Influencial Quotes
Posted on: June 24, 2008 - 3:31am
Offline
Influencial Quotes
Heres a quote that basically sums up my position on religion. I'd like to find out what quotes sum up your reasoning for what you believe.
“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)
"Faith means not wanting to know what is true"
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
- Login to post comments
"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"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
"If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction."
Judith Hayes
Psalm 14:1 "the fool hath said in his heart there is a God"-From a 1763 misprinted edition of the bible
Argument from Sadism: Theist presents argument in a wall of text with no punctuation and wrong spelling. Atheist cannot read and is forced to concede.
I don't think I'd be able to find enough quotes to even begin summarizing my reasoning, but here's a few quotes of which I'm particularly fond...
If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.
-- Baron d'Holbach
The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
-- Sir Richard Burton
Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss'd
Of the Two Worlds so wisely—they are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn
Are scattered, and their mouths are stopped with Dust.
-- Omar Khayyám
If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.
-- Lord Byron
Stultior stulto fuisti, qui tabellis crederes!
"Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over."
-- Frank Zappa
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
oooh, I luuuve quotes. Matter of fact I collect them. I plan on printing long lists out and hang them in my room in frames, since my walls need some shining up.
Unfortunately my quote collection is on my lap top hard disk, which is currently Out Of Action, so until I get that recovered, I have to make do with a few I can quote from memory or find around on the net just now.
Bear in mind though, that these may not have much to do with Religion/atheism. But I encourage anyone to post more quotes here that are funny/profound/thoughtprovoking/tongue-in-cheek et.c. since I collect them and are always on the lookout for more.
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
- Douglas Adams
"I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."
- Galileo Galilei
"I must take issue with the term 'a mere child,' for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult."
And
"Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep."
- Fran Lebowitz
"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."
- Mark Twain
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
- Dorothy Parker
And the master of quotes, the unequaled genious and wit that is:
Oscar Wilde.
"I am not young enough to know everything."
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong."
"Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."
"One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason."
"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."
And my personal favorite:
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
Well I was born an original sinner
I was spawned from original sin
And if I had a dollar bill for all the things I've done
There'd be a mountain of money piled up to my chin
Oh, and also, "There are no atheists in foxholes", usually credited to Ernie Pyle, a journalist embeded with the soldiers in the Pasific theatre during WWII, is a quote I'm sure you're all familiar with.
Apart from the fact that it is blatantly untrue, and I'm sure everyone here can name examples of that, I think there is also a nasty tendency for people who love to throw this quote about to overlook one important question: What is it really an argument for?
Which is why another favorite quote of mine is:
" 'There are no atheists in foxholes' isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes."
- American novelist James Morrow
Well I was born an original sinner
I was spawned from original sin
And if I had a dollar bill for all the things I've done
There'd be a mountain of money piled up to my chin
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house unless they have a well-stocked bar.
Don't worry about your heart, it will last you as long as you live
Thou shalt not steal--only from other comedians
If I ever found a church that didn't believe in knocking all the other churches, I might consider joining it.
I think of the church often. Not because religion was closing in on me, but because for a long time my ass was sore from that hard, unupholstered pew.
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain unless you've used up all the other four-letter words
I admit I scanned it once, searching for some movie plots... (but found) only a pack of wild lies
No doubt exists that all women are crazy, it's only a question of degree
Thou shalt not covet they neighbor's wife unless she's a beauty.
Liberty and Freedom and Worship---there is a super-abundance of all three in this U.S.A under the law. The only people who are not being meted out full portions are the colored folks.
W.C. Fields
One half of the world does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me.
I find that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication.
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
Life is too important to be taken seriously
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Women are made to be loved, not understood
Oscar Wilde
If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?
--Justin Brown
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
-Benjamin Franklin
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
-Bertrand Russell
"I've yet to witness circumstance successfully manipulated through the babbling of ritualistic nonsense to an imaginary deity." -- me (josh)
If god can do anything, can he make a hot dog so big even he can't eat all of it?
An American soldier in Iraq recently made headlines for fighting back against harassment he was receiving for being an atheist. After surviving a rocket attack on his humvee, he was asked if he believed in god. His response was classic :"No, but I believe in plexiglass."
"Faith, Faith is an island in the setting sun,
but proof, proof is the bottom line for everyone."
Proof, Paul Simon
Nothing this hard should taste so beefy.
Not real big on holding one particular position, mental or physical.. But on that note there's this:
"An unsophisticated forecaster uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts - for support rather than for illumination." Andrew Lang
Why do people quote bertrand russell so much? I'm not saying that you shouldn't quote bertrand russell but i just find it curious because people don't usually quote someone if they think that the individual held views or engaged in actions that they would deem suspect or immoral. i never see people quote vi lenin for example.
Russell was an elitist who believed that the world should be run by a tiny group of powerful individuals who impose a kind of techno fascism on everyone where they control every aspect of your life from your access to food to your ability to reproduce, and even your thoughts.
with that said;
"We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the nearby marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation."
- V.I. Lenin
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
I simply tell them, there was ALWAYS at least ONE Atheist in MY foxhole....
Louis Cypher
91B10 Basic Combat Medic
US Army Medical Corps
1970-1976
Christianity: A disgusting middle eastern blood cult, based in human sacrifice, with sacraments of cannibalism and vampirism, whose highest icon is of a near naked man hanging in torment from a device of torture.
Ahem.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you
live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him
you accept him as your master so he can remove an evil force from your soul
that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a snake to
eat from a magical tree. (Unknown)
There are three kinds of men:
The ones that learn by reading.
The few who learn by observation.
The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence.
- (Will Rogers)
"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)
"When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off." (Unknown)
"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities." (Voltaire)
"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." (Hume)
"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind." (DeSade)
"Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?" (Ingersoll)
"Faith is believing what you know ain't so." (Twain)
"'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true." (Twain)
"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand." (Twain)
"Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of." (Twain)
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God." (Edison)
"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." (Shaw)
"I believe that religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't believe in either. I don't believe in God as I don't believe in Mother Goose." (Darrow)
"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 Menckhen)
Driving through a Swiss city one day, (Alfred) Hitchcock suddenly pointed out of the car window and said, "That is the most frightening sight I have ever seen." His companion was surprised to see nothing more alarming that a priest in conversation with a little boy, his hand on the child's shoulder. "Run, little boy," cried Hitchcock, leaning out of the car. "Run for your life!"
"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." (R A Heinlein)
"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 unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time." (Asimov)
LC >;-}>
Christianity: A disgusting middle eastern blood cult, based in human sacrifice, with sacraments of cannibalism and vampirism, whose highest icon is of a near naked man hanging in torment from a device of torture.
Ok maybe some people quote V.I. Lenin... but nobody quotes Stalin.
what did he say? the capitalists will sell us the ropes we hang them with.
try putting that in a quote box
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
The Pope? How many divisions has he got?
-Joseph Stalin
done and done...
What Would Kharn Do?
A pesimist is actually an optimist, thinking, that he still can dare to be a pesimist.
- my modesty
When there's a forest cutting, splinters fall off.
- Josif Vissarion Jugashvili, aka Stalin
When there's a wood planing, shavings fall off.
- Goebbels
When you want to make a pancake, you have to break a few eggs.
- Someone unknown
Strangely, I'm somehow sure that nobody of these people was actually a woodcutter, carpenter or a cook. Maybe it would be better if they were.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
In "You Are All Diseased" he wraps up his hour by saying "There is no god, never was, not a one...and if I'm wrong may he strike this audience dead..."
“There's a cheap debating trick which implies that if, say, science can't explain something, this must mean that some other discipline can. If scientists suspect that all aspects of the mind have a scientific explanation but they can't actually say what that explanation is yet, then of course it's open to you to doubt whether the explanation ever will be forthcoming. That's a perfectly reasonable doubt. But it's not legitimately open to you to substitute a word like soul, or spirit, as if that constituted an explanation. It is not an explanation, it's an evasion. It's just a name for that which we don't understand. The scientist may agree to use the word soul for that which we don't understand, but the scientist adds, "But we're working on it, and one day we hope we shall explain it." The dishonest trick is to use a word like soul or spirit as if it constituted an explanation.” – Richard Dawkins
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” – Carl Sagan
"So how do theists respond to arguments like the Argument from Evil? They say there is a reason for evil, but it is a mystery. Well, let me tell you this: I'm actually one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall. You ask me for proof of this. I have a simple answer: it's a mystery. Just accept my word for it on faith. And that's just the logic theists use in their discussions of evil." -Quentin Smith
“I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.” - Daniel C. Dennett
“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But 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. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.” – Carl Sagan
"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths." – Carl Sagan
I can't remember who said it, but I've always liked, "Purgatory is a place where souls go until a sizable donation to the Church frees them to ascend to Heaven."
Religion is a virus.
Fight the infection.