Collected Quotes P - T
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.
P
•Emo Phillips (1956 - ; American Comedian & Actor)•
"I pray a simple prayer every morning. It’s an ecumenical prayer. Whether you’re Catholic or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu, I think it speaks to the heart of every faith. It goes "Lord please break the laws of the universe for my convenience. Amen."" (Emo Philips)
"When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me." (Emo Phillips)
•Massimo Pigliucci (1964 - ; Italian-American Philosopher & Biologist)•
"Holy crap. So we are now positing that the entire universe "suffers" from a multiple personality disorder because we need to solve a non-problem that we created ourselves out of stubbornly postulating that there is something special and quasi-magical about consciousness." (Massimo Pigliucci)
"I'm afraid [Alvin] Plantinga would fail my introductory critical thinking class. But he is a great theologian." (Massimo Pigliucci)
•Steven Pinker (1954 - ; American Cognitive Psychologist)•
"Selfish Genes don't create selfish people any more that blueprints result in blue buildings." (Steven Pinker)
"The ‘gay gene’ has been used to argue that homosexuality is not a choice for which gay people can be held responsible but an involuntary orientation they just can’t help. But the reasoning is dangerous. The argument against persecuting gay people must be made not in terms of the ‘gay gene’ or the ‘gay brain’ but in terms of the people’s right to engage in private consensual acts without discrimination or harassment." (Steven Pinker)
•John Piper (1946 - ; American Theologian)•
"A housewife in her backyard may be asked by a man how to get to the freeway. At that point she is giving a kind of leadership. She has superior knowledge that the man needs and he submits himself to her guidance. But we all know that there is a way for that housewife to direct the man in which neither of them feels their mature femininity or masculinity compromised." (John Piper)
"May God protect us from the atheistic notion of doing right for right’s sake." (John Piper)
•Terry Pratchett (1948 - 2015; English Author)•
"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it." (Terry Pratchett)
"And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head." (Terry Pratchett)
"Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it’s not satire, it’s bullying." (Terry Pratchett)
"The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head." (Terry Pratchett)
"There's a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist." (Terry Pratchett)
"Words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone's mouth before the speaker has a chance to stop them." (Terry Pratchett)
"Personal isn't the same as important." (Terry Pratchett)
•Robert M. Price (1954 - ; American Bible Scholar & Ex-Preacher)•
"The born-again gospel promises joy and peace of mind, but it does so by prolonging childhood." (Robert M. Price)
"Fundamentalism fills you with answers before you even think to ask the questions." (Robert M. Price)
"The notorious tendency of conservative apologists and New Age paperback writers alike is to leap from mere possibility to the right to believe. "If there might be space aliens, we can assume there are." "If the idea of Atlantis is not impossible, we can take it for granted." "If the traditional view of gospel authorship cannot be definitively debunked, we can go right on assuming it’s truth." No, you can’t." (Robert M. Price).
"Here is a devotional style that demands its adherents cultivate feelings of emotional adoration and tender cherishing for a fellow male figure. It makes a kind of symbolic sense for nuns to imagine themselves as being engaged to Christ - but for men? How absolutely fascinating that the muscular Christianity of the Promise Keepers and of fundamentalist men everywhere creates and shapes romantic feelings in men for a man. It might even help account for fundamentalist homophobia as a reaction formation against the implicit homoeroticism to which their 'personal relationship with Christ' commits them." (Robert M. Price)
•Mary Pride (1955 - ; American Author)•
"Never vote for a candidate whose campaign promises include 'doing more for children'." (Mary Pride)
"My body is not my own." (Mary Pride)
"We need to stop allowing the unsupported testimony of children who are of an age where they can barely distinguish fantasy from reality. Abolish the child abuse hotlines.......As for reporting your 'suspicions' if you are a mandatory reporter: any law that meddles with your thoughts is innately wrong." (Mary Pride)
"If sex has nothing to do with having babies, you can have sex with anyone or anything. Including children." (Mary Pride)
"If "statistics show" that one quarter of the female population will be unwillingly defiled by age 18, and only one-tenth of the cases are reported, that means that over 200% of the female population are victims of child abuse. Twice as many girls will be raped as exist. Come on now, isn't that carrying things a mite too far?" (Mary Pride)
"If [child abuse prevention programs] are allowed to proliferate, we will produce for the first time an entire generation of males who have been trained to consider raping their sons and daughters as passably normal behavior." (Mary Pride)
"Age segregation increasingly alienates children and adults. Children are the new niggers." (Mary Pride)
•Other P•
"A purposeless creation would not be a creation at all." (Ted Peters)
"Give a poor person $2,000, and it's instantly recirculated into the economy when they need to buy necessities. Give a large company $2,000, and they'll store it offshore, say they have no more money, and ask for another $2,000." (Stephen Punwasi)
"I stand by my statement that Italian satellites controlled by our own CIA with the help of the Italian government switched millions of votes from President Trump to Joe Biden. There was even proof of this on the Internet which has since "mysteriously" disappeared. There were also credible reports on the Internet that Chinese thermostats in American homes switched votes as well which also disappeared." (Scott Perry)
"We are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance." (Thomas Pynchon)
"Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece and became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became an institution; it moved to Europe and became a culture; it came to America and became an enterprise." (Sam Pascoe)
"I don’t keep what I catch. I just stick a barbed hook in its face, yank it gasping from the water, rip the hook out, and then throw it back in, leaving it to wonder what kind of god would allow such a thing." (Dan Piraro)
"Those who imagine there is a "right" to attend a school without being bullied are deluded: one never has a right to behave however one wishes without consequences. Accepting this fact is a key step toward maturity. I'm torn on the extent to which this ought to entail physical bullying (certainly, I think it's justified when one is being an asshole about defying social norms)" (Internet commenter: Proph)
"The chains men bear they forged themselves. Strike off their chains and they will weep for their lost security." (John Passmore)
"Intuitions are a good place to begin a philosophical debate, but a terrible place to end one." (Keith Parsons)
"In a couple of weeks millions of turkeys are going to briefly discover that their lives had a purpose, and that they were brought into existence as part of a plan by a higher power." (Internet commenter: Paul)
"To argue with a man who has renounced reason is like administering medicine to the dead" (Thomas Paine)
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night." (Edgar Allan Poe)
"If god created man in his own image, how come I'm not invisible?" (David Powers)
"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)
"The artist Nature often achieves greatest effect when not working with a full palette." (Jim Perrin)
"It is misleading for creationists to characterize science in general and evolution in particular as "godless." Science is godless in the same way that plumbing is godless. Evolutionary biology is no more or less based on a "dogmatic philosophy" of naturalism than are medicine and farming. ... Surely it is unreasonable to complain of a "priesthood" of plumbers who only consider naturalistic explanations of stopped drains and do not consider the "alternative hypothesis" that the origin of the backed-up toilet was the design of an intervening malicious spirit." (Robert T. Pennock)
"I don't get why anyone would think this particular set of physical laws or the commonly used set of numbers and operators are inevitable. If quantum mechanics was our everyday experience we'd invent math where 2+2 = interference." (Pavlos Papageorgiou)
"Men who shame women who lie about rape are actually worse than men who rape." (April Potter)
"If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?" (Chuck Palahniuk)
"You fools. Actually reading scientific articles before you comment on them is exactly what the postmodern neo-Marxists want you to do!" (Ryan Pudlowski)
"The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free." (Fernando Pessoa)
"All the atoms of our bodies will be blown into space in the disintegration of the solar system, to live on forever as mass or energy. That’s what we should be teaching our children, not fairy tales about angels and seeing Grandma in heaven."(Carolyn Porco)
""I could never follow Stalin. He puts people in the Gulag." That is what doubters tell themselves to rationalize their rejection of Stalin. But the truth is that Stalin does not send anyone to the Gulag. It is those who have hardened their hearts against him who send themselves to the Gulag through their bourgoise attitudes and counterrevolutionary actions. This was not Stalin's plan at all. He truly wants everyone to go the Worker's Paradise. And it grieves him that so many harden their hearts against him. But he will not force anyone into the Worker's Paradise against their wishes, he respects their free will. So if you don't want to go to the Gulag, just open your heart to the love of Stalin. And stop resisting him." (Internet commenter: Dr Pepper)
"Science makes them afraid that they aren't the special pet of some 'Big Daddy'. In some ways I feel sorry for them. They are hiding under the furniture in case the universe doesn't like them." (John Pieret)
"Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?" (Ron Patterson)
"Gödel tells us logic is either incomplete or inconsistent. We're crossing our fingers that it's incomplete. (David Plumpton)
"I must admit of all the prejudices out there (none of which I understand) anti-gay prejudice confuses me the most. Who gives a fuck who's fucking who? It's no-ones business but their own. If you ain't fucking me, I don't give a fuck who you're fucking." (Kenneth Polit)
"I had good kids. We had one of each sex. When my kids were growing up I said “God, please don’t let my son grow up to be a faggot and my daughter, a slut.” And he did not. He did not do that. He reversed it." (David Poteat)
"Being educated is nothing to be proud about, it builds the ego, especially with women. It builds their egos and they really believe that they can be better and are better than men. That’s why these men who are marrying these so-called educated women, they are turning their husbands into housewives. They make them stay home, they make them babysit, they make them cook, they make them clean, they make them be the woman. A real woman would not be on an ego trip, she would be happy to be a wife and a mother and she would love the fact that her husband is the head of her because she loves the order of God. These educated women are not like that. I would never—unless she’s been born again—never marry an educated woman; you are marrying Satan’s daughter." (Jesse Lee Peterson)
"Let's play Monopoly with 10 people. One person already owns 90% of the money and real estate and has access to borrow money from the bank whenever they want. The other 9 people have to share the remaining 10%. If you don't like it you hate America and are a Communist. That is our current system." (Internet commenter: PrimalMusk)
"There is no obligation upon anyone framing a view of the world to take account of what twentieth-century science has to say." (Andrew Pickering)
"So let me see if I’ve got this straight: Space program, go to the moon, cameras on Mars, etc., etc. – God’s cool with that. Tower of Babel, however, and suddenly it’s OH MY SELF!!! A tower reaching to the heavens! Divine freakout!" (Ken Phelps)
"I'm not racist but I believe black people are closer to gorillas than to white people..........that's why we shouldn't get mixed with black people, we are different species and they should stay at Africa? or to the zoo, somewere far away from us, as I said I'm not racist and I don't pretend to insult anybody, but black people is a threat to our race." (Internet commenter: Prettyshandra8)
"DNA is digital information because there is DNA in my fingers, which are digits." (Jonathan vos Post)
"If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend they are role models." (Lester Pearson)
Q
•W.V.O. Quine (1908 - 2000; American Philosopher)•
"I have been accused of denying consciousness but I am not conscious of having done so." (W.V.O. Quine)
"Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about." (W.V.O. Quine)
"A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word - 'Everything' - and everyone will accept this answer as true." (W.V.O. Quine)
"The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples." (W.V.O. Quine)
"The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body." (W.V.O. Quine)
"Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word." (W.V.O. Quine)
"Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar." (W.V.O. Quine)
"Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind." (W.V.O. Quine)
"Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right." (W.V.O. Quine)
"Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits." (W.V.O. Quine)
"Life is what the least of us make the most of us feel the least of us make the most of." (W.V.O. Quine)
R
•Robert Reich (1946 - ; American Economist)•
"Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not." (Robert Reich)
"Why does Trump object to voting by mail? Because, he says, it would cause "levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected again." The first honest sentence he's ever uttered. When more people vote, Republicans lose. It's that simple." (Robert Reich)
"Mark my words: A Universal Basic Income is coming, as artificial intelligence and robots eat away good jobs." (Robert Reich)
"Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which government "intrudes."" (Robert Reich)
"The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort." (Robert Reich)
"An economy should exist for the people who inhabit it, not the other way around." (Robert Reich)
"I'll believe corporations are people when Texas starts executing corporations." (Robert Reich)
"A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted." (Robert Reich)
"Indentured servitude is banned, but what about students seeking to sell shares of their future earnings in exchange for money up front to pay for their college tuitions?" (Robert Reich)
•Neil Rickert (American Computer Scientist & Mathematician)•
"If I call in a plumber, then I won’t be impressed with his ability to spout off true beliefs about pipes. Instead, I want him to know how to actually fix the pipes. Knowledge has to do with "how to", not with the ability to make impressive sounding speeches." (Neil Rickert)
"I remember, some years ago, that I was puzzled about why philosophers concern themselves with ontology of mathematical objects. So I asked a philosopher, and he gave me a reasonably clear explanation. But that left me thinking that philosophers must have really weird ways of looking at mathematics, if the ontology of mathematical objects makes any difference at all." (Neil Rickert)
"As a mathematician, it would not have occurred to me that one needs to make a distinction between the logical and the empirical. We pretty much take that for granted." (Neil Rickert)
"Show me a moral absolutist, and I will show you a moral relativist who absolutely wants to impose his relative morality on everybody else." (Neil Rickert)
•Paul Rimmer (Internet Commenter)•
"Tolerance means literally a burden. If you are unprepared to shoulder the burden of legally existing others, though they distress you mightily, then you are intolerant and have lost the right to be tolerated yourself." (Phil Rimmer)
"When did metaphysics ever reliably confirm the existence of a metaphysical object?" (Phil Rimmer)
"Both virtue ethics and deontology are second order heuristics and rehearsals (personal and cultural) in preparation for moral work yet to be done. Like it or not they derive entirely from experience, though will be dressed up as absolutes for marketing purposes." (Phil Rimmer)
•Pat Robertson (1930 - 2023; American Media Mogul & Author)•
"Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." (Pat Robertson)
"I know there are some Christians who believe that war and their participation in it are morally wrong. While I respect their views and must allow them to follow their consciences, I do not believe the Bible teaches pacifism." (Pat Robertson)
"The key in terms of mental ability is chess. There's never been a woman Grand Master chess player. Once you get one, then I'll buy some of the feminism." (Pat Robertson)
•Spider Robinson (1948 - ; Canadian - American Author)•
"If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron." (Spider Robinson)
"The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality." (Spider Robinson)
"Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak human, not the other way around." (Spider Robinson)
"Some guys step on a rake in the dark, and get mad and go punch somebody. Others step on a rake in the dark and fall down laughing at themselves. I know which kind of guy I'd rather be. So do my friends." (Spider Robinson)
"This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving - and to act, to strive." (Spider Robinson)
"The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation." (Spider Robinson)
"Well, some men learn by listening, some read, some observe and analyze — and some of us just have to pee on the electric fence." (Spider Robinson)
•Steve Ruis (American Author)•
"Apparently "God" is the reason for all low probability events. I wish I had known that when I was studying statistics." (Steve Ruis)
"YHWH created the universe to support the Earth on which he planted a Garden, for which He need a gardener (Genesis 2:15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.). We are God’s Mexican." (Steve Ruis)
•Salman Rushdie (1947 - ; British - Indian Author)•
"The moment you declare a set of ideals to be immune from derision, freedom of thought becomes impossible." (Salman Rushdie)
"No, I don’t think it’s fair to label Islam ‘violent’. But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticising the Amish." (Salman Rushdie)
"If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now." (Salman Rushdie)
•Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970; English Philosopher & Mathematician)•
"Science does not aim at establishing immutable truths and eternal dogmas; it’s aim is to approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved." (Bertrand Russell)
"People are more unwilling to give up the word "God" than to give up the idea for which the word has hitherto stood." (Bertrand Russell)
"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence." (Bertrand Russell)
"The fundamental difference between the liberal and the illiberal outlook is that the former regards all questions as open to discussion and all opinions as open to a greater or less measure of doubt, while the latter holds in advance that certain opinions are absolutely unquestionable, and that no argument against them must be allowed to be heard. What is curious about this position is the belief that if impartial investigation were permitted it would lead men to the wrong conclusion, and that ignorance is, therefore, the only safeguard against error." (Bertrand Russell)
"Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion". (Bertrand Russell)
"To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead." (Bertrand Russell)
"I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose. Take the statement: ‘Some people marry their deceased wives’ sisters.’ I can express this in language which only becomes intelligible after years of study, and this gives me freedom. I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language ‘understanded of the people’." (Bertrand Russell)
"I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." (Bertrand Russell)
"Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality." (Bertrand Russell)
"If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based upon faith, you will realise that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting the minds of the young in what is called ‘education.’" (Bertrand Russell)
"Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, `The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.' You would say, `Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment'; and that is really what a scientific person would say about the universe." (Bertrand Russell)
"The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment." (Bertrand Russell)
"Many people would rather die than think. In fact, most do." (Bertrand Russell)
"If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it - if there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate law-giver. In short, this whole argument from natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have." (Bertrand Russell)
"I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me." (Bertrand Russell)
"And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence." (Bertrand Russell)
"It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it's useful and not because you think it's true." (Bertrand Russell)
"I conclude that the Aristotelian doctrines with which we have been concerned.......are wholly false, with the exception of the formal theory of the syllogism, which is unimportant. Any person in the present day who wishes to learn logic will be wasting his time if he reads Aristotle or any of his disciplines." (Bertrand Russell)
"Philosophy cannot boast of having achieved such a degree of certainty that it can have authority to condemn the facts of experience and the laws of science." (Bertrand Russell)
•Richard S. Russell (American Blogger)•
"The Bible is the world’s oldest, longest-running, most widespread, and least deservedly respected Rorschach Test. You can look at it and see whatever you want. And everybody does." (Richard S. Russell)
"Every cake is the miraculous fulfillment of a prophecy called a recipe." (Richard S. Russell)
•Other R•
"Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see." (John Ruskin)
"I love being able to look at new approaches that may come along and to ask myself, ‘Is this within the bounds of the philosophy I so embrace?’ And if not, to let it go." (Amy Rothenberg)
"Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, buy the pond, tell him he can't have the fish but he can fish for you and you sell the fish and give him a very small cut and then he'll say stuff like "I am hungry and my teeth hurt." Nobody wants to fish these days." (Tim Ross)
"You can legally kill uninvited guests on your propert in Texas but they don't want you to get an abortion which is weird because they're kind of the same thing." (Zach Reinert)
"It would not be sinful for me to own you and your family, provided I treated you like the Apostle Paul commanded." (Paul Rigney)
"Batman could have fixed all the crime in Gotham City just by using his wealth to create a universal basic income. But he just had to go around beating people up instead. That's billionaire logic for you." (Rebecca Renner)
"Atheists are unable to distinguish between real and false gods. The common atheist ‘objection’ that God can’t be clearly defined is circular reasoning: assuming that God can’t be and isn’t defined clearly in order to show that God can’t be and isn’t defined clearly. There is no reason to accept circular reasoning on this point. There is no God-definition problem. The definition is "at first blush, intuitive and uncontroversial." The problem is personal acceptance of the definition." (Derek Ramsay)
"Ah yes, the occasional "why did you put gender fluidity in your book your agenda is ruining the story" comment. Perhaps what is ruining the story for that reader is their insistence on believing that a non-cishet character's right to exist in a story is an "agenda?". And, of course, if the reader is wondering why I put gender fluidity in a Norse mythology story, that reader doesn't know much about Norse mythology." (Rick Riordan)
"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." (Gene Roddenberry)
"I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone." (Rainer Maria Rilke)
"Funny how all the consumers and workers staying home brings the economy to its knees and the "job creators" aren't keeping things running with their amazing bootstraps. Almost as if it's the people at the bottom who create wealth." (Lucas Reichennek)
"If a believer demands that I, as a non-believer, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect but for my submission." (Flemming Rose)
"As a death historian, I feel like I'm going *mad* watching the United States stumble through a mass death event, pushing aside elderly folks & poor folks & people of color in pursuit of normalcy, summertime and instant gratification. We are utterly grotesque. This is horrifying." (Leah Richier)
"Children who willingly participate in sexual acts have the right to make that decision as well, even if it’s distasteful to us personally. Some children will make poor choices just as some adults do in smoking and drinking to excess. When we outlaw child pornography, the prices paid for child performers rise, increasing the incentives for parents to use children against their will." (Mary J Ruwart)
"I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in. That's the America I love." (Mitt Romney)
"If somewhere within the Bible, I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5, I wouldn't question what I'm reading in the Bible. I would believe it, accept it as true, and then do my best to work it out and understand it." (Peter La Ruffa)
"Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products." (Jim Rutz)
"It's not true that everything in the world makes it true that there's either beer in my fridge or not - there are some parts of the world that are completely silent about my fridge and its contents. You can maintain the classical insights as being correct, but still say that they don't tell you all there is to know about consequences and logical connections." (Greg Restall)
"We all took our glasses to the table for a salad of fresh mozzarella, tiny heritage tomatoes and a few shavings of black truffle to double up on our pre-poured glasses of Coche-Dury’s Meursault Rougeots 2009. My plan had been to serve a California Chardonnay from the cool Sonoma Coast, DuMOL’s Isobel Chardonnay 2013, made, incidentally, by a Scottish winemaker. Full-bodied whites served too cold are often wasted, tasting merely wet rather than expressing any nuance. When I tasted it before our friends arrived, I was a bit worried (guest stress syndrome again). I was concerned the California wine would be dismissed as too blowsy and obvious because it seemed so much richer than the Coche. So I decanted the Coche, as I do often with white burgundies, in order to expose them to lots of air that would loosen them up. I splashed it into a generous magnum decanter and put it in our wine store, which is kept at a regular 13C, rather than in the fridge…………I was delighted to find that by the time the two Chardonnays were served side by side, the Coche had opened out and the DuMOL had tightened up, so they really were quite a respectable match for each other. California honour was saved." (Jancis Robinson)
"There's no such thing as an atheist. I'm serious, because there's too much documentation. Our calendars are based on Jesus Christ. Whether you believe in him or not, every time you sign your calendar, you add down the day's date, you're saying he's here, OK? That's documented." (Si Robertson)
"God's plan is the refuge of those who, unable to face up to harsh realities, opt for fantasy. But to recognize that childhood-leukemia-as-God's-plan is a form of lunacy, yet hide your own weak-kneed desperation behind claims of "reason," is really insulting. It’s one thing to dismiss rational thought altogether when attempting to face life's horrors. It's quite another to bastardize and mangle rational thought to create a shield against life's horrors." (Akim Reinhardt)
"As far as the Old Testament goes, God wanted those people dead for a reason. Be it the wicked lives and practices they lead or the genetic make up they had." (Internet commenter: ready2go)
"The only alternatives to thinking with reason are thinking unreasonably and not thinking." (John A T Robinson)
"I have so little patience with men complaining about wearing masks. I wear a thick bra with an underwire so you fuckers won't get distracted with my nipples during meetings and you can't cover your face to prevent people from dying? WTF is wrong with you?" (Monjula Ray)
"A penis is a fucking weapon… and I AM a mother of 3 sons! My youngest is 5 and I can tell you, I never allow the older teen boys to bathe him, sleep in the same bed with him, see him naked, sit on their laps, babysit, wrestle or any interaction that involve more than a hug. Do I think my older sons will rape him? In my heart no ,but in my mind I know it can happen because they have a fucking penis and a penis is a weapon. Might sound harsh to some but my job is to protect my kids even from each other. I was the same way when the older boys were younger… no staying over friends house were there are older boys or men. No staying over my brother’s house( my brother loves them and in my heart I know he would not hurt them, but he also has a penis which is a fucking weapon. Only female doctors. Never fully trust any man with a penis. Not their father, uncles, teachers … no one. I cannot even fathom how vigilant I would have been if my children were females." (Internet commenter: Rose)
"Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and slaughters a visible nature without realising that this nature he slaughters is this invisible God he worships." (Hubert Reeves)
"Given that we are all descended from Adam and Eve, genetic defects as a result of intra-family marriage would not begin to crop up until after the first few dozen generations." (Hugh Ross)
"I don't believe in male gynecologists because I know what a gynecologist does. I might as well let him have sex with my wife. It's basically foreplay without the penis entering into the picture." (Internet commenter: Raven55)
"There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized." (James Randi)
"The reason you find contradictions in the Bible is because you are reading the Bible at a frequency different to the frequency the Bible was created. This explains the distorted image you perceive. Read at the correct frequency, the image is clear." (Philip Rand)
"Just to illustrate how times have changed, not many years ago all one had to say to affirm his belief in the full inspiration of the Bible was that he believed it was "the Word of God." Then it became necessary to add "the inspired Word of God." Later he had to include "the verbally, inspired Word of God." Then to mean the same thing he had to say "the plenary (fully), verbally, inspired Word of God." Then came the necessity to say "the plenary, verbally, infallible, inspired Word of God." Today one has to say "the plenary, verbally, infallible, inspired, and inerrant-in-the original manuscripts Word of God." And even then, he may not communicate clearly!" (Charles Ryrie)
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." (Cardinal Richelieu)
"Now what is the message there? The message is that there are no "knowns." There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns." (Donald Rumsfeld)
"People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as ‘parasites’ fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is the ruling class in a capitalist society." (Jason Read)
"When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." (Stephan F Roberts)
"In the occult science of Numerology, the number 33 represents the ultimate attainment of consciousness. Keeping that in mind, it is very interesting to note that the geographic location of Mount Hermon, the very place where the Watchers are said to have descended to the earthly plane, lies on the 33rd parallel, which is a latitude of 33° north of the equator. If you trace the 33rd parallel to the exact geographic global opposite from Mount Hermon, you will find yourself directly on top of the most controversially mythic place in current ufological history: Roswell, New Mexico. Mount Hermon, where the Watchers descended to the earth, and Roswell, New Mexico, are exact polar opposites on the same 33rd degree north latitude. The global coordinates of Mount Hermon and the Roswell crash site are no accident, and speak to some deeper, perhaps secret significance." (Scott Alan Roberts)
"If you're a black Christian, you have a real short memory." (Chris Rock)
"Even the most parasitically meme-infected Cabbage for Christ knows subconsciously or overtly that Jesus is not holding up the plane in the sky." (Dave Ranning)
"I just sent an email to Wal Mart's corporate office, demanding that they stop selling gay pride rainbow flags which following their reasoning concerning the Confederate flag, is a symbol of hatred against White people. "Wal Mart supports the murder of White people" by black racist anal sex fetishists." (Internet commenter Rondogg9)
"What happens when we're dead? The irony is that all our questions will be answered after we die. We spend our whole life trying to figure out the truth and the only way we'll find out what it is, is to get hit by a bus. And the only comfort that religion offers is that God is driving that bus." (John Ryman)
"Ever since I first learned about confirmation bias I’ve been seeing it everywhere." (Jon Ronson)
"You always know the mark of a coward. A coward hides behind freedom. A brave person stands in front of freedom and defends it for others." (Henry Rollins)
"To use the term blind faith, is to use an adjective needlessly." (Julian Ruck)
"I have some sense of what it means to say that an abstract set (e.g. whole numbers divisible by 42) is infinite. Despite racking my tiny primate brain, I cannot wrap my head about what it means to say that a nonspatial atemporal immaterial mind is infinite." (Damion Reinhardt)
S
•Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996; American Astrophysicist)•
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." (Carl Sagan)
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…….The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." (Carl Sagan)
"The size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.....I believe our future depends on how well we know this cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky." (Carl Sagan)
"The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory." (Carl Sagan)
"The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today." (Carl Sagan)
"In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." (Carl Sagan)
"I don’t want to believe, I want to know." (Carl Sagan)
"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true." (Carl Sagan)
"Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever it has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?" (Carl Sagan)
"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along." (Carl Sagan)
"Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that, today at least, sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevski were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods. (Carl Sagan)
•George Santayana (1863 - 1952; Spanish - American Philosopher & Author)•
"There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval." (George Santayana)
"Sanity is madness put to good use." (George Santayana)
"A naturalistic conception of things is a great work of imagination - greater, I think, than any dramatic or moral mythology: it is a conception fit to inspire great poetry, and in the end, perhaps, it will prove the only conception able to inspire it." (Santayana)
"Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired ends." (George Santayana)
•Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980; French Philosopher & Author)•
"Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing." (Jean-Paul Sartre)
"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does." (Jean-Paul Sartre)
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." (Jean-Paul Sartre)
"She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist." (Jean Paul Sartre)
•Dan Savage (1964 - ; American Journalist & Author)•
"The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner, about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn’t say "Christians don’t own people." Paul talks about how Christians own people. We ignore what the Bible says about slavery because the Bible got slavery wrong. If the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong, what are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong?" (Dan Savage)
"If kids got raped at Denny’s as often as they get raped at church it would be illegal to take your kids to Denny's." (Dan Savage)
•Andrew Schafly (1961 - ; American Lawyer & Political Activist)•
"Obviously many people refuse to read the Bible and thus miss out on the benefit of its foreknowledge. Had scientists carefully studied the walking on water with an open mind, then it may not have taken 1900 years before they recognized the existence of wave-particle duality." (Andrew Schlafly)
"Why the big push for black holes by liberals, and big protests against any objection to them? If it turned out empirically that promoting black holes tends to cause people to read the Bible less, would you still push this so much?" (Andrew Schlafly)
"Another striking example is the how traditional marriage provides a greater set than otherwise: the union of A = {a, b, c, d} and B = {a, b, c, e} is merely {a, b, c, d, e}, while the union of M (man) = {a, b, c, d} and W (woman) = {e, f, g, h} is {a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h}, which is a broader and more diverse set." (Andrew Schlafly)
•Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860; German Philosopher)•
"There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity." (Arthur Schopenhauer)
"If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence? Or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden in cold blood?" (Arthur Schopenhauer)
•James Sears (1963 - ; Canadian Licence-Revoked Physician & Author)•
"Most women are irrational, short-sighted, passive-aggressive traitors who cannot be trusted with a vote. That is why we keep electing charming assholes who sell us out to foreign interests, corrupt the morals of our society, and open the gates of our nation to ungrateful foreigners who seek to rape, pillage and plunder our country." (James Sears)
"In a non-feminized country, no man would ever face criminal charges merely for groping a juicy ass, tugging on a pair of ripe tits, or raping a woman who cockteased him incessantly. But as the FemiMarxist tide sweeps across the western world, more and more countries are adopting evolutionary backward laws whose sole purpose is to psychologically castrate men. In most western countries today, even ravaging one’s own chattel ("raping one’s wife") has been criminalized!" (James Sears)
•Self-Mutation (Internet Commenter)•
"Mathematics is also great proof of God. How is it possible that: 98 x 72 can be figured out by carrying a digit over the top? What if that didn't work? How would we multiply without calculators? If carrying over the one on top of the 9 did not work, how would we multiply? Seems awfully convenient to me that it "just happened" like that?" (Internet commenter: Self-Mutation)
"Critical thinking has to be TAUGHT to people. It is no different from religion being taught to others. Some people have never heard of critical thinking and logic. If it has to be taught, it is a religion." (Internet commenter: Self-Mutation)
•Jeffrey Shallit (1957 - ; American Mathematician & Computer Scientist)•
"You can lead a creationist to knowledge, but you can't make him think." (Jeff Shallit)
"Humans tend to use what is effective and discard what is not. If, for example, dancing were more effective in describing the physical world, scientists would be ballerinas." (Jeffrey Shallit)
•Ben Shapiro (1984 - ; American Political Commentator)•
"I despise rap music because it serves as a very profitable creative outlet for black men in low income urban areas." (Ben Shapiro)
"People who are poor their entire lives are just bad with money." (Ben Shapiro)
"The idea of demonizing the other side as morally deficient is something that should really be out of bounds. But the Left has used it as its own kind of favorite tactic and the media covers for them." (Ben Shapiro)
"If climate change happens, and all the low-lying areas around the coast are underwater, don't you think those people would just sell their houses and move?" (Ben Shapiro)
•George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950; Irish Playwright & Author)•
"The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." (George Bernard Shaw)
"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means" (George Bernard Shaw)
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." (George Bernard Shaw)
"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." (George Bernard Shaw)
•Peter Singer (1946 - ; Australian Philosopher)•
"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)
"Probability is the guide of life, and of death, too." (Peter Singer)
•George H. Smith (1949 - ; American Author & Educator)•
"When the atheist is told that God is unknowable, he may interpret this claim in one of two ways. He may suppose, first, that the theist has acquired knowledge of a being that, by his own admission, cannot possibly be known; or second, he may assume that the theist simply does not know what he is talking about." (George H Smith)
"The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty." (George H Smith)
"Christianity has nothing to offer a happy man living in a natural, intelligible universe." (George H Smith)
•Quentin Smith (1952 - 2020; American Philosopher)•
"[This world] exists nonnecessarily, improbably, and causelessly. It exists for absolutely no reason at all. It is inexplicably and stunningly actual.......The impact of this captivated realisation upon me is overwhelming. I am completely stunned. I take a few dazed steps in the dark meadow, and fall among the flowers. I lie stupefied, whirling without comprehension in this world through numberless worlds other than this one." (Quentin Smith)
"According to theism, if a universe is to have any probability of existing, this probability is dependent upon God's beliefs, desires and creative acts. But the Hartle-Hawking probability is not dependent on any supernatural considerations; Hartle and Hawking do not sum over anything supernatural in their path integral derivation of the probability amplitude." (Quentin Smith)
•Thomas Sowell (1930 - ; American Economist)•
"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear." (Thomas Sowell)
"People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything." (Thomas Sowell)
"Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric." (Thomas Sowell)
"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't even know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." (Thomas Sowell)
"Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel." (Thomas Sowell)
"Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days." (Thomas Sowell)
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." (Thomas Sowell)
Lavern Spicer (1965 - ; American Political Candidate)
"You will never catch me using pronouns." (Lavern Spicer)
"There are no pronouns in the Bible or the Constitution! These pronouns are some new age BULLSHIT that I will NEVER subscribe to! (Lavern Spicer)
•Steve Stewart-Williams (New Zealander Psychologist & Author)•
"Why would the omnipotent creator of the entire universe be so deeply attached to a bipedal, tropical ape? Why would he take on the bodily form of one of these peculiar tailless primates? Why would such a magnificent being be so obsessively, nit-pickingly preoccupied with trivial matters such as the dress code and sexual behaviour of one mammalian species, especially its female members?" (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"People often assume that anyone who studies evolution thinks that everything should be about the survival of the fittest. However, this makes no more sense than assuming that anyone who studies glaciers thinks that everything should be done really, really slowly." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"Albert Schweitzer once observed that "When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other." This was clearly not meant as a compliment. People quote Schweitzer's statement to thumb their noses at the way we copy each other - which, when you think about it, is rather ironic." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"Brains that deny they are brains and believe instead that they are eternal souls are brains that hold false beliefs about themselves." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"It may be the fate of the universe to spend an eternity in darkness, save on brief flash of self-awareness in the middle of nowhere." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"We have ideas in our heads that are orders of magnitude smarter than we are." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"The idea that the Biblical stories are symbolic is charitable to the point of absurdity. What would we think of a university professor who, happening upon unambiguous errors in a favourite student's work, concluded that the student was speaking symbolically and awarded top marks?" (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"Nature isn't just a bloodbath; it's also a vast, unending orgy." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"Just as a toaster used as a doorstop is still a machine designed to toast bread, you - whatever you choose to do with your life - are still a machine designed to propogate your genes. All of us are. It's what the priests, the sages and philosophers searched for in vain: the ultimate explanation for our existence." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"Once a suitable mate is located, humans engage in various peculiar mating rituals. The male, for example, may give the female a bundle of plant genitals, or the pair may take turns making noises at each other while imbibing fermented plant juice." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, mind is not the cause of the order in nature; mind is an example of the order in nature - something to be explained rather than the explanation for everything else." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"To a hypothetical alien with a vastly superior intellect to our own, human minds would be classed as intermediate forms between the mindless and the fully minded." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"Even in a pointless universe, pointless happiness and pleasures are surely preferable to pointless suffering." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"One could argue that our creative endeavours and achievements and small acts of kindness are all the more impressive against the backdrop of a purposeful universe." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"Jane Goodall once wrote about a female chimpanzee who mated with more than fifty males in a single day. This is uncommon among human beings, even in LA." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
"Tying morality to religion is a little like transporting a precious cargo on a sinking ship. What happens when the child grows up and starts doubting the factual claims of the religion? The cargo may be lost with the ship." (Steve Stewart-Williams)
•Kevin Swanson (American Preacher)•
"Now, homosexuality had not existed for about 1,000 years, between about 300 AD to 1400-1500 AD where certain mentions of it were extant in some of the classical literature of the day, because classical literature tends to bring back homosexuality as the ‘cool thing’, but it hadn’t existed for about 1,000 years." (Kevin Swanson)
".....certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies." (Kevin Swanson)
•Other S•
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." (Upton Sinclair)
"Rape victims should make the best of a bad situation." (Rick Santorum)
"Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple." (Barry Switzer)
"I have to explain what to do during a school shooting to my 7yr old, but by all means lets freak out about gay marriage." (Jay Skarlow)
""When you claim there is a God, I don’t believe you" is not totalitarian. Neither is "I see no evidence for the existence of any gods, and until such evidence is presented, I prefer to live my life on the assumption that there are none". However, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" certainly is totalitarian." (Jim Steele)
"Now you could argue that the meaning and significance I derive from my life is not objective: and you’d be right. Significance and meaning are entirely subjective, human values. But they’re subjective for you just as they’re subjective for me. There’s no extrinsic entity who’s going to spoon out dollops of ‘real’ meaning for you. The best you can do is lie to yourself." (Saul Sorrell-Till)
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
"Ultimately, saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don't care about freedom of the press because you don't like to read." (Edward Snowden)
"There is a biology to why some people have a lower threshold than others for how much evidence they demand before believing something, how critical they are in their thinking, how much random patterns are percieved by them as not being random and I think that's genetics of anxiety, of cognitive flexibility / things of that sort. Somewhere in there the difference between being capable of religious belief or not lurks." (Robert Sapolsky)
"A rule of thumb for sound inference has always been that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But there’s a corollary: if it struts around the barnyard loudly protesting that it’s a duck, that it possesses the very essence of duckness, that it’s more authentically a duck than all those other orange-billed, web-footed, swimming fowl, then you’ve got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a quack." (Steven Shapin)
"Someone should probably tell the rich that workers banding together to present formal address of grievances is the alternative we worked out a long time ago to breaking down the factory owner's fron door and beating him to death in front of his family? I feel like they forgot." (Holden Shearer)
"Women don't seem to understand that from the very beginning of time men have taken young girls (Prior to periods) as wives and concubines. Even the bible talks of this so don't make it sound like men that are attracted to to 12 year old girls are sick. It's you women that can't get a grip on reality is what's sick. It's only normal and you can't change normal or a persons DNA." (Michael Saari)
"The word entropy tends to cause cessation of rational thought in the reader." (J W Sleigh & P M Barnard)
"Words aren’t a condiment you sprinkle on top of reality; they are the marinade that alters the taste of everything." (David Shariatmadari)
".....traditional Pi is deficient because historically it has awkwardly used logical straight lines to measure illogical curvature." (Collin Nicholas Saad)
"If I owned Texas and hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell." (Philip Sheridan)
"The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. Antisemitism is only secondarily about Jews. Primarily it is about the failure of groups to accept responsibility for their own failures, and to build their own future by their own endeavours. No society that has fostered antisemitism has ever sustained liberty or human rights or religious freedom." (Jonathan Sacks)
"Jesus: I am the son of God and also I am God and we are the same thing but different people and also there is a ghost who is me and is God but different too. Christians: yes, good. Me: I was assigned male at birth but I’m actually a woman. Christians: impossible." (Lilah Sturges)
"Make a decision for a man and you can punish him for one day. Give him free will and you can punish him for an eternity." (Internet commenter: starskeptic)
"Introducing a technology is not a neutral act--it is profoundly revolutionary. If you present a new technology to the world you are effectively legislating a change in the way we all live. You are changing society, not some vague democratic process. The individuals who are driven to use that technology by the disparities of wealth and power it creates do not have a real choice in the matter. So the idea that we are giving people more freedom by developing technologies and then simply making them available is a dangerous illusion." (Karl Schroeder)
"I’ve never really wanted to go to Japan. Simply because I don’t like eating fish. And I know that’s very popular out there in Africa." (Britney Spears)
"The trolley is barreling down the track towards five grandmothers. You can pull the switch and redirect it so that it kills no one. But you have to wear a mask to buy a toaster oven. What do you do?" (Scott Shapiro)
"I’d rather live next door to someone who crossed a desert to become an immigrant than a citizen who wouldn’t cross the street to help a foreigner." (Mohamad Safa)
"If we must embed our schedule of indicator readings in some kind of background, at least let us accept the only hint we have received as to the significance of the background - namely that it has a nature capable of manifesting itself as a mental activity." (Galen Strawson)
"You can’t force people to do labor for you. The concept of a burden of proof is illegal, it’s called slavery." (Internet commenter: Jeshua Satterlee)
"Atoms are to protons as a pas de deux in a delicate ballet is to a dance floor crowded with drunk twenty-somethings bouncing and flailing to a DJ." (Matt Strassler)
"Our gardens are symbols of home rather than seduction. Young people with fire in their blood are seldom found in them. The garden is the scene of middle age, of the slow passage from sexual excitement to domestic routine." (Roger Scruton)
"Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery, which increases earthquakes." (Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi)
"The flu is not even a life form. It is just bad information replicating itself." (Internet commenter: seekmosttoprophesy)
"Only among people who think no evil can evil flourish." (Logan Pearsall Smith)
"In the 50's someone called Crick discovered DNA. This was the news evolutionists were dreading as DNA made evolution even more impossible than it was before. To remedy the situation evolutionists made an alternative field to Genetics that they named Eugenics. Unfortunately for evolutionists not many scientists took Eugenics seriously and it has all but disapeared. Not much has happened in evolution in the last 30 years, as many graduates have been attracted by the money in real science like medicine and genetics. A few evolutionists are left though." (Internet commenter: Bob Smith)
"A scientist is someone who constantly questions, generates falsifiable hypotheses, and collects data from well-designed experiments. The kind of people who brush their teeth on only one side of their mouth to see whether brushing has any benefit." (Richard Smith)
"We dabble with nonsequiturs, dadaism, repetition, repetition." (Himanshu Suri)
"I have been asked by a lot of people how I made my fortune. Well, I bought car aerials for £1 and sold them for £1.20. Went on and bought more, sold them, and bought even more and sold them and so on.......Then my uncle died and left me £500m." (Alan Sugar)
"When you play with fire, there is a 50/50 chance something will go wrong, and nine times out of ten it does." (June Swenson)
"Have you heard about the recipe for making boiling water? First put a pot of water on a hot stove, then stir with a magic spoon (just once, clockwise), and then wait for the water to boil. God is the magic spoon. He’s not necessary. He only complicates the explanation." (Bob Seidensticker)
"You know what they say. History is written by the victors. The satanic witches won and now they run our country. That's why history books say they weren't really witches." (Internet commenter: ServantofChrist)
"The American belief machine apparently has a fail-safe component. Nothing shuts it down." (Gary Sloan)
"If God wanted us to believe in him, surely he would have existed." (Linda Smith)
"Nihilism? I mean say what you will about the tenets of national Socialism, Dude, but at least it's an ethos!" (Walter Sobchak, character in 'The Big Lebowski')
"Contemporary popular apologists tend to look for any way to salvage the text, no matter how unlikely or untenable the argument. They’ll use scholarly sources selectively, or pounce on one scholar’s argument and run away with it, without any concern for the fact the vast majority of scholars haven’t been persuaded by it. They don’t often make arguments for what’s plausible, preferring to argue for what’s “possible,” if it serves their immediate purposes. They trade in eisegesis, wild speculation, and fanciful interpretations, reading into the text what isn’t there, indeed, what’s often contradicted by the very passages they cite. But despite their very good intentions, they seem oblivious to the real harm they’re doing. Not only are they giving permission for Christians to be dishonest with the material, they’re reinforcing delusions that disconnect well-meaning Christians from reality, blinding them to the destructive effects many of these horror texts continue to have upon Christian communities and in broader society. This is a serious pastoral issue." (Thom Starke)
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor there see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." (John Steinbeck)
"A theologian is a ventriloquist with moving lips and no puppet." (Bruce S. Springsteen)
"God did not object to a man marrying a young girl. As long as you were married the bed was considered undefiled. Even the Christian community has been brain washed by modern society to reject the bibles teaching. Why did God make little girls body's ready to have a baby at puberty to just not use it. It is no more harmful than touching them on the head. They are tricked into thinking there harmed by society and psychologist who think there smater than God. Are you saying that if a 12 year old can have a bay physically, God made a mistake. The obvious is very clear. God does not object to the marriage of children." (Internet commenter: Surgg)
"The Universe does not bend itself to our ignorance." (Robert J. Schadewald)
“If we require some kind of sign, or "proof," for our belief in God, then we believe, or place our trust, not in God but in the sign or proof.” (Robert L. Short)
"I don't need to kill goats to say things. I can talk." (L J Smith)
"Calling a Black POTUS married 25 years to 1 wife with 2 children, no mistresses, affairs or scandals,'the antichrist' but a white POTUS married thrice, 5 kids by 3 women, mistresses, affairs and scandals, 'God's annointed', proves your religion is white supremacy." (Talbert Swan)
"I guarantee you that women who approve of abortion (i.e., murder) also see no problem with women wearing pants." (David J Stewart)
"A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for" (W G T Shedd)
"WHY CAN'T MOST OF YOU SEE LOVE IN THE BURNING OF SODOMITES???" (Internet commenter: Sola Gratia)
"Once we examine the precision of the great pyramid, it is clear that these builders certainly did not install the corner stone for a reason. The largest structure on earth, and the last stone was never installed? Accident? Coincidence? This was to symbolize Jesus." (Johan Swart)
"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, to add another hue onto the rainbow, or with taper-light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, is wasteful and ridiculous excess." (William Shakespeare)
"In an honest search for knowledge, you often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period." (Erwin Scrodinger)
"The biggest problem with the denizens of Bullshit Mountain is that they act like their shit don't stink. If they have success, they built it. If they failed, the government ruined it for them. If they get a break, they deserved it. If you get a break, it's a handout and an entitlement. It's a baffling, willfully blind cognitive dissonance." (Jon Stewart)
"Darwinism doesn't explain where gravity comes from. It doesn't explain where thermodynamics comes from. It doesn't explain where the laws of physics come from. It doesn't explain where matter comes from." (Ben Stein)
"Today's science shows that nature is relentlessly nonlinear. So whatever God deals with........God's got an analogue computer as versatile as the entire universe to play with - in fact it is the entire universe." (Ian Stewart)
"Evolution couldn't possibly explain why whales have hair, but it makes sense from an ID standpoint; that God made groups of animals similars, and added more similarities with each subgroup." (Internet commenter: shinbits)
"If something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but religious dogma says it is a gorilla, then it is a gorilla." (Phil Senter)
"An unfertilized egg is a Pre-Abortion!!! An EGG is like a little PERSON. An EGG can grow into a little person in it's mommy's TUMMY if it meets the right SPERM. So every egg can be a PERSON!! Would you kill a person? I wouldn't!!!! When a woman dies, all the little eggs in her ovaries die. That's 100's of 1000s of little PEOPLE, DYING! Killing people is wrong. That is why every woman must try to be pregnant as Often as possible. God says it is bad to have sex to a man you are not married to. But God also says it is bad to kill people. So women must get married and have as many babies as you can! Otherwise the little eggs will die." (Internet commenter: savetheoocytes)
"People in Asian countries habitually wear masks when they have a simple cold, out of concern for others. No one cries about being oppressed. No one takes up arms and storms government buildings. No one mocks anyone for wearing a mask. Americans are self-centered toddlers." (Ani Sangye)
"The mere name “Universal Theory of Gravity” or “Theory of Universal Gravity” (the secularists like to use confusing language) has a distinctly socialist ring to it. The core idea of “to each according to his weight, from each according to his mass” is communist. There is no reason that gravity should apply to the just and the unjust equally, and the saved should have relief from such “universalism.” If we have Universal Gravity now, then Universal health care will be sure to follow. It is this kind of Universalism that saps a nation's moral fiber." (Ellery Schempp)
"If you put a stick of dynamite inside a bowling ball and exploded it, I bet you wouldn't find a single round piece. So explain to me, if the Big Bang model is accurate, why are all the planets round?" (Internet commenter: stonecommander)
"The Divine might stumble over the power cord at any moment, ending us all." (Eric Schwitzgebel)
"Myself is the foxhole of ignorance where cowards take refuge because they were taught that me is vulgar and I is egotistical." (Red Smith)
"If Obama lost to Mitt Romney in 2012 and refused to acknowledge the election as legitimate, then spent months promoting on Twitter and Facebook that he won the election in a landslide, and that Romney and the Republicans stole the election, and then on the day the electoral college votes were to be counted in Congress Obama held a mass rally near the Capitol and told a mob of Antifa hotheads to march down Pennsylvania Ave. and go to the Capitol and “be strong” with the “weak” Congressmen and Senators, and to “show strength,” and that “our country will be destroyed and we’re not going to stand for that” and that with Romney “we’re stuck with a president who lost the election by a lot and we have to live with that for four more years” and “we’re just not going to let that happen,” and this was followed by an Antifa storming of the Capitol resulting in five dead, do you think Fox News and right-wing media would be claiming that it wasn’t Obama’s fault, that he had nothing to do with the violence, and that the biggest story of the week is that Twitter and Facebook kicked him off their platforms?" (Michael Shermer)
"There is a word count threshold after which it has been statisticably imposibilified for even the naziest of vocabularimen and grammatisticians to avoid all need of editing and proofreading." (Internet commenter: Sandstone78)
"The US should invade itself to bring democracy to the US." (Karl Sharro)
"My socks, made of a fabric blend unknown in Biblical times, are definitely an abomination before the Lord - but I think the fact that they keep my feet from turning into a swamp means I am willing to endure displeasure from the Almighty to ensure less displeasure from my family and neighbors." (Jacob Sommer)
"When my daughter was a toddler, I asked her where the stars came from. She confidently said "The moon made them". I followed by asking "Then where did the moon come from?" She strongly asserted "Daddy, the moon is the boss. Nobody made the moon." This is an unmistakably familiar mindset; and rightfully embarrassing for an adult to hold such similar thought." (David Smalley)
"That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative." (South Dakota Legislature, House Concurrent Resolution 1009)
"If you extend the term ‘faith’ to making predictions and testing them as well as belief in a Big Beardy who created the entire universe in seven days and then spent the following 10,000 years obsessing over people masturbating or sticking things up each other’s bottoms what’s the fucking point of the word?" (Internet commenter: Speaker To Animals)
"The Brexit mindset is a lot like a bloke who wants to divorce his wife, assuming that he'll keep the house and she'll still clean it." (Internet commenter: Starlady)
"Certainly, if one needs to believe that beyond the appearances of the world there lies a permanent and transcendent reality, there is no better choice than mathematics. No other conception of reality has led to so much success, in practical mastery of the world. And it is the only religion, so far as I know, that no one has ever killed for." (Lee Smolin)
"Whenever a critic makes much use of a higher truth you may suppose he is trying to conceal a lower falsity." (Morton Smith)
T
George Takei (1937 - ; American Actor & Activist)
"Is there a vaccine for Fox news? Asking for a country." (George Takei)
"I didn't spend my childhood in barbed wire enclosed internment camps so I could listen to grown adults today cry oppression because they have to wear a mask at Costco." (George Takei)
•Randall Terry (1959 - ; American Political Activist)•
"When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you and we will execute you." (Randall Terry)
"God established patriarchy when he established the world. God established a patriarchal world. If we're going to have true reformation in America, it is because men once again, if I may use a worn out expression, have righteous testosterone flowing through their veins. They are not afraid of the contempt of their contemporaries. They are not here to get along. They are not even here to take issue. They are here to take over!" (Randall Terry)
"I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you.....I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good.....Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism." (Randall Terry)
"Our goal must be simple. We must have a Christian nation built on God's law, on the Ten Commandments. No apologies." (Randall Terry)
"Do we want to make the pill illegal? Yes. Do we want to make the IUD illegal? Yes. The morning after pill? Yes. The patch? Yes. Anything that's a human pesticide, they all have to be made illegal. A woman has to go to jail if she kills her baby." (Randall Terry)
"If you are using any kind of birth control - stop. Leave the number of children you have in God's hands." (Randall Terry)
"What it is coming down to is who runs the country. It's us against them. It's the good guys versus the bad guys. It's the God-fearing people against the pagans, and some of the pagans are going to church." (Randall Terry)
•R.S. Thomas (Welsh Poet, Author & Priest)•
"He was too big to be nailed to the wall of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him between the boards of a black book." (R.S. Thomas)
"The old men ask for more time; the young waste it. And the philosopher simply smiles, knowing there is none there." (R.S. Thomas)
"I am alone on the surface of a turning planet." (R.S. Thomas)
"Poetry is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart." (R.S. Thomas)
"I'm obviously not orthodox. I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox." (R.S. Thomas)
"You have to imagine a waiting that is not impatient because it is timeless." (R.S. Thomas)
•Donald Trump (1946 - ; American Businessman, Reality TV Star & 45th President)•
"We have placed tremendous tariffs on China. When China sends things into America now, they're paying 25% interest on everything they send in." (Donald Trump)
"Look, having nuclear, my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart,you know, if you;re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world, it's true! but when you're a conservative Republican they try, oh, do they do a number, that why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune, you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged, but you look a the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me,it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are, nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago, he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right, who would have thought?, but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners, now it used to be three, now it's four, but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, its gonna take them about another 150 years, but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us." (Donald Trump)
"When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same. The temperament is not that different." (Donald Trump)
"We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers. And other elements of bathrooms, where you turn the faucet on, in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it, and you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out, just dripping out, very quietly dripping out. People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once. They end up using more water.....You go into a new building, or a new house or a new home, and they have standards where you don’t get water. You can’t wash your hands practically, so little water comes out of the faucet. And the end result is you leave the faucet on and it takes you much longer to wash your hands.....For the most part, you have many states where they have so much water, it comes down, it’s called rain. They don’t know what to do with it.....A lot of things we do are based on common sense.....If I didn’t get elected you wouldn’t have a steel industry.....We weren’t going to have a steel industry." (Donald Trump)
"It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it." (Donald Trump)
"You never blame yourself. You have to blame something else. If you do something bad, never, ever blame yourself." (Donald Trump)
"You can call it a germ. You can call it a flu. You can call it a virus. You can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody even knows what it is." (Donald Trump)
"[Kim Jong-Un] speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same." (Donald Trump)
"I wouldn't mind a little bow. In Japan, they bow. I love it. Only thing I love about Japan." (Donald Trump)
"I'm very liberal when it comes to health care. I believe in universal health care. I believe in whatever it takes to make people well and better." (Donald Trump)
"I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen, down on 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down." (Donald Trump)
"I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion." (Donald Trump)
"I did try and fuck her. She was married. I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look. I’ve gotta use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything." (Donald Trump)
"Our country is totally fractured and, with our weak leadership in Washington, you can expect Ferguson type riots and looting in other places." (Donald Trump)
"He [Obama] lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country! The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation." (Donald Trump)
"More votes equals a loss.....revolution!" (Donald Trump)
"Why would Kim Jong-Un insult me by calling me "old" when I would NEVER call him short and fat? Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend - and maybe someday that will happen!" (Donald Trump)
"I won’t do anything to take care of them. I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park." (Donald Trump)
"Of course I hate these people and let's all hate these people because maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done." (Donald Trump)
"You remember Hillary with the coal, right, sitting with the miners at the table? Remember? That wasn’t so good for her. So the people of West Virginia and all over, you look at Wyoming, you look at so many different places where they just, Pennsylvania, where they loved what we did, and it’s clean coal and we have the most modern procedures. But it’s a tremendous form of energy in the sense that in a military way – think of it – coal is indestructible. You can blow up a pipeline, you can blow up the windmills. You know, the windmills, boom, boom, boom [mimicking windmill sound], bing [mimes shooting large gun], that’s the end of that one. If the birds don’t kill it first. The birds could kill it first. They kill so many birds. You look underneath some of those windmills, it’s like a killing field, the birds. But you know, that’s what they were going to, they were going to windmills. And you know, don’t worry about when the wind doesn’t blow – I said, “What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?” “Well, then we have a problem.” OK good. They were putting them in areas where they didn’t have much wind, too. And it’s a subsidiary – you need subsidy for windmills. You need subsidy. Who wants to have energy where you need subsidy? So, uh, the coal is doing great." (Donald Trump)
"I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?" (Donald Trump)
"I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words." (Donald Trump)
"I never understood wind. I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody. I know it is very expensive. They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right?" (Donald Trump)
"You know what uranium is, right? It’s this thing called nuclear weapons. And other things. Like lots of things are done with uranium. Including some bad things. But nobody talks about that." (Donald Trump)
"I'm going to be working for you. I'm not going to have time to play golf." (Donald Trump)
"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." (Donald Trump)
"Pregnancy is a wonderful thing for the woman, it's a wonderful thing for the husband, it's certainly an inconvenience for a business." (Donald Trump)
"Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest – and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault." (Donald Trump)
"Certain guys tell me they want women of substance, not beautiful models. It just means they can't get beautiful models." (Donald Trump)
"The concept of shaking hands is absolutely terrible, and statistically I've been proven right." (Donald Trump)
"The line of 'Make America great again,' the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody's using it, they are all loving it. I don't know, I guess I should copyright it, maybe I have copyrighted it." (Donald Trump)
"People that go to far away places to help out are great - but must suffer the consequences!" (Donald Trump)
"It's like in golf.....A lot of people - I don't want this to sound trivial - but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive.....it's weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can't sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist." (Donald Trump)
"It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles. I think I know most of it anyway. You're talking about just getting updated on a situation." (Donald Trump)
"I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don't have a musical instrument. I don't have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No, we've broken a lot of records. We've broken virtually every record. Because you know, look I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important." (Donald Trump)
"I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it's literally going to cease to exist." (Donald Trump)
•Frank Turek (1961 - ; American Author)•
"God satisfies His justice by punishing Himself for our sins and holding out that payment for each one of us." (Frank Turek)
"The less evidence you have for your position, the more faith you need to believe it (and vice-versa). Faith covers a gap in knowledge." (Frank Turek)
•Alan Turing (1912 - 1954; English Mathematician & Computer Scientist)•
"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition." (Alan Turing)
"I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future. Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines do not think. Yours in distress, Alan." (Alan Turing)
•Mark Twain (1835 - 1910; American Author)•
"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." (Mark Twain)
"A patriot is the person who shouts the loudest without knowing what he is shouting about." (Mark Twain)
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one’s lifetime." (Mark Twain)
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." (Mark Twain)
"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." (Mark Twain)
"In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind." (Mark Twain)
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." (Mark Twain)
"It isn't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me; it is the parts I do understand." (Mark Twain)
•Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958 - ; American Astrophysicist)•
"There is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"Rumor has it that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin agreed to fake the Moon landing. But to make the footage look as authentic as possible, they urged NASA to film it on-location. And NASA agreed." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"After the 9/11 attacks, when President George W Bush, in a speech aimed at distinguishing the U.S.from the Muslim fundamentalists, said “Our God is the God who named the stars.” The problem is two-thirds of all the stars that have names, have Arabic names." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"I simply go with what works. And what works is the healthy skepticism embodied in the scientific method. Believe me, if the Bible had ever been shown to be a rich source of scientific answers and enlightenment, we would be mining it daily for cosmic discovery." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"If you are depressed after being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"It’s well known: What flat-earthers fear most is sphere itself." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"Does it mean if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here’s a list of the things in the past that the physicists at the time didn’t understand, and a talk show you might have conducted 200 years ago would have said “The planets do retrograde? Can’t understand that, must be a god.” And we’d say “You know, you’re right.” And then 10 years later we understand it, so what do you do? So if that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller as time moves on, so just be ready for that to happen if that’s how you want to come at the problem." (Neil de Grasse Tyson)
"If you believe in the Christian story of Jesus, you can’t call Scientology crazy." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"You Matter. Unless you multiply yourself by the speed of light squared. Then you Energy." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"The likelihood that a person uses the word “toxin” correlates strongly with how much chemistry the person does *not* know." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"There is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behaviour fill the vacuum left by ignorance." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"If aliens did visit us I'd be embarrassed to tell them we still dig fossil fuels from the ground as a source of energy." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?" (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply simply that you do not need to believe to know." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
"A conspiracy theorist is a person who tacitly admits that they have insufficient data to prove their points. A conspiracy is a battle cry of a person with insufficient data." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
•Other T•
"When a scientist tells you that "the truth is.......", it is time to walk away. Better to find a priest." (Timothy Taylor)
"To an authoritarian, a non-authoritarian leader just looks like a defective authoritarian." (Lee Thé)
"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours." (Hunter S Thompson)
"The fact that the extremist right is talking about burning books in an age in which every fucking one of these books is available as a downloadable pdf is further proof that these people do not even know what century we are in." (Mike Templeton)
"Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank but give a man a bank and he can rob the world." (Jim Trotter)
"All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why." (James Thurber)
"Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity." (Dorothea Tanning).
"I believe in free will. I can’t help it, determinism makes me do it. I’ve tried to change my mind, but I can’t. You can try to convince me I’m wrong, I won’t be offended because I know you can’t help it." (Internet commenter: Thad the Lesser)
"An example of white privilege. You keep saying "it's horrible that an innocent black man was killed, but destroying property has to stop." Try saying "It's horrible that property is being destroyed but killing innocent black men has to stop." Priorities. Make sense?" (Randall Telfer)
"Hubris is the greatest danger that accompanies formal data analysis.....Let me lay down a few basics, none of which are easy to accept. The data may not contain your answer. The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data." (John Tukey)
"What has been done, thought, written, or spoken is not culture; culture is only that fraction which is remembered." (Gary Taylor)
"A little water is used in pretty much every aqueous solution." (Internet commenter: TrueEmpiricism)
"The objection "we don’t know exactly how it works" would have been fatal to the electrification of society a century ago. Happily, they knew THAT it worked, if not exactly how. Just join up the wires." (James Thompson)
"Scientism could be a word to describe how we learn not to put your finger in a light socket." (Internet commenter: tildeb)
"If philosophy can’t make sense of the reality that science has uncovered, that is a problem with philosophy – reality won’t change to conform to a philosophical argument." (Jim Turner)
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." (Linus Torvalds)
"An absolute free market is proto-feudalism. And while libertarians seem to find issue with something like a state power intervening to prevent certain actions, they seem to be blind to corporate entities doing the same thing. I'm not sure why an entity preventing monopolies is seen as an unjust curtailing of freedom, but a huge corporate giant with enormous leverage over mom-and-pop businesses is not seen as an abuse of power. It's simply an appeal to might-makes-right." (Jeremiah Traeger)
"As an atheist, having a Christian threaten me with hell is like having a hippy threaten to punch me in my aura." (Josh Thomas)
"We Christians would do well to adopt the Muslim strategy. When someone sues to remove the Ten Commandments from a public area, attack, beat and maybe even KILL them. When a federal appeals court rules that Christian Nativity Scenes in New York Schools can be banned while Jew Menorrah's a Muslim Crescents can remain in the same schools, the Judges on that court should be attacked, beaten and if necessary, KILLED. When someone sues to halt Christian public prayers at football games, school events or local town meetings, that person should be attacked, beaten and if need be, KILLED. Violence works. It makes people think twice before doing something to a particular person or group of people." (Hal Turner)
"Whereas many philosophers and theologians appear to possess an emotional attachment to their theories and ideas.....scientists feel no qualms about suggesting different but mutually exclusive explanations for the same phenomenon." (Frank Tipler)
"The KJV is the original copy written and translated by Shakespeare, from the ancient greek and hebrew manuscripts. If not this, he may have translated it from an even earlier english translation (which was then translated from the original greek and hebrew)." (Internet commenter: TimothyK)
"If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens." (Andrei Tarkovsky)
"Imagine that you are going to take one shot — well, OK, two — at dictating Ten Commandments that will be timeless and universally relevant, literally and metaphorically written in stone. You get where I’m going. With a little help from his weed, Bob Marley could have done better." (Valerie Tarico)
"You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around - and why his parents will always wave back." (William D. Tammeus)
Collected Quotes A - E
"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)
Collected Quotes K - O
""There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes."
(James Morrow)
Collected Quotes F - J
"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)
Collected Quotes U - Z
"As for the little green men.....they don't want us to know about them, so they refrain from making contact.....then they do silly aerobatics displays within radar range of military bases.....with their exterior lights on.....if that's extraterrestrial intelligence, I'm not sure I want to know what extraterrestrial stupidity looks like."
(Russell Wallace)
