Quotes

A Few of My Favorite Quotes

“I believe that life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.” -- Marjory Stoneman Douglas

"Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." -- Henry Ford

“We must be ready to learn from one another, not claiming that we alone possess all truth and that somehow we have a corner on God.” -- Desmond Tutu

“I am not frightened of my beliefs. If there is a God who is threatening me with damnation because I don't believe in Him, so be it. I've lived my life in conscience, and I will suffer damnation willingly in conscience against a tyrannical God who would damn me because, on the basis of the intelligence He gave me, I have come to a conclusion doubting His existence.” -- Alan Dershowitz

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence” 
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) British philosopher, Nobel Laureate, mathematician

If you want to believe in god, “Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn't do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of "being godlike".” -- Peter Kreeft (1937-    ) Professor of philosophy and Christian apologetics author, Before I Go: Letters to Our Children about What Really Matters

“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually un-respectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.” 
-- Isaac Asimov

“CALVIN: This whole Santa Claus thing just doesn't make sense. Why all the secrecy? Why all the mystery? If the guy exists why doesn't he ever show himself and prove it? And if he doesn't exist what's the meaning of all this?
HOBBES: I dunno. Isn't this a religious holiday?
CALVIN: Yeah, but actually, I've got the same questions about God.” 
-- Bill Watterson

“Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-seeing Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood of believing in God.” 
-- Scott Dikkers, You Are Worthless: Depressing Nuggets of Wisdom Sure to Ruin Your Day

“I don't know how you feel, but I'm pretty sick of church people. You know what they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate.” 
-- George Carlin

“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.” 
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936, U.K. philosopher, journalist, lay theologian)

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.” 
-- Albert Einstein

“I have a problem with people who take the Constitution loosely and the Bible literally.” 
-- Bill Maher

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”
-- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.” 
-- Haruki Murakami (1949-     ) Japanese author, Kafka on the Shore

“There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.” 
-- Ruth Hurmence Green [American author 1915-1981]

“There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.” -- Richard Lederer (1938-    ), Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language

“It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.” 
-- Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) American journalist and essayist, Minority Report

“If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.” 
-- Napoléon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

“The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden story. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.' ” 
-- Frank Zappa (1940-1993) American musician 

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.” 
-- Umberto Eco (1932-2016) Italian novelist, The Prague Cemetery

“Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.” 
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) German philosopher
  (This one I believe should be "trains what to think"; I think that's what he actually meant.)

“The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.' ” 
-- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.” 
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Irish poet, playwright