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$100 million represents roughly ten years' worth of spending on
the biology of aging for the NIA budget. This weekend, [July 19,
2004] Spiderman II brought in $180 million in ticket receipts in
its first six days of performance. So any one day's receipts for
Spiderman represents five years of basic aging research. It's now clear in the last ten years that there are at least eight
different genes, which, when changed, can slow aging down proportionately
and extend the life span by 40 percent. If this sort of change also
applied to people, and that's a big if, but if it applied to people,
then the average person at the age of about 130 would be as healthy
as the average 80-year-old today. We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc. ~ Sir Julian Huxley Top I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of. ~ Clarence Darrow Top The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened. ~ Josef Stalin This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. ~ Plato [T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe, if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism… ~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. ~ Thomas Jefferson Top The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. ~H.L. Mencken If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. – James Madison Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human liberty; it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. ~ William Pitt Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. . . ~ Henry Kissinger (from Chapter 5 in Final Days by Carl Bernstein) …I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Phillippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. . . ~ Mark Twain (from the New York Herald, October 15, 1900, "An Anti-Imperialist") Nations! What are nations? . . . Like insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. ~ Henry David Thoreau You really haven't been a virgin for so long In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking skills in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. ~ Carl Sagan In the American republic the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us. By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessing--Gyges' ring of invisibility. ~ Walter Karp Top If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. ~ Thomas Jefferson When covering the Capitol, the first thing to remember is that every government is run by liars. ~ I. F. Stone Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range
of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year
2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive
who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The
whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be
no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking
-- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. I promise to question everything my leaders tell me. I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgments. ~ Carl Sagan Populus vult decipi. (The people want to be deceived.) ~ Ancient Roman saying What experience and history teach is this--that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Top Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. ~Pericles Top "The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Federal Constitutional - Convention of 1787, not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was, not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy." -Louis Brandeis A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker. ~ H.L. Mencken The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.... ~ Eugene Debs Top Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and
are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms
is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers,
the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children....This
is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud
of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross. It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling
into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government
from falling into error. Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. ~ Carl Sagan Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure
wind. The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness. ~ Karl Marx Top The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries. ~ James Madison We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both. ~ Louis Brandeis Top The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." ~ Thomas Jefferson It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office. ~ H. L. Mencken All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. ~ George Orwell ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS The AstonishingHypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memoires and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. ... This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing. ~ Francis Crick I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ~ Stephen Roberts Top ... Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature. It could be said that Atheism has a doctrine to question and a dogma to doubt. It is the human mind in its natural environment, nothing is too holy to be investigated, nor too sacred to be questioned. The Atheist Bible, it could be said, has but one word: “THINK.” Atheism is the complete emancipation of the human mind from the chains and fears of superstition. ~ Emmet F. Fields I don't believe in God, because I don't believe in Mother Goose. All thinking men are atheists. ~ Ernest Hemingway Top ‘God’, ‘immortality of the soul’, ‘redemption’, ‘beyond’. Without exception, concepts to which I have never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child. Perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them? I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: It is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche Theists have good reasons for not believing in every god but their own. Atheists make no exception for the last one. ~ Brett Lemoine Atheist - A person to be pitied in that he is unable to believe things for which there is no evidence, and who has thus deprived himself of a convenient means of feeling superior to others. It is difficult, none the less, for the ordinary man to cast off orthodox beliefs, for he is seldom allowed to hear the other side.... Whereas the Christian view is pressed on him day in and day out. ~ Margaret Knight Something akin to laws of Nature was once glimpsed in a determinedly polytheistic society, in which some scholars toyed with a form of atheism. This approach of the pre-Socratics was, beginning in about the fourth century B.C., quenced by Plato, Aristotle, and the Christian theologians. if the skein of historical causality had been different--if the brilliant guesses of the atomists on the nature of matter, the plurality of worlds, the vastness of space and time had been treasured and built upon, if the innovative technology of Archimedes had been taught and emulated, if the notion of invariable laws of Nature that humans must seek out and understand had been widely propagated--I wonder what kind of world we would live in now. ~ Carl Sagan Men will cease to commit atrocities only when they ceae to believe
absurdities. BELIEF Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief, in anything else. On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe. -Charles Sanders Pierce Top As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have
no use. Intellectual honesty consists in stating the precise conditions under which one will give up one's belief. ~ Imre Lakatos We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. ~ George Orwell Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude of systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended with the utmost certainty. ~ Paul Tillich Top A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. ~ David Hume Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true. ~ Francis Bacon It’s not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum
and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and
scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe:
unbelief is an unknown. We do everything by custom, even believe by it our very axioms, let us boast of freethinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned. ~ Thomas Carlyle Every man is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day. ~ Bertrand Russell Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. ~ Montaigne The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the
arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. The general root of superstition is that men observe when things
hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass
over the other. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees
of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure
of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as
whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question
might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't
figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have
to know an answer. I don't have to...I don't feel frightened by
not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without
having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can
tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. Bible Quotes - Translation: New International Version. On Punishing 'Immorality' Leviticus 20:9 If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. 20:10 If a man commits adultery with another man's wife-with the wife of his neighbor-both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death. Deuteronomy 22:20-1 If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl's virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father's house. Exodus 35:2 For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it must be put to death. 20:13 If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death. On Destroying Other People Deuteronomy 7:1-2 When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations . . . then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 20:10-17 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. . . . This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them-the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites-as the Lord your God has commanded you. On the Evil of Biblical Law Ezekiel 20:25-26 I also gave them over to statutes that were not good and laws they could not live by; I let them become defiled through their gifts-the sacrifice of every firstborn-that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the LORD. On Slavery & Subjugation of Women Ephesians 5:22-24 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Exodus 21:20-21 If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property. 1 Peter 2:13 Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among men. 2:18 Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh. Leviticus 25:44-45 Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. Jesus, on His Second Coming Matthew 24:29-34 [T]he sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. . . . They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. . . . I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. [Emphasis added.] 16:27-28 For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. Scientific Errors (1) Rabbits don't chew cud. Deuteronomy 14:6-7 You may eat any animal that has a split hoof divided in two and that chews the cud. However, of those that chew the cud or that have a split hoof completely divided you may not eat the camel, the rabbit, or the coney. (2) No insects (including grasshoppers) are 4-legged. Leviticus 11:20-22 All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you. There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper. (3)This is only possible on a flat earth. Matthew 4:8 Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. (4) pi does not = 3. 1 Kings 7:23 He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim . . . It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. (5) The earth moves. It does not have a foundation. Psalms 104:5 He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved. Selected Contradictions (1) 2 Kings 2:11 As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. John 3:13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven-the Son of Man. (2) Numbers 23:19 God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Exodus 32:14 Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened. (3) Ephesians 2:8-9 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith . . . not by works. James 2:14-17 What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? . . . Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. Revelation 22:12 Behold, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he has done. (4) (Jesus speaking) Matthew 5:16 Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your father in heaven. Matthew 6:1 Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. (5) (Jesus speaking) John 14:27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Matthew 10:34 Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. (6) Genesis 32:30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "It is because I saw God face to face, and my life was preserved." Exodus 33:11 The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. John 1:18 No one has ever seen God. (7) (Jesus speaking) John 5:31 If I testify about myself, my testimony is not valid. John 8:14 Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid. The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is,
that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing
generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than
those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of
the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose,
what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier
impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~Potter Stewart Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention,
largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
...the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and nations to sell. This is not an issue of which we might anticipate widespread skepticism. People will want to believe it, even if the evidence is meager to nil... compelling testimony ... provides that our personality, character, memory ... resides in the matter of the brain, it is easy not to focus on it, to find ways to evade the weight of the evidence. ~ Carl Sagan I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection. ~ Ben Franklin Top I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. ~ Woody Allen Top I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that
some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But
as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide
cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing
to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. Will Durant to his wife Ariel Grow strong my comrade … Bertrand Russell to his wife Edith Through the long yearsI sought peace I found ecstasy, I found anguish I found madness, I found loneliness I found the solitary pain That gnaws the heart, But peace I did not find. Now, old and near my end, DOGMA No country or people who are slaves to dogma and dogmatic mentality can progress. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru Top ... none of his [a priest's] certainties were worth a single strand of a woman's hair. ~ Albert Camus Top What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific
inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not
desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in
the likeness of the believer. Ubi dubium ibi libertas. (Where there is doubt, there is freedom.)
It you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life, you doubt, as far as possible, all things. ~ Rene DescartesTop Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms. ~ Will Durant Top Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. ~ Voltaire Believe nothing because a wise man said it. Believe nothing because it is generally held. Believe nothing because it is written. Believe nothing because it is said to be divine. Believe nothing because someone else believes it. But believe only what you yourself judge to be true. ~ Buddha I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure
of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy,
not even mine. I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath. ~ Rene Descartes Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. ~ H. L. Mencken Top I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different
degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely
sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such
as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the
question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if
I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't
have to know an answer. I don't have to...I don't feel frightened
by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe
without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far
as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. ~ Bertrand Russell Top If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise. ~ Aldous Huxley Top ECONOMICS The money our society spends goes to appease those with power. As such, it goes mainly to those who don't need it. A nation that redistributes income to its poor buys a civilized and humane society, and it buys this with a miniscule share of the national income and a modest reduction in the supply of cleaning women. ~ Mancur Olson A country that subsidizes workers in the prime working years sacrifices,
not a dust-free living room, but the very muscle of the national
economy. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt, but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor. ~ David Hume Why do we go through the struggle to be educated? Is it merely
in order to pass some examinations and get a job? Or is it the function
of education to prepare us while we are young to understand the
whole process of life? I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace. ~ Baruch Spinoza Top We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. ~ Epictetus Top The principle goal of education is to create [persons] who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-[persons] who are creative, inventive, and discoverers. ~ Jean Piaget Top Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching
calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets
nothing else be learned than-learning. His conduct, therefore, often
produces the impression that we properly learn nothing form him,
if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement
of useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in
this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they-he has
to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being
more teachable than the apprentices. The teacher is far less assured
of his ground than those who learn are of theirs. If the relation
between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there
is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the
authoritative sway of the official. It is an exalted matter, then,
to become a teacher-which is something else entirely than becoming
a famous professor. Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of
realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited
by the risk of displeasure. ~ Kingman Brewster A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government - in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. ~ John Stuart Mill Have patience, and endure. ~ Shakespeare Top None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm. - Henry David Thoreau Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm. - Benjamin Disraeli The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate
intensity. The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell. ~ Bertrand Russell The scientific doctrine of progress is destined to replace not
only the myth of progress, but all other myths of human earthly
destiny. It will inevitably become one of the cornerstones of man's
theology, or whatever be the future substitute for theology, and
the most important external support for human ethic I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider
ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority
behind it. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. ~ Christopher Hitchens Today the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning, but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles. ~ James Watson Evolution, as such, is no longer a theory for the modern author. It is as much of a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun. ~ Ernst Mayr Every modern discussion of man's future, the population explosion, the struggle for existence, the purpose of man and the universe, and man's place in nature rests on Darwin. ~ Ernst Mayr Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman -- a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal. ~ Nietzsche Top Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level. ~ E. O. Wilson ... humans can now impose moral principles upon ever-widening areas
of cosmic process, in whose further slow unfolding they are now
the protagonist. They can inject their ethics into the heart of
evolution. ...Evolutionary biology ... has given us a new view ...
impossible of attainment in an earlier age, of our human destiny.
That destiny is to be the agent of the evolutionary process on this
planet, as the instrument for realizing new possibilities for its
future. There is grandeur in this [evolutionary] view of life ... whilst
this planet has gone cycling on according to the laws of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful
have been, and are being evolved. The living thing is not the clay molded by the potter, nor the harp played upon by the musician. It is the clay modeling itself. ~ Edward Stuart Russell Top What disconcerts the modern world at its very roots is not being
sure, and not seeing how it ever could be sure, that there is an
outcome--a suitable outcome to evolution. Half our present uneasiness
would be turned to happiness if we could once make up our minds
to accept the facts and place the essence and the measure of our
modern cosmogonies within a noogenesis. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out. Nor is his duty. The kingdom above, or the darkness below: it is for him to choose. ~ Jacques Monod Top In the evolutionary long run, humanity will survive only as integral parts of a wild nexus of widely divergent life forms whose reproduction becomes possible only in concert. ~ Dorion Sagan Top [the] general condition to which all other theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Top The evolutionary epic is ... the best myth we will ever have.
Mankind is still embryonic ... [man is] the bud from which something
more complicated and more centered than man himself should emerge. We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency. Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition
of deity. More humble and I think truer to consider himself created
from animals. We want to be special. We want our place in the cosmos to be central. We want evolution--even godless evolution--to have been directed toward us so that we stand at the pinnacle of nature's ladder of progress. Rewind the tape of life and we want to believe that we (Homo Sapiens) would appear again and again. Would we? Probably not. ~ Michael Shermer ... Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of
his lowly origin. Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic
process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself.
His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and
to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events.
In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as agent of
the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately I asserted – and I repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man – a man of restless and versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice. ~ T.H. Huxley (in reply to Bishop Wiberforce) Faith is believing things for which there is no evidence. Faith is believing what any darn fool knows ain’t so. ~ Mark Twain The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. ~ Benjamin Franklin Top Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. ~ Ambroise Bierce Top Faith is deciding to allow yourself to believe something your intellect
would otherwise cause you to reject—otherwise there’s no need for
faith. Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing “Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down. down. Amen!” If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it. ~anonymous Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits. ~ Dan Barker He is a person of faith, and faith has that effect. It is, as James’
schoolboy said, “believing what you know ain’t true”. This means
lying to yourself, to tell yourself you are justified in believing
it. And of course, you have to keep adding to the lies to bolster
the story you believe. The result of this continual lying is the
loss of your intellectual integrity. Once intellectual integrity
is lost, so is moral integrity. The believer will then lie in God’s
name, cheat in God’s name, exploit in God’s name, and persecute
in God’s name. ~anonymous
They, believe me, who await Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. ~ Bertrand Russell Top Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. ~ Bertrand Russell Top Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known. ~ Montaigne The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are
always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. Ultimately, we are not subject to the conditions that confront us; rather, these conditions are subject to our decision ... we must decide whether we will face up or give in, whether or not we will let ourselves be determined by the conditions. ~ Victor Frankl Top ... freedom is a conquest, always partial, always precarious,
always challenged. ... the freest person is the one with the most
hope. If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will. ~ Albert Einstein Top The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. ~ John Stuart Mill It would be very strange that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be very little animal, five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased. ~ Voltaire My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm-as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy. ~ Camille Paglia FREETHOUGHT Freethought is scientific inquiry unrestricted by tradition, authority,
established belief, preconception, prejudice or any agenda that
might compromise the free exercise of thought and the reliability
and validity of one's conclusions. Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender. ~ Dan Barker To all freethinkers, past and present, whose independence of mind isolates them from the sympathy and understanding of their community, but whose courageous and unwavering devotion to the scientific method has liberated their community from the dark ages. ~ David Mills Scientists who have dedicated their lives to building machines that think, feel that it's only a matter of time before some form of consciousness is captured in the laboratory. ~ Michio Kaku Top Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills,
and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our
minds. The development of artificial intelligence may well imply that man will relinquish his intellectual supremacy in favor of thinking machines. With oceans of time available for future innovation, there seems to be no reason why machines cannot achieve and surpass anything of which the human brain is capable. ~ Paul Davies Top By 2050 we expect AI systems to have a modest range of emotions. Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of their own. ~ Michio Kaku Top Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. ~ George Bernard Shaw Top Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the
final word. The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason
for hope. We know what we are, but we know not what we may become. All the past is but the beginning of a beginning; all that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. ~ H.G. Wells Top But at the same time, in reality, what a difference there is between the world today, and what it used to be! And with the passage of more time, some two or three hundred years, say, people will look back at our own times with horror, or with sneering laughter, because all of our present day life will appear so clumsy, and burdensome, extraordinarily inept and strange. Yes, certainly, what a life it will be then, what a life! ~ Anton Chekhov Top No theory changes what it is a theory about. Nothing is changed because we look at it, talk about it, or analyze it in a new way. Keats drank confusion to Newton for analyzing the rainbow, but the rainbow remained as beautiful as ever and became for many even more beautiful. Man has not changed because we look at him, talk about him, and analyze him scientifically. ... What does change is our chance of doing something about the subject of a theory. Newton's analysis of the light in a rainbow was a step in the direction of the laser. ~ B.F. Skinner ... not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness
to a distant futurity. Be a lamp unto yourself. ~ Buddha Top HAPPINESS Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. This creed is somewhat short, but is long enough for this life; long enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there, we can make another creed. But this creed certainly will do for this life. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under circumstances directly found, given and tranmitted from
the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like
a nightmare on the brain of the living. Not to know what has happened before one was born is always to
be a child. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. The nations wax, the nations wane away; in a brief space the generations
pass. And like runners hand the lamp of life one unto the other. HUMAN NATURE Man will become better when you show him what he is like. ~ Anton Chekhov Every man as long as he remains alive is in himself a multitude of conflicting men. ~ D.H. Lawrence The man's (a heathen south sea islander) a human being, just as I am; he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. ~ Herman Melville (Moby Dick) This may be the curse of the human race. Not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike. ~ Salman Rushdie Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but then again fade away and are dead. ~ Homer Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love
of power. Mankind is blessed with a creative talent for inventing and applying
ideas, and cursed with an inability to shed them when their time
is passed. ... ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge:
it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so
positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved
by knowledge. Ignorance of reality provides no protection from it. ~ Harold Gordon INSECURITY Flight from insecurity is catastrophic to any kind of human growth. To flee from insecurity is to miss the whole point of being human. It is to miss, at any rate, the whole point of religion. ~ Peter Bertocci Top Irreverence is the champion of liberty. ~ Mark Twain Top People who are on the journey are a lot more interesting than people who, having found answers, are in dry dock. ~ Lori Villamil Top It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. And none will hear the postman’s knock Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls. "Life is tragic simply because the earth turns
and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of
us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole
root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice
all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems,
taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies,
flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the
only fact we have." A dangerous path is this, like the edge of a razor. ~ Hindu proverb Top Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate
is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still
yours. All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players.
Life is warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame, oblivion. When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then. ~ Blaise Pascal Top I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burdens again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. ~ Albert Camus Top Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, How can life ever be a good teacher if there is only one of them
to be lived? How can one perform life when the dress rehearsal for
life is life? This is the true joy of life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. ~ George Bernard Shaw Top Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life. ~ George Bernard Shaw Top "The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have
given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness,
Beauty, and Truth..." I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no 'brief candle" to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. ~ George Bernard Shaw Top Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke Top The unexamined life is not worth living. -~ Socrates Top The person who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life
imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the
habitual beliefs of their age or their nation, and from the convictions
which have grown up in their mind Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority,
and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and don't be caught
in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you
love, everything will come right. Love has its own action. Love,
and you will know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority
who tells you what love is and what it is not. No authority knows
and he who knows cannot tell. Love, and there is understanding. Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek
each other Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as
to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins
them by what is deepest in themselves. This is a fact of daily experience.
At what moment do lovers come into the most complete possession
of themselves if not when they say they are lost in each other?
In truth, does not love every instant achieve all around us, in
the couple or the team, the magic feat, the feat repudiated to be
contradictory, of personalizing by totalizing? And if that is what
it can achieve daily on a small scale, why should it not repeat
this one day on world-wide dimensions? Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. ~ Mark Twain Top LYING The way to get a lie believed is to continue to REPEAT it. ~ George Orwell We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned
about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen
and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy
me eight million years. I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular
to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because,
like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being
more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence,
is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry. Man's concern about a meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human. ~ Victor Frankl Top An individual piece only has meaning when it is seen as part of
the whole. In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won’t be there to see it – but it’s why we live, why we work. It’s why we suffer. We’re creating it. That’s the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal. - Anton Chekov Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation of his life.
This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled
by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will
satisfy his own will to meaning. MEMES Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme
pool. Probably it originated many times by independent ‘mutation.’
In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself?
By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art.
Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that ‘survival
value’ here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value
for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it
about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance
in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme
in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It
provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling
questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world
may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a
cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo,
is none the less effective for being imaginary. There are some of
the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive
generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form
of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment
provided by human culture. There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par. ~ Mark Twain Top No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless . .
. its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it
endeavors to establish. The Christian religion not only was at first
attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed
by any reasonable person without one. The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better. ~ Mark Twain Top Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains
work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to
a human mind. How little is required for pleasure! The sound of a bagpipe — without music, life would be an error. ~ Nietzsche NATURE In my opinion, the greatest scandal of philosophy is that, while all around us the world of nature perishes ... philosophers continue to talk, ...about the question of whether this world exists. ~ Karl Popper We are all born originals. Why is it so many of us die copies?
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial
reasons. Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing
for their country. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. ~ Samuel Johnson Top Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it. ~ Mark Twain Top My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory. The old lie: It is sweet and fitting that you should die for your country. ~ Wilfred Owen Top Morally, a philosopher who uses his professional competence for
anything except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a
kind of treachery. Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings? Philosophy is a stubborn attempt to think clearly. ~ William James Top Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is
answers that may never be qustions. ... philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex: it's cheaper, easier and some people prefer it. ~ Steve Jones The first step toward philosophy is doubt. ~ Denis Diderot Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore
independence of all social, political, or religious prejudice. The beginning and end of all philosphy is--freedom. Philosophy asks the simple question, what is it all about? It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious. ~ Jean Piaget Top Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite
answers to its questions ... but rather for the sake of the questions
themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what
is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the
dogmatic assurance which The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people. ~ Mark Twain Top The great virtue of philosphy is that it teaches not what to think,
but how to think. "Can you tell me, boss," he said, and his voice sounded
deep and earnest in the warm night, "what all these things
mean? Who made them all? And why? And, above all" - here Zorba's
voice trembled with anger and fear - "why do people die?" PROGRESS Progress is a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history. ~ Stephen Jay Gould Top Progress, then, as I see it, is to be measured by the accuracy of man's knowledge of nature's forces. If you examine this sentence carefully you will observe that I conceive progress as a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets ahead, in other words, by discarding the theory of today for the fact of tomorrow. Moses believed that the earth was flat, Caesar believed that his family doctor could cure pneumonia, and Columbus believed that devils entered into harmless old women and turned them into witches... You and I, knowing that all three of these distinguished men were wrong in their beliefs, are their superiors to that extent. ~ H. L. Mencken Top One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes the wicked have committed, but by the punishments the good have inflicted; a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurance of the crime. ~ Oscar Wilde The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever. ~ Chinese Proverb Top There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to. ~ Joseph Heller Our whole dignity consists in thought. Let us endeavor, then, to think well: this is the principle of ethics. ~ Blaise Pascal It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone to believe upon insufficient evidence. ~ W. K. Clifford Top You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place. ~ Jonathan Swift To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true. ~ Bertrand Russell It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him. ~ Abraham Lincoln Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God. Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. ~ Mark Twain Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be decieved to his heart's content. ~ Will Durant How noble is reason! How infinite in faculty! ... in apprehension
how like a god! Intelligence is the only moral guide. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters:
united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of
her wonders. So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light. ~ Lucretius Top And generally let every student of nature take this as a rule: that whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion, and that so much the more care is to be taken dealing with such questions to keep the understanding even and clear. ~ Francis Bacon The Church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round,
for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in
a shadow than in the Church. He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave. ~ William Drummond Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing us the consequences and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be? ~ Arthur Schopenhauer Does the human being reason? No; he thinks, muses, reflects,
but does not reason...that is, in the two things which are the peculiar
domain of the heart, not the mind, politics and religion. He doesn't
want to know the other side. It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Top It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. ~ Bertrand Russell Top For every complex question there's a simple answer--and it is clever, neat, and wrong. ~ H. L. Mencken Our thinking tends to be hazy, hasty, narrow, or sprawling--causal terms for impulsive. Just like anything else, thinking skills require upkeep. If they aren't nourished, they'll fade away. ~ David Perkins It is much easier to do and die than it is to reason why. ~ H. A. Studdert Kennedy. The weapon that most readily conquers reason is terror and violence. Most people would rather die than think--in fact, they do! ~ Bertrand Russell Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage s man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! "Have courage to use your own reason!"- that is the motto of enlightenment. ~ Immanuel Kant I wish to propose for the reader's' favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesireable to believe a proposition when there is no good ground for supposing it to be true. ~ Betrand Russell Top Why continue? Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug their superstitions to their breast. ~ Isaac Asimov Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? ~ Douglas Adams Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration--courage,
clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth. If you want to make a little money, write a book. If you want to make a lot of money, create a religion. ~ L. Ron Hubbard (founder of scientology) I am myself a dissenter from all know religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. Religion is based ... mainly on fear ... fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand .. My own view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. ~ Bertrand Russell Top Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful. ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca Top I count religion but a childish toy and hold there is no sin but
ignorance. The Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principle enemy of moral progress in the world. ~ Bertrand Russell Top With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. ~ Steven Weinberg Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of ]mankind trained from infancy to believe in error. ~ Robert Owen Top The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. ~ H. L. Mencken Top The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. ~ George Bernard Shaw Top Religion ... the universal ... neurosis of humanity. ~ Sigmund Freud Top Religion is the opiate of the masses. ~ Karl Marx Top Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence,
it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion. ~ Thomas Hobbes Top Religion is all bunk. ~ Thomas Edison Top It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.
There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality. ~ Jeremy Bentham The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches. ~ Jeremy Bentham, There is no point beating around the bush. Supernatural concepts
have no philosophical warrant. Furthermore, it is not that such
concepts are displaced only if we accept, from the start, a naturalistic
or scientific vision of things. There simply are no good arguments--theological,
philosophical, humanistic, or scientific--for beliefs in divine
beings, miracles, or heavenly afterlives. These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. ~ Sigmund Freud Top In exchange for obedience, Christianity promises salvation in an afterlife; but in order to elicit obedience through this promise, Christianity must convince men that they need salvation, that there is something to be saved from. Christianity has nothing to offer a happy man living in a natural, intelligible universe. If Christianity is to gain a motivational foothold, it must declare war on earthly pleasure and happiness, and this, historically, has been its precise course of action. In the eyes of Christianity, man is sinful and helpless in the face of God, and is potential fuel for the flames of hell. Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation. ~ George H Smith In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides. ~ Heinrich Heine I knew that man's womanish heart has constant need of consolation,
a need to which that super-shrewd sophist the mind is constantly
ready to minister. I began to feel that every religion which promises
to fulfull human desires is If I have said anything about religions and religion that seems
harsh, I have said those things because of a firm belief that the
claim on the part of religions to possess a monopoly of ideals and
of the supernatural means by which I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. ~ Charles Darwin Top I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous sturcture of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of tthe Reason that manifests itself in nature. ~ Albert Einstein Top One does well to put on gloves when reading the New Testament.
The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do this.
The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing
one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion. There is no greater social evil than religion. It is the cancer in the body of humanity. Human credulity and superstition, and the need for comforting fables, will never be extirpated, so relgion will always exist, at least among the uneducated. The only way to manage the dangers it presents is to confine it entirely to the private sphere, and for the public domain to be blind to it in all but one respect: that by law no one's private beliefs should be allowed to cause a nuisance or an injury to anyone else. ~ A.C. Grayling The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known. ~ John Stuart Mill Top With or without [religion] you'd have good people doing good things
and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil
things, it takes religion. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. ~ Blaise Pascal The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events--that is, if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it goes through. Hence science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. ~ Albert Einstein Top Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world. If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities. Superstition, born of paganism and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil. Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense. ~ Voltaire Top No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter ... than you and I; and all religion ... is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry. ~ Edgar Allan Poe Top I found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. Surely the writers had a very low idea of the nature of their god. They made him not only anthropomorphic, but of the very lowest type, jealous and revengeful, loving violence rather than mercy. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of women. The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton Top There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: 'Let us be friends.' It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: 'Let us agree not to step on each other's feet.' For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said, "Think!" The many have said, "Believe!" ~ Robert Green Ingersoll Top Faith is believing what you know ain't so. "In God We Trust." I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true. It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast. [The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. Man is a marvelous curiosity . . . he thinks he is the Creator's pet . . . he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea. If there is a God, he is a malign thug. ~ Mark Twain Top The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. ~ Sigmund Freud Top I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. ~ Bertrand Russell Top It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. ~ Albert Einstein Top You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible
fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate
in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain.
Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt,
by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into
benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is
the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite
intelligent enough. Maybe this world is another planet's hell. History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it. Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proven innocent. ~ Robert A. Heinlein Top To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.... It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the truth of a religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it - and the only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief. ~ Sir Peter Brian Medawar Top I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the
power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will--and
a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their
degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion
is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. 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. We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same
sense and to the same extent that we respect his theory that his
wife is beautiful and his children smart. Religion is so absurd
that it comes close to imbecility. He who begins by loving Christianty better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings. ~ H. L. Mencken Top Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence
of the improbable. . . . A man full of faith is simply one who has
lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill. The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on it divine inspiration. ~ Carl Sagan During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. ~ Mark Twain God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters. ~ H. L. Mencken Top For centuries, theologians have attempted to explain the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing. ~ H. L. Mencken Top You dispute, you quarrel, you fight for that which is uncertain, that of which you doubt. O men! Is this not folly? ... We must trace a line of distinction between those that are capable of verification, and those that are not, and separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities, that is to say, all civil effect must be taken away from theological and religious opinions. ~ C. F. Volney The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which
there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology,
not in arithmetic. ... I cannot see as plainly as others do, evidence of design and
beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery
in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent
god would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express
intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars,
or that a cat should play with mice. The human psyche has two greate sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion gives strong sanction to both--and mixes explosively with both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. ~ Richard Dawkins Fear of power invisible, feingned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed is religion; not allowed is superstion. ~ Thomas Hobbes Those to whom his word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses. There wasn't anyone else around when Mohammed got the word, either. Mormon Joseph Smith and Christian Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy, had exclusive audiences with God. We have to trust them as reporters--and you know how reporters are. They'll do anything for a story. ~ Andy Rooney For anyone with eyes to see, there can be no doubt that religious faith remains a perpetual source of human conflict. Religion persaudes otherwise intelligent men and women to not think, or to think badly, about questions of civilizational importance. And yet it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in our society ... What is worst in us (outright delusion) has been elevated beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best (reason and intellectual honesty) must remain hidden, for fear of giving offense. ~ Sam Harris The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don’t understand it. ~ George Santayana The aim of a religious movement is to inflict a malady on society, then offer the religion as a cure. ~ Eric Hoffer Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity? ~ Arthur C. Clarke History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unkonwn without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it. ~ Robert A. Heinlen You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. ~ Aldous Huxley There is so much in the bible against which every insinct of my being rebels, so much so that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end. I do not think that the knowledge I have gained of its history and sources compensates me for the unpleasant details it has forced upon my attention. ~ Helen Keller 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 Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. ~ Kurt Vonnegut RELIGION (ACCORDING TO SOME OF AMERICAN'S FOUNDERS) It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. ~ Thomas Jefferson Top Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it
is always the I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies. ~ Benjamin Franklin Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible [by which Paine means the Old Testament] is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit. ~ Thomas Paine Top During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution. In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people. Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise. ~ James Madison Top I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of [hu]mankind has preserved - the Cross. Consider what calamaties that engine of grief has produced! ~ John Adams Top The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma. ~ Abraham Lincoln Religion is based upon blind faith supported by no evidence. Science is based upon confidence that results from evidence. ... Science approaches truth, closer and closer ... Religion already has it all decided, and it's 'in the book.' It's dogma, unchangeable, and unaffected by .. whatever facts we come upon in the real world. ~ James Randi Science makes godlike - it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such - it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the original sin. This alone is morality. “Thou shall not know” - the rest follows. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche You will find men like him in all of the world’s religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now. ~ Arthur C. Clarke
All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike--and yet it the most precious thing we have. ~ Albert Einstein It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science. ~ Charles Darwin Top Artists may pour out their angst; philosophers and theologians may fume, lament, and obfuscate; but only science can know. ~ Stephen Jay Gould There is nothing which can better serve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. ~ George Washington At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.... ~ Carl Sagan Top If we were to back off from science and technology, we would in
fact be condemning most of the human population of the Earth to
death. The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible. ~ Francis Bacon Top For my part, I have no doubt, although progressive changes are
to be expected in physics, the present doctrines are likely to be
nearer to the truth, than any rival doctrines now before the world.
Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong,
and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories
of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.
Thus have I made as it were a small globe of the intellectual world, as truly and faithfully as I could discover. ~ Francis Bacon Top Those to whom intellectual freedom is personally important may be a minority in the community, but among them are the [humans] of most importance to the future. We have seen the importance of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin in this history of mankind, and it is not to be supposed that the future will produce no more such men. If they are prevented from doing their work and having their due effect, the human race will stagnate, and a new Dark Ages will succeed, as the earlier Dark Ages succeeded the brilliant period of antiquity. New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruely and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species. ~ Betrand Russell Top We shall not seek from exploration But to me the search for unity is much more substantial than the
affirmation of unity; the need and the search, and the idea that
one is working at it ... We declare at the outset that we do not make any positive assertion
that anything we shall say is wholly as we affirm it to be. We merely
report accurately on each thing as our impressions of it are at
the moment. Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact propoertion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a skeptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging skepticism. ~ Carl Sagan I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. Skeptics are the watchmen of reasoning errors, aiming to expose
bad ideas. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, hten those in power work for us. In every country we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and hte enveloping darkness. ~ Carl Sagan Top ... continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. ~ Thomas Hobbes Top If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due
to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have
the power to revoke at any moment. Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. ~ Robert F. Kennedy Top SUNDAY Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves
were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and
in Hell. TECHNOLOGY Technology does not drive change at all. Technology merely enables change. It's our collective cultural response to the options and opportunities presented by technology that drives change. ~ Paul Saffo If scientists don't play God, who will? ~ James Watson Top Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. ~ Albert Camus There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking. ~ Sir Joshua Reynolds No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. ~ Voltaire You can lead me to college, but you can't make me think. ~ College Sweatshirt
As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins. ~ Albert Schweitzer Top What good fortune for those in power that people don't know how
to think. We are such things as dreams are made on. ~ Shakespeare If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.~ Betrqnd Russell I don't know what I may seem to the world. But to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then to find a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. ~ Isaac Newton Wa are but thinking reeeds; but because we know, we are superior to the universe. Thought constitutes our greatness. ~ Blaise Pascal When people learn no tool of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulations are sown. ~ Stephen J. Gould A person who does not think about life is a stranger mapless in a foreign land, for one such, lost and without directions, any turning in the road is as good as any other, and if it takes him somewhere worthwhile it will have done so by the merest chance. ~ A. C. Grayling Top So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, lead nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world. ~ Stanislave Andreski Dost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that's the
stuff life is made of. All the tragedies which we can imagine, return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time. ~Simone Weil Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. ~ Will Durant "I believe in transhumanism": once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny. ~ Julian Huxley Top It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. ~ Edmund Way Teale Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. ~ Mark Twain ...in matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it can carry you without other considerations... do not pretend the conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable. It is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley. Top Truth is the greatest secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel It you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life, you doubt, as far as possible, all things. ~ Rene Descartes Top A credulous mind ... finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such. ~ Samuel Butler It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle The foundation of morality is to ... give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge. ~ T. H. Huxley Top Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee
of truth Nothing is too wonderful to be true. ~ Michael Faraday Top One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any
proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon
will warrant. In war, truth is the first casualty. ~ Aeschylus Top Truth emerges from the clash of adverse ideas. ~ John Stuart Mill I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. ~ Baruch Spinoza It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. ~ Upton Sinclair Out yonder there was this huge world... which stands before us like a great eternal riddle ~ Albert Einstein My own suspicion is that the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose. ~ John B. Haldane Top Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife. ~ Bertrand Russell The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation …(their) vision does not penetrate the surface of things. ~ Henry David Thoreau Top Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. ~ Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials To carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows? ~ Noam Chomsky Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. ~ Buddha Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things
you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines.
Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover. Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, happiness, which is everything in the world. ~ Blaise Pascal This feeling of wonder is the touchstone of the philosopher, and all philosophy has its origins in wonder. ~ Plato Top But words are things, and a small drop of ink, I don't know what I think until I see myself write. ~ Annie Dillard There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers. ~ H. L. Mencken I write to understand as much as to be understood. ~ Elie Wiesel The relation of word to thought, and the creation of new concepts, is a complex, delicate, and enigmatic process unfolding in our soul. ~ Leo Tolstoy The writer of today, if he is truly alive, is someone who suffers and worries at the sight of reality. He is led to co-operate with all the still surviving powers of light to advance man's burdensome destiny a little. The modern writer, if he is true to his mission, is a fighter. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis Top Learn as much by writing as by reading. ~ Lord Acton We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still, we show be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road, we shall be dashed to pieces. We do no certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? Be strong and of good courage. Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. ... If death ends all, we cannot meet death better. ~ William James (quoting Fitz-James Stephen) Top Young philosophers because they are made to specialize immediately
on entering the university in a discipline which the greatest thinkers
in the history of philosophy have entered only after years of scientific
investigations, Youth is often too sure of its future. The imagination paints the vision of success and fortune in the rosiest tints; the sufferings and disappointments of which one hears are for youth but the exception which proves the rule; the instinctive and blind faith of youth is in the relative happiness of some form of external success. Maturity, on the other hand, has often learned to be content with scraps and fragments, wretched crumbs saved out of the disasters on which its early hopes suffered shipwreck. Youth pursues an ideal that is illusory; age has learned, O wretched wisdom! to do without an ideal altogether. But the ideal is there ... and no mirages of happiness or clouds of disappointment, not the stupor of habit or the frivolity of thoughtlessness, can entirely erase the sense of it from the depths of the soul. ~ David Swenson Top There is no evil I have to accept because 'there's nothing I can do about it'. There is no abused child, no oppressed peasant, no starving beggar, no crack-addicted infant, no cancer patient, literally no one that I cannot look squarely in the eye. I'm working to save everybody, heal the planet, solve all the problems of the world. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky Top |