QUOTES
provided by Lois Lyons
This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there
were no religions in it.
- John Adams
If you have
two religions in your land, the two will cut each other's throats; but if you
have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace.
- Voltaire
Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would
have repudiated his doctrine.
- Friedrich
Nietzsche
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke
about it.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere,
may be happy.
- H.L. Mencken
If the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't,
it's that girls should stick to girls' sports, such as hot oil wrestling, foxy
boxing, and such and such.
- Homer
Simpson
In conclusion, there is a marvelous anecdote from the occasion of Bertrand
Russell's ninetieth birthday that best serves to summarize his attitude toward
God and religion. A London lady sat next to him at this party, and over the soup
she suggested to him that he was not only the world's most famous atheist but,
by this time, very probably the world's oldest atheist. What will you do, Bertie,
if it turns out you're wrong? she asked. I mean, what if--uh--when the time
comes, you should meet Him? What will you say? Russell was delighted with the
question. His bright, birdlike eyes grew even brighter as he contemplated this
possible future dialogue, and then he pointed a finger upward and cried, Why, I
should say, 'God, you gave us insufficient evidence.'
- Al
Seckel
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
Science tells us what we can know but what we can know
is little and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive of many
things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand induces a dogmatic
belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so
generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in
the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish
to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.
- Bertrand
Russell
The world is not a prison house but a kind of spiritual
kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with
the wrong blocks.
- Edwin Arlington
Robinson
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the
occurrence of the improbable.
-
H. L. MENCKEN
On Being An American (1922)
It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into
trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so.
ARTEMUS WARD [Charles Farrar Browne] 1860s
The human understanding supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds; and although many things in nature be sui generis and most irregular, will yet invest parallels and conjugates and relatives where no such thing exists.
FRANCIS BACON, Novum Organum, 1600s
Remember then, that science is the guide of action, that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate witout error, but that which we may act upon without fear and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD
Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought (1872)
