan Fotheringham)
"In a Biblical worldview, we do not expect to find feathered dinosaurs." (Avery Foley)
G
•John Gabriel (Irish Mathematician)•
"The New Calculus is the greatest feat of human accomplishment. It is the first and only rigorous formulation of calculus in human history. Not worth one, but ten Abel prizes, given that no one before me was able to realise it." (John Gabriel)
"A useless arithmetic mean is one where it makes no sense to redistribute the values. Example: The arithmetic mean of student grades in a given class is a senseless calculation because students cannot share their marks." (John Gabriel)
"Asshole: I don't hate anyone because of what ethnic group they belong to. I hate conceited fucking assholes like you!!! You have lied and misrepresented anything and everything you could. You better be worried asshole because I promise you if there is anything I can do to get you for this slander and libel, I am going to make you eat shit! You pathetic Jewish cunt!!!" (John Gabriel)
"Mathematics was around long before the axioms and some goddam stupid Jews came along and obfuscated matters." (John Gabriel)
"The Greeks invented the integers. All else is the work of fools." (John Gabriel)
"The real numbers are not well defined." (John Gabriel)
•Ricky Gervais (1961 - ; English Actor, Writer & Director)•
"You could easily spot any religion of peace. Its extremist members would be extremely peaceful." (Ricky Gervais)
"If a religious text that calls for the death of atheists and blasphemers isn’t hate speech, then neither is condemning it and calling it evil." (Ricky Gervais)
"Same-sex marriage is not gay privilege, it’s equal rights. Privilege would be something like gay people not paying taxes. Like churches don’t." (Ricky Gervais)
"Dear Religion, This week I safely dropped a man from space while you shot a child in the head for wanting to go to school. Your’s Science." (Ricky Gervais)
•Ben Goertzel (1967 - ; American Computer Scientist)•
"The popular media can only handle ideas expressible in proto-language, not ideas requiring nested phrase-structure syntax for their exposition." (Ben Goertzel)
"Our language for describing emotions is very crude.....that's what music is for, I guess." (Ben Goertzel)
•John Gray (1948 - ; English Philosopher)•
"In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury – or else a disability: only tormented persons want truth." (John Gray)
"It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to the normal madness." (John Gray)
"We are not authors of our lives; we are not even part-authors of the events that mark us most deeply. Nearly everything that is most important in our lives is unchosen." (John Gray)
"The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he as chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonising over alternatives, he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must. Such a human being has the perfect freedom of a wild animal – or a machine." (John Gray)
•A.C. Grayling (1952 - ; English Philosopher)•
"Ask yourself what grounds we have for believing that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden; consider what tests might be supposed to test the hypothesis that such things exist; ask yourself how reasonable it would be to organise your life on the supposition that such fairies exist. The evidential basis of belief in gods and other supernatural forces is no different from this." (A.C. Grayling)
"Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn’t argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we’re doing is, we’re presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain." (A.C. Grayling)
•Julien Green (1900 - 1998; American Author)•
"I enter the world called real as one enters a mist. Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them. I don't want to go on playing in a world where everyone cheats. Where everyone cheats - not only men and women, but sometimes even God." (Julien Green)
"I knew that we counted little in comparison with the universe, I knew that we were nothing; but to be so immeasurably nothing seems in some way both to overwhelm and at the same time to reassure. Those figures, those dimensions beyond the range of human thought, are utterly overpowering. Is there anything whatsoever to which we can cling?" (Julien Green)
".........and at that point the church quietly articulated these words, which tell us something of the secret of old buildings: 'The worse I am threatened, the lovelier I become." (Julien Green)
"A dish which around which I see too many people doesn’t tempt me." (Julien Green)
•Glenn Greenwald (1967 - ; American Lawyer & Author)•
"The First Amendment is actually not that complicated. It can be read from start to finish in about 10 seconds. It bars the government from abridging free speech rights. It doesn't have anything to do with whether you're free to say things without being criticized, or whether you can comment on blogs without being edited, or whether people can bar you from their private planes because they don't like what you've said." (Glenn Greenwald)
"..........nothing strengthens fascists and neo-fascists more than censorship. It turns them into martyrs, draws more attention and appeal to them. Every fascist group I've ever known loved being censored." (Glenn Greenwald)
•Other G•
"The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion." (Arnold H. Glasow)
"He did everything wrong, politically. He offended gays. he offended women. He offended the military. He offended black people. He offended the Hispanic people. He offended everybody! And he became president of the United States. Only God could do that." (Franklin Graham)
"I'm a pre-suppositional mathematician. When I want to prove a new theorem, I just pre-suppose it's true, and I'm done." (Daniel Gautreau)
"If there is no God, why do meteorites always land in the centre of craters?" (Internet commenter: Greg G)
"As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind: Every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bid." (John Glenn)
"If it weren't for electricity, we'd all be watching television by candlelight." (George Gobel)
"Thinking is now viewed as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture, as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. .....I am not talking about the kind of anti-intellectualism that has a long history in the United States. I am pointing to a more lethal form of ignorance fueled by a manufactured type of illiteracy that is often ignored. What I am referring to is a mode of illiteracy that is both a scourge and a political tool power designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking, and the capacity for critical thought." (Henry A Giroux)
"As a Christian myself, there is a lot I dislike about Christianity. Christians being at the top of my list.....I am reminded of Christian men who exaggerate talking in tongues to the extent that they sound like beat-boxing chickens." (Carl Griffin)
"That than which nothing greater can be conceived is most likely an empty set. Draw conclusions accordingly." (Joel Grus)
"Before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attacks inside the United States." (Rudy Giuliani)
"Remember when Dan Quayle misspelled “potato”, and everyone was like "that’s a good enough reason for him not to be president?" We should be like that again." (Ben Grimes)
“I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.” (Billy Graham)
"A subsistence farmer living on less than 2 dollars per day doesn’t need a western intellectual consigning him to a separate “epistemology of the South” and advocating “deep and profound civilisational changes”. He needs electricity so his children can do homework under a bulb." (Internet commenter: goldmund52)
"Claiming that a rejection of faith-based epistemology is still somehow a faith-based epistemology is as illogical as stating a rejection of gullibility is still somehow in of itself gullibility. Rejecting gullibility does not make it “A” gullibility in nothing, it’s just a rejection of gullibility." (Blogger: Godless Wolf)
"The validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence." (Kenneth Gergen)
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." (John Kenneth Galbraith)
"In order for life to be sustained, living things must have other living things to ingest. What an odd thing for a mere cosmic coincidence to develop." (Carl Gallup)
"Mark my word.....If and when these preachers get control of the Republican Party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them." (Barry Goldwater)
"Here is a big tip make almost any woman stick to you like glue. That is, if this is what you want. The secret is to engage in REAL LIVE sexual intercourse. You read that correctly. It is penis in the vagina without condoms, without any so called “protection”, and inseminating her repeatedly. You see love is also hormonal and chemical. Your semen has hormones and chemicals that will make a woman love you. Inseminate them regularly and they will stick to you like glue." (Internet commenter: goodsamaritan55)
"So let me get this straight, the unending, all-powerful force of creation that hand-made the universe funneled himself into the body of a human fetus and then teleported the fetus into the uterus of a married virgin. He then spent 30 years on earth walking around doing basically nothing and then one day rearranged reality to set in motion events that would lead to his own death.....effectively committing suicide. He does this because his death will, for some or other reason, clear humanity's sin tally (which he, himself is keeping up in heaven). And then after his plans to get himself killed fall into place, he looks around and asks himself why he has abandoned himself? Is that the basic gist of it?" (Hank Guerin)
"Lets be brutally frank about Einstein's theory. he imagined that the vacuum of space time is bent by the sun and the earth follows the local bent rails in the vacuum. No one has ever detected a shred of visible evidence for space time nor has anyone isolated or directly detected any gravity. Both Einstein and newton believed that static matter does enormous amounts of work bending the path of the Earth without changing anything about itself. This is nothing but a mathematical version of perpetual motion." (Internet commenter: godsriddle)
"However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature." (Graham Greene)
"When I'm asked when there will be enough women on the Supreme Court? And I say 'When there are nine.' People are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that." (Ruth Bader Ginsburg)
"Believe those who seek the truth. Doubt those who find it." (André Gide)
"Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten." (Paul Graham)
"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, surrounding yourself with assholes." (William Gibson)
"To me the most wondrous thing about science and physics in particular is the fact that through the power of thought and calculation and observation you can be led to conclusions vastly at odds with what you would think based on experience. I don't think there is anything more wondrous than that moment when you think the world is one way, and your equations, your math, your ideas, your theory begins to convince you it is another way." (Brian Greene)
"The sleep of reason produces monsters." (Francisco de Goya)
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." (Stephen J Gould)
"The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good." (Robert Graves)
"And Jesus did sayeth unto his followers, "whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me. Well, unless it's inconvenient for you, or lowers your standard of living, then you can just carry on. You know, volunteer at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving or something. Whatever helps you sleep at night."" (Mark Germano)
"If you have a society that grants religious privilege and exemption and you’re willing to give privilege and exemption to certain groups, then it’s unacceptable to give that only to people who believe in the supernatural." (Lucien Greaves)
"Can God make a rock so heavy that hitting His head with it would explain the change in personality He underwent between the Old Testament and the New Testament?" (Internet commenter: GubbaBumpkin)
"Modern Islamism is just a reaction to the fact that Israel has always been the tip of the US dick in the Middle East. How exactly do you politely explain that this is not my dick?" (Tige Gibson)
"If u have sex before marriage then in Gods eyes u are married to that person if a man rapes a woman in Gods eyes they are married it sucks for the girl but what can we do." (Internet commenter: God's soldier)
H
•Ken Ham (Australian Creationist)•
"When we hear the term light-year, we need to realize it is not a measure of time but a measure of distance, telling us how far away something is. Distant stars and galaxies might be millions of light-years away, but that doesn’t mean that it took millions of years for the light to get here, it just means it is really far away!" (Ken Ham)
"The Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation." (Ken Ham)
"How do we know the Bible is true? Well, ultimately, we know it must be true because it claims to be the Word of God and God cannot lie." (Ken Ham)
•Jack Handey (1949 - ; American Author)•
"If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’ And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.’" (Jack Handey)
"I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it." (Jack Handey)
•Yuval Noah Harari (1976 - ; Israeli Historian)•
"We'd rather talk about things we understand that aren't important, than discuss things that are important, because we don't understand it." (Yuval Noah Harari)
"The easiest people to manipulate are the people who believe in Free Will, because they think they can't be manipulated." (Yuval Noah Harari)
•Sam Harris (1967 - ; American Author)•
"There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable." (Sam Harris)
"We can name plenty of religious hypotheses about the nature of the world that science disproved over time. Can we name the opposite?" (Sam Harris)
"Before you can get to the end of this paragraph, another person will probably die because of what someone else believes about God." (Sam Harris)
"In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astologer” or a “non-alchemist.” We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle." (Sam Harris)
"Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science." (Sam Harris)
"George Bush says he speaks to god every day, and Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd." (Sam Harris)
"If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves someone should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you invoke to show that they should value logic?" (Sam Harris)
"It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil. Wherever conviction grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the very basis of human cooperation." (Sam Harris)
"It is possible to be well educated, so well educated that you can be a neurosurgeon and still believe that you can get 72 virgins in paradise." (Sam Harris)
"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything - anything - be more ridiculous. And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." (Sam Harris)
•Jim Harrison (1937 - ; American Author)•
"I've got a copy of an old French prayer around here someplace that asks the Virgin Mary's aid in healing a farmer's ailing mules. That's what real religion is like on the hoof." (Jim Harrison)
"Liberals tolerate inequality if it leads to growth......conservatives tolerate economic stagnation if it maintains inequality." (Jim Harrison)
"If we're going to execute people, we ought to at least insist that the jury form the firing squad and the judge load the rifles. The prosecutor can mop up the blood afterwards." (Jim Harrison)
"The Nazis lost: America's slavers merely suffered a setback. Which is why their descendants exercise huge political power to this day." (Jim Harrison)
•Stephen Hawking (1942 - 2018; English Physicist)•
"Not only does God play dice but.......he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen." (Stephen Hawking)
"Whenever I hear Schrodinger's cat, I reach for my pistol." (Stephen Hawking)
"The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighbourhood not seeing any poverty." (Stephen Hawking)
"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." (Stephen Hawking)
"You can't afford to be disabled in spirit as well as physically. People won't have time for you." (Stephen Hawking)
"Quiet people have the loudest minds." (Stephen Hawking)
•N. Katherine Hayles (American Literary Critic)•
"Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders." (N. Katherine Hayles)
"Almost without exception, [physical] conservation laws were formulated, developed and experimentally tested by men. If conservation laws represent particular emphases and not inevitable facts, then people living in different kinds of bodies and identifying with different gender constructions might well have arrived at different models for [fluid] flow." (N. Katherine Hayles)
• Sadegh Hedayat (1903 - 1951; Iranian Novelist)•
"I passed through many streets without any predetermined destination and, distraughtly walked by the rabble who, with greedy faces, were in pursuit of money and lust. In fact, I did not need to see them to know them; one was enough to represent the rest. They were all like one big mouth leading to a wad of guts, terminating in a sexual organ." (Sadegh Hedayat)
"What relationship could exist between the lives of the fools and healthy rabble who were well, who slept well, who performed the sexual act well, who had never felt the wings of death on their face every moment—what relationship could exist between them and one like me who has arrived at the end of his rope and who knows that he will pass away gradually and tragically?" (Sadegh Hedayat)
•Heinrich Heine (1797 - 1856; German Author & Poet)•
"In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides." (Heinrich Heine)
"Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all." (Heinrich Heine)
•Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988; American Author)•
"Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything. Just give him enough time to rationalize it" (Robert A. Heinlein)
"It is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that [he] is on the moral of any other con man." (Robert A. Heinlein)
"The profession of shaman has many advantages. It offers high status with a safe livelihood free of work in the dreary, sweaty sense. In most societies it offers legal privileges and immunities not granted to other men. But it is hard to see how a man who has been given a mandate from on High to spread tidings of joy to all mankind can be seriously interested in taking up a collection to pay his salary; it causes one to suspect that the shaman is on the moral level of any other con man. (Robert A. Heinlein)
"I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith - it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a Universe." (Robert A. Heinlein)
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks please. Cash and in small bills." (Robert A. Heinlein)
• Coel Hellier (English Astrophysicist)•
"..........theologians are generally sufficiently wily not to hold any beliefs about observational statements that are vulnerable to being disconfirmed. All the action tends to take place in non-observable places such as heaven and hell, precisely to get round this problem." (Coel Hellier)
"Anyone saying that they believe in free speech "except when it crosses the line to being offensive" does not believe in free speech. Indeed, it is only speech that someone objects to that needs protection." (Coel Hellier)
•David Hilbert (1862 - 1943; German Mathematician)•
"Taking the principle of the excluded middle from the mathematician would be the same, say, as proscribing the telescope to the astronomer or to the boxer the use of his fists. To prohibit existence statements and the principle of excluded middle is tantamount to relinquishing the science of mathematics altogether." (David Hilbert)
"Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom. That may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself." (David Hilbert)
•Christopher Hitchens (1949 - 2011; British - American Author)•
"It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so." (Christopher Hitchens)
"To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker? To whom would you delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read?" (Christopher Hitchens)
"I have been called arrogant in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit." (Christopher Hitchens)
"Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt." (Christopher Hitchens)
"My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, anyplace, anytime. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my arse." (Christopher Hitchens)
"When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time." (Christopher Hitchens)
"A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humour, parenthood, literature and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called meaningless." (Christopher Hitchens)
"Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations." (Christopher Hitchins)
"Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out arguments and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence." (Christopher Hitchens)
"I am more inclined to doubt something if its truth would suit me." (Christopher Hitchens)
"What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." (Christopher Hitchens)
"Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion." (Christopher Hitchens)
"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it." (Christopher Hitchens)
"Nothing optional from homosexuality to adultery is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate." (Christopher Hitchens)
"Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal; the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need." (Christopher Hitchens)
"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse." (Christopher Hitchens)
"The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks." (Christopher Hitchens)
"The religion which treats its flock as a credulous plaything offers one of the cruelest spectacles that can be imagined; a human being in fear and doubt who is openly exploited to believe in the impossible." (Christopher Hitchens)
"Here is my challenge. Name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first - I have been asking it for some time - awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain." (Christopher Hitchens)
"How much vanity must be concealed - not to effectively at that - in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?" (Christopher Hitchins)
"Let’s say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates Homo sapiens have been on this planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I’ll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98.000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2,000 years ago, thinks "That's enough of that. It’s time to intervene,” and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don’t let’s appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilisation. Let’s go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can’t be believed by a thinking person." (Christopher Hitchens)
"The man who prays is the one who thinks that God has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct God how to put them right." (Christopher Hitchens)
•Douglas Hofstadter (1945 - ; American Cognitive Scientist)•
"Irrationality is the square root of all evil." (Douglas Hofstadter)
"What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?" (Douglas Hofstadter)
"This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance." (Douglas Hofstadter)
"It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done." (Douglas Hofstadter)
"We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination." (Douglas Hofstadter)
"In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect." (Douglas Hostadter)
"You can never represent yourself totally.......to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which.......will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described." (Douglas Hostadter)
"Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku." (Douglas Hofstadter)
"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths." (Douglas Hostadter)
"How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation." (Douglas Hofstadter)
"The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true. If the meanings of "true" and "false" were switched, then this sentence wouldn't be false." (Douglas Hofstadter)
•Sabine Hossenfelder (1976 - ; German Theoretical Physicist)•
"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)
"I wrote a research proposal about inflation (in the early universe, not in your supermarket) and it bounced back because I didn't explain its relevance to "sex, gender and diversity". I need to add a paragraph on this. Anyone has an idea what to write?" (Sabine Hossenfelder)
"Look, go and write down the standard model of particle physics and then try to figure out what you want to change about it in order to give consciousness to particles. I am telling you there is nothing you can change about it without ruining the model's power to explain data. I understand that this is inconvenient for you, but I think you should face this problem." (Sabine Hossenfelder)
"If you don’t give a shit that today’s teenagers will struggle their whole life cleaning up the mess that your generation left behind fine, that’s a totally valid opinion. But please just say it out loud, so we can all hear it. Don’t cover it up by telling us a story about how you weren’t able to reproduce a figure in the IPCC report even though you tried really hard for almost ten seconds, because no one gives a shit whether you have your own "theory."" (Sabine Hossenfelder)
"Post-empirical science is an oxymoron." (Sabine Hossenfelder)
"All evidence you have is sensory input. If you hear an explanation of someone else’s experiment, if you read a paper laying out someone else’s argument, that’s your own sensory input. A distinction which does exist, however, is that some of our sensory input requires very little decoding, while some requires a lot. Flat earthers’ problem is that they refuse to decode difficult sensory input." (Sabine Hossenfelder)
"Religious explanation is an oxymoron. Religion is what people draw upon if they don't want to admit they have no explanation." (Sabine Hossenfelder)
"Everyone knows there's no reason that a scientific explanation must appeal to the human sense of beauty. Right? Doesn't everyone know this? Science is about explaining observations, regardless of whether we like these explanations..........Arguments from beauty are additional assumptions, and they are unnecessary to make a theory work." (Sabine Hossenfelder)
•Kent Hovind (1953 - ; American Creationist)•
"I notice you're calling him ‘Dr’ and me ‘Mr,’ so I'm just making a level playing field here; I have a doctorate's degree also, although it's not from an accredited university, but I don't think that matters."
"The God of the Bible being the creator of the universe must be true, not because it has been proven in the laboratory, but because otherwise it would be necessary to believe that there are other Gods." (Kent Hovind)
"If evolution is true, you could not know that it’s true because your brain is nothing but chemicals. Think about that." (Kent Hovind)
"They [the New World Order] want to reduce the population [to 500 million] and their target date is May 5th of 2000…….The demons who call themselves spirit guides have told them. "You know, you have to reduce the population by May 5th." Because May 5th is Karl Marx's birthday, you know, enter the Age of Aquarius…….I suspect they may use Y2K as an excuse to create some little problems here, we shall have to wait and see." (Kent Hovind)
"No, monkeys are still having babies, why don't they have another human today?" (Kent Hovind)
"The Earth is billions of years old. The geologic column is the way to interpret it, and Charles Darwin's evolution is right. That is what they teach in order to be a good communist." (Kent Hovind)
•Rodney Howard-Browne (1961 - ; South African - American Preacher)•
"At the highest level, the people that rule the planet worship Lucifer. These people perform human sacrifices and drink blood. I don't care what you believe. We've got all the documentation on it." (Rodney Howard-Browne)
"They sacrifice children at the highest levels in Hollywood. They drink the blood of young kids. This is a fact. The human sacrifice and the cannibalism has been going on for years." (Rodney Howard-Browne)
•Nicholas Humphrey (1943 - ; English Psychologist)•
"........it originates with what is, arguably, one of the most remarkable confidence tricks our culture has played on us. This has been to persuade people that there is a deep connection between believing in the possibility of psychic forces and being a gracious, honest, upright, trustworthy member of society." (Nicholas Humphrey)
"In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not." (Nicholas Humphrey)
•Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963; English Author)•
"Rational and kindly behaviour tends to produce good results and these results remain good even when the behaviour which produced them was itself produced by a pill." (Aldous Huxley)
"A love of nature keeps no factories busy." (Aldous Huxley)
"The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes." (Aldous Huxley)
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." (Aldous Huxley)
"Whether, the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and satisfying its lust for power … the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience … all conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable destiny." (Aldous Huxley)
"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion..... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough." (Aldous Huxley)
•Other H•
"Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them." (Hypatia of Alexandria)
"The considerable threat to population policy and public health posed by the still relatively high number of abortions today, which represent a serious violation of the ideological principles of National Socialism, as well as the homosexual control of a not insignificant section of the population, in which one of the greatest dangers for Youth lies, requires more than before an effective fight against these popular diseases." (Heinrich Himmler)
"The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." (T.H. Huxley)
"The fearful can be the most dangerous when they gain power. They become demoniac when they see the unpredictable workings of all that life around them. Seeing the strengths as well as the weaknesses, they fasten only on the weaknesses." (Frank Herbert)
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent – their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy – they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent – he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief." (Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord)
"No one who has been asked by an intelligent American university student whether the phrase Second World War means that there had been a First World War is unaware that knowledge of even the basic facts of the century cannot be taken for granted." (Eric Hobsbawm)
"What if I told you that nearly every influenza pandemic of the last one thousand years would have been prevented if we had only taken the Bible seriously?" (Jake Hebert)
"If you are not an eyewitness, you are a false witness (Exodus 20:16). If you didn’t see it, you shouldn’t be gossiping about it." (John Hagee)
"The purpose of the heliocentric model is to hide the existence of God." (Edward Hendrie)
"People these days don't know how good they have it. Back in my day you had to spend weeks reading Erich von Däniken, Charles Berlitz, or Hal Lindsay, to become a living embodiment of the phrase "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Now you can just check Facebook and Wikipedia." (James Huber)
"Oh Lord, I want to thank you that I was born in the west and not some other God-forsaken place, and that I was able to become a Christian by default. I’m thankful that I don’t have to think hard about what I believe. I can accept without a second thought everything that’s fed to me, and that I can support the status quo with a clear conscience without interrupting my comfortable way of life. You’ve made me what I am today without any effort on my part. I haven’t had to think, question, or change a thing, and for that I am truly grateful." (David Hayward)
"I am a skeptic. I am not pretending to know the solution to the problem of infinite causal regress. I don’t know how something arose out of nothing or how something prior to this was necessarily existent. But neither does anybody else, and so if anyone comes to me claiming to be privy to such secrets — secrets far beyond human comprehension — I shall label him a charlatan, a liar and a traitor of intellectual honesty. And I will not take his offer to sacrifice my own critical faculties on the altar of religion or ideology." (George Hargrave)
"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." (P C Hodgell)
"If no thought your mind does visit, make your speech not too explicit." (Piet Hein)
"All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d'être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science's disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can." (John Horgan)
"Tell me this since you believe we evolved from a rock. If someone were to smash a stone with a sledgehammer, would you consider that murder?" (Internet commenter: Heavens Janitor)
“Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory may be like, He is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not a loving God who cares about his productions. He is not even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job. The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.” (David Hull)
"Address the rational with reason, and the irrational with ridicule." (Madison S Hughes)
"Separation of church and state is necessary because there is no separation of religion and ignorance." (Richard Halasz)
"There are only two ways we know of to make extremely complicated things, one is by engineering, and the other is evolution. And of the two, evolution will make the more complex." (Danny Hillis)
“Find out what people believe to be sacred, and when you look around there you will find rampant irrationality.” (Jonathan Haidt)
"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction." (Adolf Hitler)
"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: one is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing and you should save it for someone you love." (Butch Hancock)
"If you view crossing the finish line as the measure of your life, you're heading for personal disaster." (Chris Hadfield)
"One thing I learned from engaging with Christian apologists is that they can easily defend the proposition that God exists, as long as the definition of 'God' is sufficiently nebulous and the definition of 'exists' is sufficiently metaphysical. Wrestling with that claim on those terms is like wrestling a jellyfish. Another thing I learned is that it's not necessary to wrestle a jellyfish." (Adam Hazzard)
"Arguing that God exists because all people are moral is like arguing that Cupid exists because all people fall in love." (Tommy Holland)
"The only way that sexuality is not disordered is in marriage between a man and a woman whose sexual act is open to the possibility of making a baby. ANY OTHER sexual activity is gravely disordered (puts the person into mortal sin). That means that any other sexual activity of any kind, by definition, is gravely disordered and the person or persons involved, hetero or gay, male or female, elderly or newly pubesecent are guilty." (Tom Hanson)
"Physics does not require a mind, and things do not need to be told to be what they are. A mind is only needed to label and conceptualise observation. If a tree falls in a forest and there are no minds to think about it, it is still a fallen tree." (David Eriol Hickman)
"Unthinking faith is a curious offering to be made to the creator of the human mind." (John A Hutchinson)
"Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous." (David Hume)
"In theology it is a mistake to be born before Darwin." (J Rendel Harris)
"Naïveté in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity, it is indistinguishable from stupidity." (Eric Hoffer)
"The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence." (William Harwood)
"Eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love." (Bill Hicks)
"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours." (Hermann Hesse)
"Like most people, I like to think that if I had been transported back to 1920’s Germany as a baby and placed with an average family that I would have grown up opposing the Nazi regime. Sadly though it seems likely I would have grown up a Nazi." (Robin Herbert)
I
•Robert Ingersoll (1833 - 1899; American Lawyer, Politician & Author)•
"You have no right to erect your tollgate upon the highways of thought." (Robert Ingersoll)
"If I owe Smith ten dollars and God forgives me, that doesn't pay Smith." (Robert Ingersoll)
"Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself." (Robert Ingersoll)
"If the Bible be true, the supreme and infinite God was once a savage." (Robert Ingersoll)
"Can you imagine anything more absurd than an infinite intelligence in infinite nothing wasting an eternity?" (Robert Ingersoll)
"No man with a sense of humor ever founded a religion." (Robert Ingersoll)
•Other I•
"We eat well, we drink well, we live well. But we do not have good dreams." (Michael Ignatieff)
"I've been informed by several angry Twitter people that if I support folks tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus, I should also support the teardown of statues of the Muslim prophet Mohammed. As a Muslim, I say go right ahead & tear down every single statue of Mohammed." (Rami Ismail)
"When we landed on the moon, that was the point where god should have come up and said 'hello'. Because if you invent some creatures, put them on the blue one and they make it to the grey one, you fucking turn up and say 'well done'." (Eddie Izzard)
"I believe in the separation of church and planet." (Eric Idle)
"All of science is completely wrong and all of religion is completely correct." (Internet commenter: idpnsd)
"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is." (Ivan Illich)
"I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution to someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag." (Molly Ivins)
"The only thing I don't like about them is they sell foreign language versions of the KJB. I don't think that's right. We know the only true translation is the 1600's version in English. It's too risky for anybody to translate that into other languages. Mistakes can creep in..........and that can lead to heresy. True Christians should only read English." (Internet commenter: Ieyenda)
J
•James (Internet Commenter)•
"I have a question for you filthy Athiest trash: if we evolved from apes like Charles Darwin said, then that would mean that people and monkeys are the same species, right? Well, if people and monkeys are the same species, then why can't a human impregnate a monkey, or vice-versa?" (Internet commenter: James)
"If evolution was real humans, and animals alike would not need reproductive organs." (Internet commenter: James)
•Alex Jones (1974 - ; American Conspiracy Theorist)•
"Let me tell you, the big real secret is the real KKK at the mid-level is a bunch of racist black people who hate black people." (Alex Jones)
"I grew up in Dallas, Texas, drinking sodium fluoridated water. All the scientific studies show my IQ has been reduced by at least 20 points." (Alex Jones)
"I'm like a chimpanzee, in a tree, jumping up and down, warning other chimpanzees when I see a big cat coming through the woods.........I'm the weirdo?" (Alex Jones)
"The reason there are so many gay people now is because it's a chemical warfare operation. I have the government documents where they said they're going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so people don't have children." (Alex Jones)
"Magellan is a lot COOLER than Justin Bieber. He circumnavigated with one ship the entire planet! He was killed by wild natives before they got back to Portugal. And when they got back there was only like eleven people alive of the two hundred and something crew and the entire ship was rotting down to the waterline! That's destiny! That's will! That's striving!" (Alex Jones)
"What do you think tap water is? It's a gay bomb...........And I'm not saying people didn't naturally have homosexual feelings.........Do you think I'm like, shocked by it, so I'm up here bashing it because I don't like gay people? I don't like 'em putting chemicals in the water that TURN THE FREAKIN' FROGS GAY! Do you understand that. I'm sick of being socially engineered, it's not funny!" (Alex Jones)
"There are aliens in this room right now." (Alex Jones)
"The army came to my door. They told me not to talk to you anymore." (Alex Jones)
"Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can't hold back the truth anymore." (Alex Jones)
• JustFineThanks (Internet Commenter)•
"Revelation is straightforward and easy to understand. In fact, just ask the full Preterists, the partial preterists, the Futurists, the historicists, the Post-tribunal premillennialists, the dispentional premillennialists, the revival postmillennialists, the reconstructionist postmillennialists, and the amillennialists. They’ll tell you the simple, straightforward, and easy to understand message of revelation: something about the future, or possibly the past, or whatever." (Internet commenter: JustFineThanks)
"It was a smart move on God’s part to make all the parts of the Bible that could render Christianity incoherent and/or demonstrably false mere “metaphor”……………Otherwise, Christianity might appear to objective observers like a jumbled mass of absurdities kept aloft by a tangled network of ad hoc rationalizations." (internet commenter: JustFineThanks)
•Other J•
"Death is very likely the single best invention of life" (Steve Jobs)
"My friend told me that he is God and that he made the world by accident when he sneezed. So I asked him what happened before he was born, and he didn't have an answer. But just because he didn't have an answer doesn't mean he's not telling the truth." (Jonathan Juel-Beer)
"As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly." (Samuel Johnson)
"Alright, so If we apply the properties of Evolution vs. No Evolution there is a 1:1 or 50% chance that they are actually correct. So, of the theory of evolution is correct we should expect that 1 out of every 2 monkeys should give birth to a human. Now if we assume that we have 12000 Monkeys in captivity, and half of which are female, you have 6000 pairs of monkeys that can produce offspring. If each female gives birth 3 times, you now have 18000 Monkeys over the span of roughly 10 years. However, none of the offspring are human. They are all monkeys. So what we expected to be about 9000 human births from zoo monkeys, according to evolution, ended up just being 18000 more monkeys, predicted from common sense. I now challenge anyone here to show me a legitimate, non-biased scientific article of a zoo monkey giving birth to *one* single human being, let alone the 9000 that we expected. Therefore, we have solid, mathematical proof that Darwin did not exist." (Jim the Mexican)
"So many debates in philosophy revolve around the issue of objectivity versus subjectivity that one may be forgiven for assuming that someone somewhere understands this distinction." (Richard Joyce)
"If there were that great a commonality between chimps and humans it ought to be relatively easy to breed chimps and come up with a human being, or by genetic engineering to change a chimp into a human. We ought to see humans occasionally being born to chimps or perhaps chimps being born into human families." (Phillip Johnson)
You have to ask, after life came from nothingness from the matter that came from nothing how it survived a huge explosion making the universe." (Internet commenter: JustThinkAboutIt)
"The facts are simple. The earth is flat. Wherever you find people with a great reservoir of common sense……….they don't believe idiotic things such as the earth spinning around the sun. Reasonable, intelligent people have always recognized that the earth is flat." (Charles K Johnson)
"Hey, picture the baby in a nappy, just able to get on his feet and he fiddles with the buttons on your dvd player. You shout at him that he must not do it. He turns his head towards you, smiles but carries on doing what his not supposed to do. Sound familiar? where did he learn that......The seed of sin is already in him!!!! (Internet commenter: JCSM)
"I was at an arts fair last weekend. I would estimate 43% of the attendees were homosexual. But it's not like I'm counting. CCW, a Murnak FIST holster and Glock 19 means you never have to worry about it. So this artsy guy with a straw hat and sandals, you know the type, is slowly walking along the booths, pretending to eye the merchandise. Of course, I know what he's really eying. So I position my self among several tents, to maximize my public visibility, and when "he" comes along I engage him, "What exactly are you doing here?" "I was hoping to find some pictures for my daughter's new apartment", he says. "Well, just keep hoping" I say, letting the bulge under my vest show prominently. He got the picture. I checked with law enforcement later and they had no complaints of homosexual harassment at the fair that day." (Internet commenter: jaytkay)
"You call it circular reasoning, we Christians call it faith." (Internet commenter: James2ko)
"Welcome to the Freedom Cafe! We trust you to make your own choices if you want to wear a face mask. And, in the same spirit of individual liberty, we allow our own staff to make their own choices about the safety procedures they prefer to follow as they prepare and serve your food. We encourage employees to wash their hands after using the bathroom, but understand that some people may be allergic to certain soaps or may simply prefer not to wash their hands. It is not our place to tell them what to do. We understand that you may be used to chicken that has been cooked to 165 degrees. We do have to respect that some of our cooks may have seen a meme or a YouTube video saying that 100 degrees is fine and we do not want to encroach on their beliefs.......Some of you may get sick, but almost everyone survives food poisoning. We think you'll agree that it's a small price to pay for the sweet freedom of no one ever being told what to do - especially for the silly reason of keeping strangers healthy." (Libby Jones; sometimes wrongly attributed to Kathony Jerauld)
"What Orwell failed to predict was that we'd buy the cameras ourselves and that our biggest fear would be that no-one was watching." (Keith Lowell Jensen)
"The White Adamic children of today DON'T stand a chance. When they are born, vaccines containing doses of xx (females) are given to little boys, while little girls are given doses of xy (males). This HELPS these young children right from the start THINK they should be the opposite gender that they are actually born." (Internet commenter: JerseyPine)
"Anytime you have an entire population defined by homogeneity, you're almost asking for a virulent virus to wipe it out...........I wrote satire/fake news (take your pick; unless you're the Onion, they basically mean the same thing) for a while in the lead up to the 2016 election. The one thing that struck me was that fake news intended for left-wingers never went anywhere. We'd always have left-wingers calling us out and debunking it. But when we wrote it for the right wing? The people debunking it in the comments were left-wingers still. So long as it matched the beliefs of the audience, our right-wing consumers would eat up anything we gave them." (Internet commenter: (((J_Enigma32))))
"We dualists don’t really need an argument to say that consciousness doesn’t fit into the physicalist world. It’s just intuitively obvious." (Frank Jackson)
"If grownups want to dress in Tudor costume, douse babies in water, intone over the dead and do strange things with wine and wafers, it is a free country. But for a Christian sect to claim ownership of the legal definition of a human relationship is way out of order." (Simon Jenkins)
"Let me see you take Hydrogen, and oxygen to make water? God can. But the smartest man ever to live can't." (Internet commenter: JRS)
"2 Americans died of Ebola: They said Obama should resign. 4 Americans died in Benghazi: They had Hillary testify for 11 hours, held 33 hearings, and launched a multiyear probe. Trump *might* come in at less than 200,000 Americans dead: They cheer. That's how cults work." (Andrea Junker)
""Reason" doesn’t really exist in cognitive science. Our knowledge of the area is growing too fast for any person to have much time to take a breath and present a summary of much collective worth.......quite honestly this human vs animal dichotomy is a strictly a battle of man’s inherent narcissism. Cognitive science doesn’t care, it is not participating in any philosophical conflict......."Reason" involves too many subprocesses for anyone to attempt to operationalize it. It is a term that has largely lost its purpose, most of humanity is just unaware of that fact." (Peter James)
"One can refuse the type of explanation offered by myths or magic. But one cannot deny to them unit and coherence because, without the least hesitation, they answer any question and solve any difficulty by a simple and single a-priori argument." (Françoise Jacob)
"How do you expect to learn any real science when the curriculum is dictated by practicing scientists and expert educators and you use textbooks that don’t have "Bible" on the cover?" (Nathaniel Jeanson)
"For most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex; it is cheaper, easier, and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it. Outside of psychology it plays almost no part in the functions of the research machine." (Steve Jones)
"Many of my highly educated, academic friends—philosophers and non-philosophers alike—participate in the Santa Claus deception. These are people who unequivocally condemn the lies told by the rich and powerful to manipulate the poor and powerless, who unequivocally endorse the ethic of respect for persons, and who applaud the practice of speaking truth to power. But when it comes to telling their kids about Santa, these principles seem to vanish like melting snowflakes. Ask them why they think it's OK for adults to lie to their offspring about Santa Claus and suddenly it becomes acceptable, or even entertaining, for the big powerful folks to pull the wool over the eyes of the small vulnerable ones." (David Kyle Johnson)
"I can sum it all up in three words: Evolution is a lie." (Internet commenter: JohnR7)
"I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." (Lyndon B Johnson)
Collected Quotes A – E
"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)
Collected Quotes P – T
"Lay off with the ‘You reason, so you don’t feel’ stuff, please. I feel, but I also think about what I feel. When people say we should only feel I am reminded of Göring, who said ‘I think with my blood.’ See where it led him."
(Peter Singer)
Collected Quotes K – O
"Someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
(H.P. Lovecraft)
Collected Quotes U – Z
"The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another."
(E.O. Wilson)
