Quotes
Anne Lamott
You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Benjamin Franklin
Lighthouses are more usefull than churches.
John Adams
This would be the best of all possable worlds if there were no religion in it.
Thomas Jefferson
Christianity is the most perverted system they ever shone on man.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787
Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Richard Price, Jan. 8, 1789
I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814
Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith, August, 6, 1816
My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Correa de Serra, April 11, 1820
Priests...dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did.
Joseph Stalin
The death of one is a tragedy, but death of a million is just a statistic.
Voltaire
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
John F. Kennedy
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
Ernest Gaines
Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?
Marilyn Manson
Is adult entertainment killing our children? or is killing our children entertaining our adults?
Marilyn Manson
I never said to be like me, I say to be like you and make a difference.
Marilyn Manson
People tend to associate anyone who looks and behaves differently with illegal or immoral activity.
Marilyn Manson
We live in a society of victimization, where people are much more comfortable being victimized than actually standing up for themselves.
Jules Renard
I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
Frank Lloyd Wright
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
Benjamin Franklin
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.
Benjamin Franklin
In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack of it.
Thomas Paine
What is it the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
Thomas Paine
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
Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
John Adams
I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved-- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!
Benjamin Franklin, in Toward The Mystery
I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.
Thomas Paine
Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
Thomas Paine, writing to Andrew Dean August 15, 1806
As to the book called the bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions and a history of bad times and bad men.
The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, Vol. 9 p. 134
That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
Thomas Paine
There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice....
The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine, p. 104
The Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.
George Washington, address to Congress, 8 January, 1790
There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
Ethan Allen, Reason the Only Oracle of Man, pamphlet, 1784
In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.
Abraham Lincoln
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, from “What Great Men Think Of Religion” by Ira Cardiff
It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.
President John F. KennedyI believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson Bible
The Christian God is a being of terrific character -- cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.
Thomas Jefferson
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson Bible
It is between fifty and sixty years since I read the Apocalypse, and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac.
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr
The Christian god can be easily pictured as virtually the same as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of the people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.
Susan B. Anthony
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
Susan B. Anthony
To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Thomas Jefferson, to Baron von Humboldt, 1813
History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.
John Adams
The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?
Thomas Edison
I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.
Mark Twain, Mark Twain and the Bible
The Bible is "a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.
Mark Twain
It is not the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain
The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
Mark Twain
A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.
Mark Twain
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company
Mark Twain, “Letters From the Earth
...Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God.'
Albert Einstein
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
Albert Einstein, letter to Hoffman and Dukas, 1946
The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.
Carl Sagan
Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.
Carl Sagan
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.
Carl Sagan
You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe
Stephen W. Hawking, Der Spiegel, 1989
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
Richard Dawkins
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Sigmund Freud
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Stephen Jay Gould, “The Verdict on Creationism”, The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186
The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents.
Gene Roddenberry
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.
Historian Henry Roberts (1901-1971)
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.
Becky
No woman will ever be truly satisfied because no man will ever have a Chocolate penis that ejaculates money.
Hugh Laurie
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people.
Ian McKellen; Interview on the ‘Today Show’, 05/06
I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction.
Walter Cronkite
There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.
Walter Cronkite
America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
Walter Cronkite
We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Instead of working on budget, the Legislature is about to debate whether cows can keep their tails while we're in a fiscal crisis.
Benjamin Franklin
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Josh M. ( A IM to Eric Hamby)
I hated star wars until i played SWG, I loved fantasy until i played WOW
Josh M. ( A IM to Eric Hamby)
SWG got me back into Star wars, WOW killed my desire to ever play a fantasy game ever again
Misdirection is the key to survival. Never attack when your enemy defends. Never behave as your enemy expects, and never reveal your true strength. If knowledge is power, then to be unknown is to be unconquerable....
