Collected Quotes U - Z
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.
U
•Unknown / Anonymous•
"Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church." (Unknown)
"God is an abusive dad, but Satan is the cool uncle who tries his best to make his shitty brother's kids feel good about themselves." (Unknown)
"A book commits suicide every time you watch a reality show." (Unknown)
" If God had meant us to use metric Jesus would have had 10 disciples." (Unknown)
"So, booing Mike Pence is wrong, but electrocuting gay kids to "cure" them is totally cool. Got it." (Unknown)
"God is the supreme Humpty Dumpty word; it means anything the person using it chooses it to mean." (Unknown)
"One cannot give birth in a pair of pants so it's obvious women were not meant to wear them." (Unknown)
"It’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally." (Unknown)
"Attacking modern science using a stone-age creation-myth is like attacking an aircraft carrier with a flint ax." (Unknown)
"When you're dead you don't know you're dead. It's difficult only for the others. It's the same with being stupid." (Unknown)
"In science, it is the question that matters. Any answers are only tools to get to the next question." (Unknown)
"Searching for good bits in the Koran is like fishing for prawns in a sewer: it’s hard work, and even if you find one, it’s tainted by the context." (Unknown)
"I always wondered why sacrificing an immortal being has any inherent value. It’s rather like being impressed and amazed by the bravery of someone getting a haircut. You do understand it grows back, right?" (Unknown)
"If you believe two penguins trekked from Antarctica all the way to the Middle East to get into a boat built by a six hundred-year-old man - you scare me." (Unknown)
"Gods don't kill people. People with gods kill people." (Unknown)
"A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone." (Unknown)
"Forgive me Allah. I don’t understand why I can behead my enemies and marry little girls, but not eat a fucking ham sandwich." (Unknown)
"Now there’s proof that it exists they should stop calling it the God particle." (Unknown)
"I'll start believing in astrology the day that all Sagittarians get hit by a bus, as predicted." (Unknown)
"If you plan on enjoying heaven while multitudes are tortured forever, then you are as much of a sociopath as the god that you worship." (Unknown)
"To me, it's all about reliability. Say you're in a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. Physics and math will get you home. 'Alternative ways of knowing' will most likely get you dead." (Unknown)
"If the gay agenda were like a church we'd come to your door to recruit, we'd put our literature in hotels, we'd print 'in gay we trust' on money and gay bars won't be taxed." (Unknown)
"When you sniff a flower you're sniffing the genitalia of another species." (Unknown)
"I'm all for the study of religion. Just as I am in favour of studying viruses like Ebola. But in both cases I think the researchers are better off not contracting that which they study." (Unknown)
"A metaphysician is someone who talks to God, but God doesn't understand what he's talking about." (Unknown)
"Dogs have owners, cats have staff." (Unknown)
"When inventing a god, the most important thing is to claim it is invisible, inaudible and imperceptible in every way. Otherwise, people will become skeptical when it appears to no one, is silent and does nothing." (Unknown)
"I before E except after C: it's not rocket science." (Unknown)
"In Theology Chess, the theologian has the entire chessboard to himself and only one piece: God. Whenever the opponent (who has no pieces) asks a question about God, the piece may be moved to a different square in any direction with no restriction on distance. This may be done infinitely until the questioner gets up and leaves." (unknown)
"Atheism allows one to fondle the genitals of a young child, never repent, and possibly never end up in hell. Does anyone have a problem with this?" (Unknown)
"Stupid is stupid. Faith doesn't make it smart." (Unknown)
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary notation and those who don’t." (Unknown)
"Primates often have trouble imagining a universe not run by an angry alpha male." (Unknown)
"All people smile in the same language. Except psychopaths." (Unknown)
"If there is no god, how did the alphabet get into alphabetical order?" (Unknown)
"You keep your burkha, I’ll keep my clitoris." (Unknown)
"Why is it that people who take chemicals to alter their perceptions have such a hard time believing that perception has something to do with chemistry." (Unknown)
"If triangles had a God, He would have three sides." (Unknown)
"If you think gay people want special rights, you're admitting you already have them." (Unknown)
"Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence." (Unknown)
"Nine out of 10 suicide bombers agree: God is Great" (Unknown)
"Homophobia: the fear that gay men will treat you the way you treat women." (Unknown)
"If atheism is a religion, then not playing cards is a hobby." (Unknown)
"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away." (Unknown)
"If there’s one thing that every woman should be proud of, it is that no woman in the history of the world wrote even one line of the Bible." (Unknown)
"You don't see faith healers working in hospitals for the same reason you don't see psychics winning the lottery." (Unknown)
"Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car." (Unknown)
"The mind of one freethinker can possess a million ideas. A million fanatics can have their minds possessed by a single idea." (Unknown)
"You never see churches with free wi-fi because no church wants to compete with an invisible power that actually works." (Unknown)
"You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince, but science is the only reliable way we have to tell the difference." (Unknown)
"Virgin births? Not as rare as first thought! I myself have been present at no fewer than five. It seems God has a thing for impressionable young daughters of gullible, strict parents." (Unknown)
"Oh Lord, I want to thank you that I was born in the west and not some other God-forsaken place, and that I was able to become a Christian by default. I’m thankful that I don’t have to think hard about what I believe. I can accept without a second thought everything that’s fed to me, and that I can support the status quo with a clear conscience without interrupting my comfortable way of life. You’ve made me what I am today without any effort on my part. I haven’t had to think, question, or change a thing and for that I am truly grateful!" (Unknown)
"What terrifies religious extremists like the Taliban are not American tanks or bombs or bullets. It’s a girl with a book." (Unknown)
"I heard that you hate people drawing your prophet, so I drew a picture of your prophet drawing your prophet from an image of your prophet, so you can hate me hating your hate while you hate." (Unknown)
"You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t determine right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion." (Unknown)
"Do you seriously believe that God will judge someone for loving someone of the same sex but not judge you for hating someone you have never even met?" (Unknown)
"Behead those who insult Hitchens. Said no atheist. Ever." (Unknown)
"Thousands of atheists rioted this week after a blank piece of paper was found on a cartoonist’s desk." (Unknown)
"If you don’t like gay marriage blame straight people. They’re the ones who keep having gay babies." (Unknown)
"Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You’re thinking of Jesus." (Unknown)
“Asking how I can know right and wrong without God is like asking how I can tell blue from red without Crayola.” (Unknown)
"Remember on the Day of Judgement to be gentle, kind and just enough to give God a chance to answer for his crimes before you judge him." (Unknown)
"Think about how this looks from the outside. The parts of the Bible that you believe apply today are the ones that require other people to make sacrifices. The parts of the Bible that would require you to make sacrifices are not considered relevant. Look at it this way, and you’ll see why ‘bigot’ is one of the nicer things you could be called." (Unknown)
"Science gives me a hadron." (Unknown)
"Christians obviously have no sense of humor, which is ironic, because they are some of the funniest people I know." (Unknown)
"A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone." (Unknown)
"Life is the whim of several trillion cells to be you for a while." (Unknown)
"You’ve never played banking? It’s easy. First, you give me the ball, and then I charge you every time you want to play with the ball. I’ll also charge you if you want to give the ball to someone else, and a small monthly fee for holding on to your ball." (Unknown)
"Jesus promised to conquer all wicked people while Odin promised to conquer all ice giants. Nope, no ice giants around here." (Unknown)
"Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat. Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there. Theology is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there and shouting “I found it!” Science is like being in a dark room and looking for the switch. The light will reveal a cat, if there is one." (Unknown)
"Religion. Treat it like your genitalia. Don’t show it off in public and don’t shove it down children’s throats." (Unknown)
"Announcing “I’m offended” is basically telling the world you can’t control your own emotions, so everyone else should do it for you." (Unknown)
"J.L. Austin, who noted that, while several languages have double negatives to indicate a positive, no language has a double positive to indicate a negative: "Yeah, right"." (Unknown)
"Saying someone shouldn’t be gay because it’s against your religion is like saying someone shouldn’t eat a cupcake because you are on a diet." (Unknown)
"I've never met a gay person who accidentally had a kid they don't want." (Unknown)
"If homosexuals had a book that said Christians should be stoned to death, how long before you called it hate speech?" (Unknown)
"If scientists are ‘playing God’ that’s because there’s a vacancy." (Unknown)
"You cannot say anything profound in a single sentence." (Unknown)
"If homosexuality can affect your marriage then one of you is gay." (Unknown)
"If I were Satan, I'd just write a book that no one can follow or agree on then watch as people kill each over the interpretations." (Unknown)
"Evolution is not a presupposition. That evidence matters is a presupposition." (Unknown)
V
•Frank Visser (Dutch Publisher & Author)•
"Are matter and energy only abstractions we invent to make sense of our sensations? Tell that to the survivors of Hiroshima. (Frank Visser)
"Our minds create images, but not brains." (Frank Visser)
"All we know is our own consciousness. True, but trivial. We can, apparently, know interesting things about the material outside world, through this very consciousness. These things don't become available by focusing on consciousness only." (Frank Visser)
•Voltaire (1694 - 1788; French Author)•
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." (Voltaire)
"The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that something exists." (Voltaire)
"Those who believe in absurdities will commit atrocities." (Voltaire)
"It is forbidden to kill, therefore all murderers are punished, unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." (Voltaire)
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise." (Voltaire)
•Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007; American Author)•
"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen, or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?" (Kurt Vonnegut)
"I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries." (Kurt Vonnegut)
"Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum." (Kurt Vonnegut)
"Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side." (Kurt Vonnegut)
"The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon." (Kurt Vonnegut)
"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why." (Kurt Vonnegut)
"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." (Kurt Vonnegut)
"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." (Kurt Vonnegut)
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand." (Kurt Vonnegut)
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." (Kurt Vonnegut)
•Other V•
"There is no good reason to assume that the brain is organized in accordance with the concepts of folk psychology." (Cornelius H Vanderwolf)
"Rarely do you meet a politician who is so transparent and straightforward even lying. If only all con men in the world were like Trump." (Dima Vorobiev)
"It should come as no surprise that companies driven by a profit motive, whose proprietary algorithms seek to divide rather than unite, are utterly unsuitable to be the gatekeepers of democracy and civil society. And yet here we are." (Leon Vlieger)
W
•Richard Wade (American Psychotherapist & Author)•
"Extremism is now a cheap substitute for authenticity. You're a more genuine Christian only if you're more extreme than your Christian opponent. You're a more bona fide Republican only if you're a more racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, poor-hating, education-hating, dominionist, fascist pig than your racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, poor-hating, education-hating, dominionist, fascist pig Republican opponent. Sincerity is now measured by your willingness to hurt people." (Richard Wade)
"Republican Jesus is the bring-your-assault-rifle-to-church Jesus, the let-the-hungry-starve Jesus, the poor-people-are-all-parasites Jesus, the fuck-over-your neighbor Jesus, the I've-got-mine-you-can-go-to-hell Jesus, the kill-all-fags Jesus, the women-must-shut-up-and-obey-men Jesus, the kill-your-smart-mouth-kid-and-just make-another-one Jesus, and the nuke-'em-all-let-God-sort-'em-out Jesus. That other Jesus was a commie pinko hippy sissy lib'ral Jesus. It's a common mistake to get the two Jesuses mixed up." (Richard Wade)
•Steven Weinberg (1933 - 2021; American Theoretical Physicist & Nobel Laureate)•
"The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion - by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers." (Steven Weinberg)
".......it seems to me that physics is in a better position to give us a partly satisfying explanation of the world than religion can ever be, because although physicists won't be able to explain why the laws of nature are what they are and not something completely different, at least we may be able to explain why they are not slightly different. For instance, no one has been able to think of a logically consistent alternative to quantum mechanics that is only slightly different.......You find that unless you arrange the theory in just the right way you get nonsense.......Religious theories, on the other hand, seem to be infinitely flexible, with nothing to prevent the invention of deities of any conceivable sort." (Steven Weinberg)
"Either you mean something definite by a God, a designer, or you don't. If you don't, then what are we talking about?" (Steven Weinberg)
" I have the impression that these days most theologians are embarrassed by talk of miracles, but the great monotheistic faiths are founded on miracle stories--the burning bush, the empty tomb, an angel dictating the Koran to Mohammed--and some of these faiths teach that miracles continue at the present day. The evidence for all these miracles seems to me to be considerably weaker than the evidence for cold fusion, and I don't believe in cold fusion." (Steven Weinberg)
"Good people do good things, and bad people do bad things, but for a good person to do bad things, it takes religion." (Steven Weinberg)
•Jim West (1960 - ; American Theologian)•
"The theological and exegetical worlds do not need to be shaken to their foundations: they need to be utterly and thoroughly demolished and rebuilt from the bottom up. The way scholars have engaged the biblical text for the past 200 or so years has gotten us virtually nowhere. Fad methodologies have come and gone and we still can’t assert with any sense of assurance that ‘this biblical passage means this’ (indeed, many would suggest these days that texts don’t mean anything, it is only what the reader thinks that matters). Nor can we confidently insist that this or that biblical author wanted to communicate this or that idea. A new approach is needed. We need not build on the shaky and uncertain foundation of historical criticism: we need a new paradigm." (Jim West)
"I understand that most biblical scholars will continue to utilize tools developed many, many decades ago. And that is a shame. Medical specialists utilize new tools and so do other professionals. Biblical scholars alone seem fixated on making use of methods long since abandoned in other fields of research. Biblical scholars are, it seems, excessively conservative." (Jim West)
•John Archibald Wheeler (1911 - 2008; American Theoretical Physicist)•
"Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?" (John Archibald Wheeler)
"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." (John Archibald Wheeler)
•Oscar Wilde (1954 - 1900; Irish Poet & Playwright)•
"If you want to tell people the truth make them laugh otherwise they’ll kill you." (Oscar Wilde)
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." (Oscar Wilde)
"A Bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say at the age of eighteen." (Oscar Wilde)
•Rick Wiles (1953 - ; American Preacher & Conspiracy Theorist)•
"I personally believe that the Man of Perdition, the one that you call Antichrist, I personally believe he will be a homosexual Jew." (Rick Wiles)
"There are people in this country, veterans, cowboys, mountain men, guys that know how to fight, and they’re going to make a decision that the people that did this to Donald Trump are not going to get away with it and they’re going to hunt them down. If these people in Washington think that they are going to get away with it, it’s not going to happen. The Trump supporters are going to hunt them down. It’s going to happen and this country is going to be plunged into darkness and they brought it upon themselves because they won’t back off." (Rick Wiles)
"Watch out for global Zionism taking over this planet through artificial intelligence. There are two things that you cannot publicly criticize now; you cannot criticize the homosexual agenda and you cannot criticize Zionism. Those two are together. They're driven by the same spirit. And what is coming is a global entity that is going to be Zionism and homosexuality and it's going to be operated through artificial intelligence and it's going to be policed through the most high-tech surveillance society that you can imagine. It will be a nightmare." (Rick Wiles)
•E.O. Wilson (1929 - 2021; American Biologist)•
"The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology." (E.O. Wilson)
"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.......Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become." (E.O. Wilson)
"The totality of life, known as the biosphere to scientists and creation to theologians, is a membrane of organisms wrapped around the earth so thin that it cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered." (E.O. Wilson)
"The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another." (E.O. Wilson)
•Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951; Austrian - British Philosopher)•
"Nowadays people believe that scientists exist to instruct them, poets and musicians to delight them. That these have something to teach them does not occur to them." (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
"At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded." (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
"Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical." (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
"When we can’t think for ourselves, we can always quote." (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
•Other W•
"Canada is like a nice family living over a biker bar." (Robin Williams)
"Sitting in a heavenly bar, throwing a few back with a couple of good looking lady angels, one of whom turns to him and says, "How long do you think it'll take those earthlings to figure out you won't be coming back?"" (Internet commenter: WithoutMalice)
"The fairest trial you could receive in Europe was a trial before the inquisition, their procedures were far more fair and just than our present judicial system.......If you think our present day judicial system is better, you are mistaken, it is far, far, far, worse." (Wyatt Wingate)
"Have no illusions, if abortion really were murder, it would come as an instinctive reaction from women. It would come with such force that men would be confused by the average woman's revulsion towards abortion." (Chuck Wolber)
"People who can't distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words." (Tal Waterhouse)
"I'm over 600,000 years old, estimated from memories of life and from the Lyran Wars and the destruction of Tiamat, which is the name this world had before it collided with a sheet of ice." (Emily Elizabeth Windsor-Cragg)
"God exists since mathematics is consistent. The Devil exists since we cannot prove it." (Andrew Weil)
"If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them." (John Waters)
"I reached a bizarre stage of my life in which I am equally likely to fly either economy or private. As such, I have a unique lens on this question. A friend of mine said to me, "The modern airport is the perfect metaphor for the class warfare to come." And I asked, "How do you see it that way?" He said, "The rich in first and business class are seated first so that the poor may be paraded past them into economy to note their privilege." I said, "I think the metaphor is better than you give it credit for, because those people in first and business are actually the fake rich. The real rich are in another terminal or in another airport altogether." (Eric Weinstein)
"Every discerning parent who has been blessed with a little child in his home realizes that his initial impression of the sweetness and the innocence of the child is in reality an illusion. A child very quickly demonstrates his fallen, depraved nature and reveals himself to be a selfish little beast in manifold ways. As soon as the child begins to express his own self-will (and this occurs early in life) that child needs to receive correction. My wife and I have a general goal of making sure that each of our children has his will broken by the time he reaches the age of one year. To do this, a child must receive correction when he is a small infant. Every parent recognizes that this self-will begins early as he has witnessed his child stiffen his back and boldly demonstrate his rebellion and self-will even though he has been fed, diapered, and cared for in every other physical way." (Ronald E Williams)
"Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory." (Scott D. Weitzenhoffer)
"It wasn't God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to." (Frans de Waal)
"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)
"Morality is objective within a given frame of reference." (Gordon Worley)
"Jesus Christ was the original Millennial - still lived at home with his mom & stepdad in his 30s - fermented his own alcohol - thought he was god's gift to the world - tried to start a career as an influencer because he had 13 followers." (Internet commenter: wittyidiot)
"People are always amazed by how much "free time" I have. They're also amazed that I don't know who Ally McBeal is. Frankly, I'm amazed that they can't make the connection." (Robert Wenzlaff)
"If a tranny really looked like a woman, wouldn't it be some kind of discrimination not to rape it because of its transgender status? I can live with being a rapist, but I hate feeling like I'm discriminating against anyone without a good reason." (Internet commenter: whereismysafespace)
"Scientists and engineers live lives governed by the reality principle: Get the variables wrong, the experiment will fail, even if this seems insensitive; do the math wrong, the equation will tell you, even if that hurts your feelings. Reality does not similarly regulate the production of Marxist interpretations of "Middlemarch" or turgid monographs on the false consciousness of Parisian street sweepers in 1714.....If engineers ignore reality, reality deconstructs their bridges." (George Will)
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." (Robert Wilensky)
"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." (Orson Welles)
"Beliefs reside only in living minds. Knowledge can reside outside minds. Regardless of how much you believe that knowledge represents a form of belief, that belief will die when you die." (Jim Walker)
"If your life was complete, you'd be dead." (Joshua Wisenbaker)
"Rape is kinda like the weather. If it's inevitable, relax and enjoy it." (Clayton Williams)
"In The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha expresses the idea which panicked Dostoyevski more than any other: Without God, 'everything is lawful'. But.....the opposite is true. Without God, murder is forbidden by human law; it is only for those acting on behalf of God, that everything is permitted." (Jonathan Wallace)
"What the mind doesn't understand it worships or fears." (Alice Walker)
"The 80 million light years long DNA nebula is not a magnetic pull on a rope or rubber band gravitation twist but a single object’s appearance from "infinite wisdom" that resembles our DNA with telomeres on both ends. This 80 light years long object could be the source of our universe and no matter or anything else of which are visible to humans. This includes the nerve impulses of our taste, vision, hearing, smell, and feeling. With the passage of the all-encompassing Cosmic Background Radiation passing through 304,805 letters, creates the appearance of the universe, matter, energy, gravitation, and our free will lives. A theoretical ‘black hole” some 300 light years away supposedly caused this one of a kind formation. The resultant signals then pass through individual "consciousness" (unknown to finite finds) resulting in our shortly experienced lives on what we call earth. These 304,805 letters would correspond to the four letters found in our in DNA (cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine). Like “Occam’s razor'”, no need for the complexity of mathematics or formulas beyond comprehension." (Arnold Wolf)
"I actually don't like thinking. I think people think I like to think a lot. And I don't. I do not like to think at all." (Kanye West)
"If a philosopher or social scientist were to try to encapsulate a single principle that yoked together the intellectual process of civilization (sic), it would be a gradual dismantling of presumptions of magic. Brick by brick, century by century, with occasional burps and hiccups, the wall of superstition has been coming down. Science and medicine and political philosophy have been on a relentless march in one direction only -- sometimes slow, sometimes at a gallop, but never reversing course. Never has an empirical scientific discovery been deemed wrong and replaced by a more convincing mystical explanation. ("Holy cow, Dr. Pasteur! I've examined the pancreas of a diabetic dog, and darned if it's NOT an insulin deficiency, but a little evil goblin dwelling inside. And he seems really pissed!") Some magical presumptions have stubbornly persisted way longer than others, but have eventually, inexorably fallen to logic, reason and enlightenment, such as the assumption of the divine right of kings and the entitlement of aristocracy. That one took five millennia, but fall it did." (Gene Weingarten)
"Gee, thanks for the elementary lesson in metaphysics. And there I thought Being was an undifferentiated unity." (Mark Walker)
"Do not look down on nonsense. Nonsense comes to power. Nonsense murders millions. It prospers if we are too exquisite, too intellectually respectable, to bother with it." (Leon Wieseltier)
X
"If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." (Malcolm X)
Y
•Harun Yahya aka Adnan Oktar (1956 - ; Turkish Author & Religious Cult Leader)•
"…....all the members of terrorist organizations, even those that portray themselves as Muslim organizations…...they are all Darwinists." (Harun Yahya)
"Since Darwinists are fearful of science, they employ propaganda tactics instead. Darwinists employ a hypnotic technique that prevents people from thinking independently or examining the true scientific evidence."
"[The year 2009] will actually turn out to be a worldwide celebration of Darwinism’s collapse. People will be stunned at how they believed in Darwinism. They will be amazed at how they were taken in by such a hoax for years. They will also be astonished at themselves and at how hundreds, thousands of universities around the world and hundreds, thousands of professors backed such a hoax, and how they were deceived by Satan’s plot." (Harun Yahya)
"Darwinism is a Pagan religion whose roots go back to the Sumerians and Ancient Egypt......the Darwinist materialist mindset lies behind all wars, revolutions and anarchy." (Harun Yahya)
•Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug (1973 - ; American Software Engineer)•
"Trump (if he is elected president in 2024) should give Russia a free hand not just in Russian-speaking territories - but all the way to the English Channel." (Curtis Yarvin)
".......democracy is to government as gray, slimy cancer is to pink and healthy living tissue." (Curtis Yarvin)
".......elect a President who has promised to cancel the Constitution. Once he is inaugurated, he can cancel the Constitution. Of course, the military must also support this autogolpe. This given, the operation is trivial and entirely safe." (Curtis Yarvin)
"Anders Behring Breivik made war on communist Norway, just as Max Manus made war on fascist Norway, just as Osama bin Laden made war on imperial America, just as Nelson Mandela made war on apartheid South Africa. Terrorism is the normal mode of warfare in our delightful post-WWII utopia. That is, it is the most common way to use force to achieve political objectives. Condemning terrorism, as such, is in every case retarded." (Curtis Yarvin)
"No-one who condones Che, Stalin, Mao, or any leftist murderer, has any right to ask anyone else to dissociate himself from a rightist who didn't even make triple digits. Anders Behring Breivik is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is the most revered living political figure on our beautiful blue planet......If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you'd like to fuck." (Curtis Yarvin)
"A century and a half of democracy has wreaked unbelievable devastation on a place and people once considered by far the most promising on earth. No mere ecological pollution could possibly compare." (Curtis Yarvin)
"If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia." (Curtis Yarvin)
"Cannot we marvel at what the Third Reich achieved, with the knowledge that it was run by a maniac? In the hands of a non-maniac, what might it have done?" (Curtis Yarvin)
"America has only one problem: America is a communist country." (Curtis Yarvin)
"In my opinion just about every country on earth today would benefit from a transition to military government." (Curtis Yarvin)
"Democracy has driven us all insane. After all, it's had two hundred years to do so. It's edifice of magical thinking is a wonderful thing, ornate as a Disney castle,more worthy of admiration than destruction. Sadly, it is the castle of evil, and God's sweet fire will melt it in a flash." (Curtis Yarvin)
•Eliezer Yudkowski (1979 - ; American Computer Scientist & Author)•
"To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use" (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"Lies propagate, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that’s connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you’d even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn’t work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn’t work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they’ve got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn’t exist and there’s no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there’s someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there’s a lot of people out there telling lies." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much worse than you think." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"The nature of "reality" is something about which I'm still confused, which leaves open the possibility that there isn't any such thing. But Egan's Law still applies: "It all adds up to normality." Apples didn't stop falling when Einstein disproved Newton's theory of gravity. Sure, when the dust settles, it could turn out that apples don't exist, Earth doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist. But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals, they are passed milestones on our road." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
"Ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance." (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
•Other Y•
"I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit." (Irvin Yalom)
"Since Darwin's time, the word "theory" has both descended with modification and speciated. So has the theory of evolution." (Matt Young)
"There are prominent Islamic preachers who have seen and understood that the present Western-style education is mixed with issues that run contrary to our beliefs in Islam. Like rain. We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain. Like saying the world is a sphere. If it runs contrary to the teachings of Allah, we reject it. We also reject the theory of Darwinism." (Mohammed Yusuf)
"Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so." (Brigham Young)
Z
•John Zande (Australian Author)•
"We are all hydrogen’s diaspora." (John Zande)
"………….if sentient life recognised the futility of its existence, if it recognised that it had been born on the line and was eternally bonded to the perverted servitude of another who does not—and will never—hold council to discuss emancipation, then it is inevitable that birth rates among all self-aware creatures would plummet as reproduction itself would be viewed as an unconscionable and outrageous act of unforgivable selfishness. Being freely acting, morally autonomous, and presented with an insufferable reality, complex conscious life would find no option but to rebel, and to rebel completely by deploying the only weapon it had against the architect of its unforgiving world: a massive denial of service; self-administered, intentional extinction. Revolutionary suicide." (John Zande)
"There is no lie. The world is presented as it is. Nothing is concealed, except for perhaps the identity of the Creator, which is not so much a lie as it is a reasonable omission." (John Zande)
"Jesus makes perfect sense when you view the character as a metafictional device invented/used by 1st Century crisis cultists to impart doctrinal messages. We *know* metafiction was in use in Greece just before the alleged time of Jesus, and if the Gospel of Thomas is indeed the first gospel (which many scholars believe), then we have the ready-script, easy to remember and move about. The character does not eat, breath, or do anything. The character simply speaks in cryptic kōans, a form of single-person dialogue, and more specifically in parables when the character himself is addressing larger (fictional) audiences. It’s really quite ingenious, and it hits every note of being metafiction." (John Zande)
"Charles Baudelaire would have the curious believe that the finest trick the Devil ever performed was in persuading the world that he did not exist. Baudelaire was mistaken. There was no persuasion." (John Zande)
"To be omniscient means to have never felt even the slightest twang of curiosity, for there can be no unexpected twists if every outcome to every drama and experiment is already known. Without the capacity for curiosity it is, therefore, impossible for the omniscient being to be interested in anything, let alone be attentive to His own pleasure, as pleasure is inaccessible if all of Creation is, from His great perspective, perfectly flat and of a uniform temperature." (John Zande)
"Where the theologian is forced to rescue an incompetent spirit who has, for one imaginative reason or another, lost total control of his creation, the gospel of the malevolent hand stands unchaste, uncontaminated, and inviolable." (John Zande)
"Anthropomorphic theism is about as natural as tennis rackets, ice cream cones and bikinis." (John Zande)
•Other Z•
"Some theists say scientists are "playing god" but I don't see any scientists deliberately making babies that will die of cancer before they can even walk." (Godfrey Zoan)
".......the truth is that the USA is not heading for Euro-Socialism. Instead, it is careening at full speed - with no discernable braking - into full-fledged Marxist Communo-Fascist elitist-ruled Islamo-Drug cartel Narco/Nazi State - replete with its own apparent and visible concentration camps." (Sher Zieve)
"Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth." (Emile Zola)
"Death is the only god that comes when you call." (Roger Zelazny)
