 Black Belt
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Here is a big list I found on someguy's website and saved a long time ago. There are some good ones in here. Most deal with science, religion, ignorance, and intellectualism in some form or another. Enjoy the scroll bomb!
I want you to have all the academic freedom you want as long as you wind up saying the bible account (of creation) is true and all others are not.
Jerry Falwell (1979)
The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be thankful for our blessings.
Garret Hardin
Creationists use facts the same way a drunk uses a lightpost: for support instead of illumination
Robert Ingersoll
It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known; but 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 science.
Charles Darwin
However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at their scientific and philosophical points, they would be helpless and a laughing-stock if that were all they had. It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for - of even against - evolution, march in the army of the night, their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.
Isaac Asimov (1981)
The final and conclusive evidence against evolution is the fact that the Bible denies it.
Henry Morris
You don't protect any of your individual liberties by lying down and going to sleep.
John Scopes
The main conclusion arrived at in my work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
Charles Darwin
May the son of Charles Darwin send you one word of warm encouragement. To state that which is true cannot be irreligious.
Leonard Darwin (letter to John Scopes)
If the Bible and the microscope do not agee, the microscope is wrong
William Jennings Bryan (1925)
Scientific creationism may be poor science, but it is powerful politics. And politically, it may succeed.
Laurie Godfrey (1981)
Evolution is a laughing matter for anybody that's got a rational mind.
Merle Haggard, 1990
He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
George Bernard Shaw
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
HL Mencken
I contend that we are both atheists, I just believe in one less god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, then you will know why I dismiss yours.
Stephen F. Roberts
Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask if God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.
JBS Haldane (1932)
The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.
James Gleick (1987)
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
Necessity is an interpretation, not a fact.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Theories have four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.
JBS Haldane, 1963
Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection.
Henri Poincare
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
Mark Twain
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell
Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind.
Isaac Asimov
Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.
Albert Szent-Gyoergi
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
Albert Einstein
What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out.
Bertrand Russell
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Galileo Galilei
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -- and therefore never scrutinize or question.
Stephen Jay Gould
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
Mark Twain
A danger sign of the lapse from true skepticism into dogmatism is an inability to respect those who disagree.
In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.
Alfred North Whitehead
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
Herbert Spencer
As long as we do science, some things will always remain unexplained.
Fritjof Capra
One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
Einstein
Name the greatest of all the inventors. Accident.
Mark Twain
The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
Frank Herbert
Let the mind be enlarged... to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind.
Francis Bacon
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
Aristotle
Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it --and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.
C. Rubbia, Nobelist and director of CERN
It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.
H. Poincare
The person who thinks there can be any real conflict between science and religion must be either very young in science or very ignorant of religion.
Joseph Henry
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
Carl Sagan
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck
If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him.
Mark Twain
The common idea that scientists reject a theory as soon as it leads to a contradiction is just not so. When they get something that works at all they plunge ahead with it and ignore its weak spots... scientists are just as bad as the rest of the public in following fads and being influenced by mass enthusiasm.
Vannevar Bush
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
James D. Watson
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are that good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
Howard Aiken
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think they'll hate you.
Don Marquis
The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party.
John Keats
There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
William James
Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
paraphrase of Hanlon's Razor (fm R. Heinlein)
Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.
Napoleon
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
Ashley Montague
Orgel's Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.
Francis Crick
The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles.
JBS Haldane
Einstein - the greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein's name will still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch and William Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which awaits the uncreative mind.
JBS Haldane
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph W. Emerson
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Richard P. Feynman
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that ever word tell.
W. Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein
Owing to the identification of religion with virtue, together with the fact that the most religious men are not the most intelligent, a religious education gives courage to the stupid to resist the authority of educated men, as has happened, for example, where the teaching of evolution has been made illegal. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others.
Bertrand Russell
If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called education. This last is peculiarly dastardly since it takes advantage of the defenselessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practiced in a greater or less degree in the schools of every civilized country.
Bertrand Russell
It is not altogether true that persuasion is one thing and force is another. Many forms of persuasion, even many of which everybody approves, are really a kind of force. Consider what we do to our children. We do not say to them: Some people think the earth is round, and others think it flat; when you grow up, you can, if you like, examine the evidence and form your own conclusion. Instead of this we say: The earth is round. By the time our children are old enough to examine the evidence, our propaganda has closed their minds, and the most persuasive arguments of the Flat Earth Society make no impression. The same applies to the moral precepts that we consider really important, such as don't pick your nose or don't eat peas with a knife., There may, for ought I know, be admirable reasons for eating peas with a knife, but the hypnotic effect of early persuasion has made me completely incapable of appreciating them.
Bertrand Russell
The date of the creation of the world (according to the orthodox view) can be inferred from the genealogies in Genesis, which tell how old each patriarch was when his oldest son was born. Some margin of controversy was permissible, owing to certain ambiguities and to differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text; but in the end Protestant Christendom generally accepted the date 4004 B.C., fixed by Archbishop Usher. Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who accepted this date for the Creation, thought that a careful study of Genesis made even greater precision possible; the creation of man, according to him, took place at 9.00 A.M. on October 23rd. This, however, has never been an article of faith; you might believe, without risk of heresy, that Adam and Eve came into existence on October 16th or October 30th, provided your reasons were derived from Genesis. The day of the week was, of course, known to have been Friday, since God rested on the Saturday.
Bertrand Russell
Boys and young men acquire readily the moral sentiments of their social milieu, whatever these sentiments may be. The boy who has been taught at home that it is wicked to swear, easily loses this belief when he finds that the schoolfellows whom he most admires are addicted to blasphemy.
Bertrand Russell
Until very recently, it was universally believed that men are congenitally more intelligent than women; even so enlightened a man as Spinoza decides against votes for women on this ground. Among white men, it is held that white men are by nature superior to men of other colors, and especially to black men; in Japan, on the contrary, it is thought that yellow is the best color. In Haiti, when they make statues of Christ and Satan, they make Christ black and Satan white. Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.
Bertrand Russell
Some advanced thinkers are of opinion that anyone who differs from the conventional opinion must be in the right. This is a delusion; if it were not, truth would be easier to come by than it is. There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths. I met once an electrical engineer whose first words to me were: How do you do? There are two methods of faith-healing, the one practiced by Christ and the one practiced by most Christian Scientists. I practice the method practiced by Christ. Shortly afterwards, he was sent to prison for making out fraudulent balance-sheets. The law does not look kindly on the intrusion of faith into this region.
Bertrand Russell
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure. The same sort of assurance is demanded, in later life, of those who undertake to lead populations into the Promised Land. Liquidate the capitalists and the survivors will enjoy eternal bliss. Exterminate the Jews and everyone will be virtuous. Kill the Croats and let the Serbs reign. These are samples of the slogans that have won wide popular acceptance in our time. Even a modicum of philosophy would make it impossible to accept such bloodthirsty nonsense. But so long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues. For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias as is possible For human beings. To have insisted upon the introduction of this virtue into philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it can be rendered Fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of which I am a member. The habit of careful veracity acquired in the practice of this philosophical method can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding.
Bertrand Russell
There are some simple maxims which I think might be commended to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. So, if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end. Take, say, such a sentence as the following, which might occur in a work on sociology: Human beings are completely exempt from undesirable behavior patterns only when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favorable circumstances, whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous manner. Let us see if we can translate this sentence into English. I suggest the following: All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had unusual luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing. This is shorter and more intelligible, and says just the same thing. But I am afraid any professor who used the second sentence instead of the first would get the sack. This suggests a word of advice to such of my readers as may happen to be professors. I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose. Take the statement: Some people marry their deceased wives' sisters. I can express this in language which only becomes intelligible after years of study, and this gives me freedom. I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language understand of the people. In these days, when our very lives are at the mercy of the professors, I cannot but think that they would deserve our gratitude if they adopted my advice.
Bertrand Russell
Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm. At any rate, they hold this about the Communist faith. What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define faith as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of faith. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.
Bertrand Russell
Since evolution became fashionable, the glorification of Man has taken a new form. We are told that evolution has been guided by one great Purpose: through the millions of years when there were only slime, or trilobites, throughout the ages of dinosaurs and giant ferns, of bees and wild flowers, God was preparing the Great Climax. At last, in the fullness of time, He produced Man, including such specimens as Nero and Caligula, Hitler and Mussolini, whose transcendent glory justified the long painful process. For my part, I find even eternal damnation less incredible, certainly less ridiculous, than this lame and impotent conclusion which we are asked to admire as the supreme effort of Omnipotence.
Bertrand Russell
According to St. Thomas the soul is not transmitted with the semen, but is created afresh with each man. There is, it is true, a difficulty: when a man is born out of wedlock, this seems to make God an accomplice in adultery. This objection, however, is only specious. There is a grave objection which troubled St. Augustine, and that is as to the transmission of original sin. It is the soul that sins, and if the soul is not transmitted, but created afresh, how can it inherit the sin of Adam? This is not discussed by St. Thomas.
Bertrand Russell
I am constantly asked: What can you, with your cold rationalism, offer to the seeker after salvation that is comparable to the cosy homelike comfort of a fenced dogmatic creed? To this the answer is many-sided. In the first place, I do not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained by the abdication of reason. I do not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained from drink or drugs or amassing great wealth by swindling widows and orphans. It is not the happiness of the individual convert that concerns me; it is the happiness of mankind. If you genuinely desire the happiness of mankind, certain forms of ignoble personal happiness are not open to you. If your child is ill, and you are a conscientious parent, you accept medical diagnosis, however doubtful and discouraging; if you accept the cheerful opinion of a quack and your child consequently dies, you are not excused by the pleasantness of belief in the quack while it lasted.
Bertrand Russell
The agnostic is not quite so certain as some Christians are as to what is good and what is evil. He does not hold, as most Christians in the past held, that people who disagree with the Government on abstruse points of theology ought to suffer a painful death. He is against persecution, and rather chary of moral condemnation. As for sin, he thinks it not a useful notion. He admits, of course, that some kinds of conduct are desirable and some undesirable, but he holds that the punishment of undesirable kinds is only to be commended when it is deterrent or reformatory, not when it is inflicted because it is thought a good thing on its own account that the wicked should suffer. It was this belief in vindictive punishment that made men accept hell. This is part of the harm done by the notion of sin.
Bertrand Russell
It was geology, Darwin, and the doctrine of evolution, that first upset the faith of British men of science. If man was evolved by insensible gradations from lower forms of life, a number of things became very difficult to understand. At what moment in evolution did our ancestors acquire free will? At what stage in the long journey from the ameba did they begin to have immortal souls? When did they first become capable of the kinds of wickedness that would justify a benevolent Creator in sending them into eternal torment? Most people felt that such punishment would be hard on monkeys, in spite of their propensity for throwing coconuts at the heads of Europeans. But how about Pithecanthropus Erectus? Was it really he who ate the apple? Or was it Homo Pekiniensis?
Bertrand Russell
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.
Bertrand Russell
I do not understand where the beauty and harmony of nature are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. Most of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm. Let it not be said that this creature is sent as a punishment for our sins, for it is more prevalent among animals than among humans. I suppose what is meant by this beauty and harmony are such things as the beauty of the starry heavens. But one should remember that the stars every now and again explode and reduce everything in their neighborhood to a vague mist.
Bertrand Russell
There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given I in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.
Bertrand Russell
The raw fruits of the earth were made for human sustenance. Even the white tails of rabbits, according to some theologians, have a purpose, namely to make it easier for sportsmen to shoot them. There are, it is true, some inconveniences: lions and tigers are too fierce, the summer is too hot, and the winter too cold. But these things only began after Adam ate the apple; I before that, all animals were vegetarians, and the season was always spring. If only Adam had been content with peaches and nectarines, grapes and pears and pineapples, these blessings would still be ours.
Bertrand Russell
We read in the Old Testament that it was a religious duty to exterminate conquered races completely, and that to spare even their cattle and sheep was an impiety. Dark terrors and misfortunes in the life to come oppressed the Egyptians and Etruscans, but never reached their full development until the victory of Christianity. Gloomy saints who abstained from all pleasures of sense, who lived in solitude in the desert, denying themselves meat and wine and the society of women, were, nevertheless, not obliged to abstain from all pleasures. The pleasures of the mind were considered to be superior to those of the body, and a high place among the pleasures of the mind was assigned to the contemplation of the eternal tortures to which the pagans and heretics would hereafter be subjected.
Bertrand Russell
The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
Bertrand Russell
I do not believe that a decay of dogmatic belief can do anything but good. I admit at once that new systems of dogma, such as those of the Nazis and the Communists, are even worse than the old systems, but they could never have acquired a hold over men's minds if orthodox dogmatic habits had not been instilled in youth. Stalin's language is full of reminiscences of the theological seminary in which he received his training. 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.
Bertrand Russell
For four and a half months in 1918 I was in prison for pacifist propaganda; but, by the intervention of Arthur Balfour, I was placed in the first division, so that while in prison I was able to read and write as much as I liked, provided I did no pacifist propaganda. I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and began the work for Analysis of Mind. I was rather interested in my fellow prisoners, who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence, as was shown by their having been caught. For anybody not in the first division, especially for a person accustomed to reading and writing, prison is a severe and terrible punishment; but for me, thanks to Arthur Balfour, this was not so. I was much cheered on my arrival by the warder at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion, and I replied agnostic. He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God. This remark kept me cheerful for about a week.
Bertrand Russell
If I were going to construct a God I would furnish him with some ways and qualities and characteristics which the Present One lacks... He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when He could have made him happy with the same effort and He would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy.
Mark Twain
In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
Mark Twain, autobiography
We all do no end of feeling and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.
Mark Twain
In Boston, they ask How much does he know? in New York, How much is he worth? in Philadelphia, Who were his parents? And when an alien observer turns the telescope upon us--advertisedly in our own special interest--a natural apprehension moves us to ask, What is the diameter of his reflector.
Mark Twain
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
Mark Twain
Rats and roaches live by completion under the laws of supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
Wendell Berry
He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
Chinese Proverb
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.
Confucius
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practise whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
Arthur C. Clarke
Now please state the scientific theory of creationism.
Dr. Pepper's imperative
It is a universal condition of the enjoyable that the mind must believe in the existence of a law, and yet have a mystery to move about in.
James Clerk Maxwell
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. The history of our study of our solar system shows us clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources.
-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos television series, quoted from The Carl Sagan Electronic Monument
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.
-- Carl Sagan (source unknown)
It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
-- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed.
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
When you make the finding yourself -- even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light -- you never forget it.
-- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 413
I'll moider da bum.
Heavyweight boxer Tony Galento, when asked what he thought of William Shakespeare
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot (1819-1880)
God, please save me from your followers!
Bumper Sticker
I would have made a good Pope.
Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)
I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
George Santayana (1863-1952)
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
Will Rogers (1879-1935)
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Pray, v.: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time.
Robin Williams, commenting on the Clinton/Lewinsky affair
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
Michel de Montaigne
There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it.
Robert Park (physicist)
The jawbone of an ass is just as dangerous a weapon today as in Sampson's time.
Richard Nixon
The creationists have this creator who is evil, who is small-minded, who is malevolent, and who is not very bright and can't even get his science right. Creationists have made their creator in their own image, in my view.
Ian Plimer
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 (1612-1680)
Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
Francis Crick (1916-)
The business of proving evolution has reached a stage when it is futile for biologists to work merely to discover more and more evidence of evolution. Those who choose to believe that God created every biological species separately in the state we observe them, but made them in a way calculated to lead us to the conclusion that they are the products of an evolutionary development are obviously not open to argument. All that can be said is that their belief is an implicit blasphemy, for it imputes to God an appalling deviousness.
Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975)
The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibilities of application to which any discovery may lead.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-)
Hands that help are better than lips that pray.
Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.
Sinclair Lewis
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Coincidence is the evidence of the True Believer.
Chet Raymo
Where skeptical observation and discussion are suppressed, the truth is hidden. The proponents of such borderline beliefs, when criticized, often point to geniuses of the past who were ridiculed. But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Carl Sagan (1934-1997)
It is obvious that the great majority of humans throughout history have had grossly, even ridiculously, unrealistic concepts of the world. Man is, among many other things, the mistaken animal, the foolish animal. Other species doubtless have much more limited ideas about the world, but what ideas they do have are much less likely to be wrong and are never foolish. White cats do not denigrate black, and dogs do not ask Baal, Jehovah, or other Semitic gods to perform miracles for them.
George Gaylord Simpson (1902-)
The opposition to teaching evolution is, of course, almost always given a religious reason. That may usually be its real basis, but I think it is often a mask, perhaps unconscious, for underlying anti-intellectualism or antiscientism.
George Gaylord Simpson (1902-)
Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. ... Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.
Jimmy Swaggart
I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey. I believe that whenever a human being, of even the highest intelligence and culture, delivers an opinion upon a matter apart from his particular and especial line of interest, training and experience, it will always be an opinion of so foolish and so valueless a sort that it can be depended upon to suggest to our Heavenly Father that the human being is another disappointment and that he is no considerable improvement upon the monkey.
Mark Twain
Today, evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are not based on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
James D. Watson (1928-)
The fact that Newton and Michael Faraday and other scientists of the past were deeply religious shows that religious skepticism is not a prejudice that governed science from the beginning, but a lesson that has been learned through centuries of experience in the study of nature.
Steven Weinberg
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil---that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
Several thousand years ago, a small tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories were embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject.
Tom Weller
[W]e shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.
Lynn White, Jr.
There is, of course, no claim so preposterous that an expert cannot be found to vouch for it.
Robert Park - physicist
Agnosticism is not properly described as a negative creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Atheists do not so much reject God as bad arguments in His favor
Jack Provonsha
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.
John Stewart Mill
All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
Lucretius
< Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.
Peter Ustinov
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectively on sympathy, education and social ties and needs; 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
All substances are poisons: there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison from a remedy.
Paracelsus
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
H.L. Mencken
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
Ralph W Emerson, Journal, 1857
Faith is a fine invention
When gentlemen can see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.
Emily Dickinson, 1880
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
Francis Bacon
The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.
Isaac D'Israeli
Education is the only interest worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man.
Wendell Phillips
The purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.
Cicero
The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
Jacques Martin Barzun
It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought--that is to be educated.
Edith Hamilton
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Malcolm Forbes
< The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience.
Unknown
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Alec Bourne
No passion so effectively robs the mind of its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Nature
Belief and sincerity do not define truth; it exists despite belief and sincerity.
Joshua David Mather
Randomized controlled trials appear to annoy human nature--if properly conducted, indeed they should.
K.F. Schultz
Proof is not anecdotal. Proof is scientific. Show me the research.
Mark Levine, DC
Scientific thinking might be defined as learning to distinguish the exception from the rule. I'd have a hard time entrusting my health to someone who didn't know the difference.
Stan Polanski
On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Finley Peter Dunne
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition
Adam Smith
Man can always believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
Oscar Wilde
The world is run by the people who show up.
Ben Franklin, Will Rogers, Woody Allen?
I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.
Denis Diderot
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? - Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
Abraham Lincoln
Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance
Daniel Davies
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
HL Mencken
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature.
Jacob Bronowski
Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction, but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible.
Aristotle
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
In England it was enough that Newton was the greatest mathematican of his century; in France he would have been expected to be agreeable too.
Jean le Rond d'Alembert
There lives more faith in honest doubt,. Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Alfred Tennyson
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Only the mediocre can always be at their best
HL Mencken
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers
Voltaire
If 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
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The understanding must not therefore be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights, to keep it from leaping and flying.
Francis Bacon
Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.
Francis Bacon
Most of us were taught that the goal of science is power over nature, as if science and power were one thing and nature quite another. Bohr observed to the contrary that the more modest but relentless goal of science is, in his words, "the gradual removal of prejudices." By "prejudice," Bohr meant belief unsupported by evidence.
Richard Rhodes
Science is a differential Equation. Religion is a Boundary Condition.
Alan Turing
Optimistic lies have such an immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his progession
George Bernard Shaw
Some eyes want spectacles to see things clearly and distinctly, but let not those that use them therefore say nobody can see clearly without them.
John Locke
Convictions are greater enemies of truth than lies.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
H.L. Mencken
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H.L. Mencken
A great deal of intelligence may be invested in ignorance if the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The real purpose of (the) scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something that you actually don't
Robert Pirsig
The person who does not read good books has no advantage over the person who can't read them
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The purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present. -Cicero
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