Moderation / Criticism / Exposition / Exposés

David Aaronovitch

• Catholics try, rather unconvincingly, to show how conferring sainthood is different in principle to the pagan apotheosis (the process that made Claudius, for instance, into a God), but the distinction doesn't quite wash. … For people with God on their side, monotheists are a touchy lot. … in Exodus, Moses comes back down off the mountain with the ten commandments, only to find that the wicked Israelites have (with the connivance of his brother, Aaron) built a golden calf to worship and are busy having an orgy round it. So Moses gets the tribe of Levi to go with "sword at side" and massacre 3,000 calf-worshippers. And we are supposed to celebrate such a violation of the freedom to worship. [never mind ignoring the whole "Thou shalt not kill" thing, but then it was in God's name so it was all right]… Why are they so touchy? The problem is partly that all monotheisms are, by their nature, anti-pluralistic. They've got the one true God, and the very latest valid version of his thoughts. It is asking a lot of monotheisms to coexist with other faiths and views. Paganism, on the other hand, is much better suited to modern ideas of tolerance and human rights. Under polytheism you can choose your own god overtly. And it is hard to imagine a group of water-worshippers getting upset because one of their priests was gay. In fact, in shamanistic cultures, homosexuality is much-valued among the holy men. … Actually, it is all about sex. Pagan religions tend to be about a respect for, and a connection with, nature. So, as the Catholic Encyclopaedia notes, it was in the pagan fertility cults associated with the "dying and rising god" that the "worst perversions existed". Old Ishtar, Cybele (later Artemis, later Diana) and Astarte all had their temple whores, and their lewd rites. … Lewd rites: that's exactly what I'd like more of on Thought For The Day. [The Guardian, 15 July 2003]
• Why Jerry [Springer] is such a good show is that it does, in fact, treat what seems to be a light thing – popular culture – seriously. But doesn't it, on the way, cause offence, and cause it a little selectively? … Could we imagine a Prophet in diapers? The Bezhti affair gives this question real salience. The editor of Granta, Ian Jack, writing following the Sikh demonstrations that forced the play's closure, seemed to suggest that some lines were unlikely to be crossed, and crystallised the argument: 'The state has no law forbidding a pictorial representation of the Prophet,' he wrote, 'but I never expect to see such a picture. On the one hand, there is the individual's right to exhibit or publish one; on the other hand, the immeasurable insult and damage to life and property that the exercise of such a right would cause. In this case, we understand that the price is too high.' Back came a furious Salman Rushdie, pointing out that there was a tradition of depictions of the Prophet, and then asking, 'should we now censor ourselves because the current potentates of the Islamic faith are more repressive than their predecessors? Do we have no principles of our own?' This seems to be one of the biggest questions of the moment, given additional topicality because of the proposed 'incitement to religious hatred' law. … When Sikh leader Mohan Singh pointed out that only 5,000 people would have seen Bezhti and asked, 'are you going to upset 600,000 Sikhs in Britain and maybe 20 million outside the UK for that?' he laid down a challenge that it is hard to refuse. And the answer is, 'yes, we probably ought to'. What we are offended by depends mostly on us, not on the person doing the offending. Some Christians decided to be offended, but Jerry also features tap-dancing klansmen and The Producers, famously, features balletic storm-troopers. Blacks and Jews could easily decide that such levity was appalling. Instead they've decided that it's not just tolerable, but wonderful. The subjectivity of offensiveness explains why our race laws are not based on suppressing offensive expression, but actions calculated to incite hatred. … And, if we keep our nerves and carefully explain to all citizens that being offended is an occupational hazard in a free society, then my guess is that in 10 years' time – if it's good enough – Bezhti will be playing to audiences of unoffended Sikhs all over Britain, and Germaine Greer: The Naked Ballet will be premiering on BBC16. [The Guardian, 09 January 2005]

Edward Abbey

• A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

AbuManga

• As an ex-muslim myself, I am baffled by the number of Muslims who believe it is acceptable that apostates should be punished. It is beyond being absurd: why not just let God punish me? Why would he need someone else to do the dirty work for him? It is obvious that the killing of apostates is just a way of containing free thought and preventing its spread within the community. [A Question Of Belief, The Guardian, 30 April 2008] Ah, but they're doing God's work, and they know what that is because someone wrote it down. It's the only reason they have for doing anything, after all, for their lives are so empty otherwise.
• I'm an ex-muslim who doesn't have time for any religion but should I now be given the choice between going to a Christian funeral service or a Muslim one, I'd go for the former. The reason is simple: Christian funerals seem to be about celebrating the life of the defunct, remembering her/him, playing their favourite music, as opposed to the cold, unemotional, Islamic rite which mainly consists of asking God for (yet again) more mercy and less punishment. [Of God, Tea And Auntie Jenny, The Guardian, 21 March 2008]
• I think the problem is not the lack of suitable black role models but the belief that your role models can only be of the ethnicity that you happen to be part of. There are a lot of people that I look up to and I couldn't care less about the colour of their skin or about their ethnic background or religious beliefs. Their achievements in themselves are enough to inspire me. The formula is very simple: work hard and you'll get somewhere. I am black by the way. [Less Notorious BIG, More PhDs, The Guardian, 23 September 2008]
• Religion stifles curiosity, the driving force behind scientific and technological advancement. I remember asking myself, when growing up as a Muslim, why study Nature and the Universe and how everything came about when we "know" that God created everything? All we're left with are nonsensical claims about scientific "truths" in the Quran and about Mecca being the centre of the Earth. An Egyptian friend of mine, who has a PhD in Engineering from one of the UK's top universities once asked me, after his house got broken into : "How can this happen? There are (framed) Quran verses all over the house"(!!!) [Pave With Good Inventions, The Guardian, 25 June 2008]
• Inayat, as an ex-muslim these are the questions I used to ask myself and maybe you should too: - why would an omniscient god create us to judge us afterwards? He knows the future and whether we will be good or evil people long before we were born, so it would be quite unfair of him to punish me for let's say drinking or even not believing in him. Islam juggles the issue of free will and fate (or "maktoub" i.e. "written") with difficulty. - would it make sense to be punished eternally in the most gruesome way (remember that this is the flip side of eternal life) for a finite, time-limited sin, no matter how great? - what is God/Allah getting out of this? What is he trying to prove and to whom? I was a muslim for the first 25 years of my life and I can tell you this: once you realise that all these stories that used to scare us as kids are really man-made myths, life suddenly becomes even more beautiful and enjoyable. [Is Death The End?, The Guardian, 18 March 2008]
• One should not forget to mention that "Islamic" science, philosophy and arts bloomed within a context that would be considered liberal and secular even by today's standards. Unfortunately the Muslim World (if there is such a thing) today is completely devoid of such propitious conditions. We're left to bask in past glories and vacuous talk of "Scientific Miracles of the Quran", (i.e how everything from the atom to the Big Bang theory and even Evolution, while we're at it, has been mentioned in the Holy Book). Conservatism, superstition and religious prevalence in Muslim countries contribute to stifling scientific progress and freethinking. Why search for answers when the Quran provides them all? Why develop technology to make our lives better if God wanted it to be this way? There was some great science done by great scientists who happen to be Muslim, in Muslim countries. It is not, however, "Islamic Science"; not more than gravity is "Christian" and general relativity is "Jewish". [It's Time To Herald The Arabic Science That Prefigured Darwin And Newton, The Guardian, 30 January 2008]

Martha Ackelsberg

• Hierarchies make some people dependent on others, blame the dependent for their dependency, and then use that dependency as a justification for further exercise of authority.

Lord Acton

• Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. [26 February 1877]

Clark Adams

• If atheism is a religion, then health is a disease.

Douglas Adams

• Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Henry Brooks Adams

• The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved.

John Adams

• As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? [letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, 27 December 1816]
• As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext, arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. [Treaty Of Peace And Friendship With Tripoli, Article XI]
• The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolised learning. And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes. [letter to John Taylor]
• God has infinite wisdom, goodness and power; he created the universe; his duration is eternal, a parte ante and a parte post. His presence is as extensive as space. What is space? An infinite spherical vacuum. He created this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory; and with deliberate design of making nine-tenths of our species miserable for ever for his glory. This is the doctrine of Christian theologians, in general, ten to one. Now, my friend, can prophecies or miracles convince you or me that infinite benevolence, wisdom, and power, created, and preserves for a time innumerable millions, to make them miserable forever, for his own glory? Wretch! What is his glory? Is he ambitious? Does he want promotion? Is he vain, tickled with adulation, exulting and triumphing in his power and the sweetness of his vengeance? Pardon me, my Maker, for these awful questions. My answer to them is always ready. I believe no such things. My adoration of the author of the universe is too profound and too sincere. The love of God and his creation – delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existence – though but an atom, a molecule organique in the universe – are my religion. [letter to Thomas Jefferson, 14 September 1813]

Wayne Adkins

• So ask yourself what you believe. Is it that every species of animal once survived for a year on a single wooden boat? That the earth is only 10,000 years old? That God divided people by race and language because people were "too united"? That Samson killed thousands of men with a jawbone because he didn't cut his hair? That unicorns once existed? That Jonah lived in a whale for three days? That after 2,000 years of waiting, Jesus is going to return? Why do you believe these things? It's time to grow up and put the God fairy-tale where it belongs, in your past alongside Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and the monster under your bed. [24 April 2005] 10,000 years? Don't be silly, we all know it's 6,000!

'Adonis' (Ali Ahmad Said Asbar)

• The Muslims today – forgive me for saying this – with their accepted interpretation, are the first to destroy Islam, whereas those who criticize the Muslims – the non-believers, the infidels, as they call them – are the ones who perceive in Islam the vitality that could adapt it to life. These infidels serve Islam better than the believers. [11 March 2006]
• … the religious interpretations that compel Muslim women to wear the veil in secular countries where church and state have long been separated and where equality of the sexes is firmly established, reveals a mentality that is not content merely with veiling woman, but seeks to shroud man, society, life in general – to pull the veil over the eyes of reason itself. [Index On Censorship, 4/2003]
• There can be no living culture in the world if you cannot criticize its foundations – the religion. We lack the courage to ask any question about any religious issue. For example, as a Muslim, I cannot say a single word about the Prophet Moses. The Prophet Moses did not say anything to me as a Muslim, whereas the Israeli Jew can criticize Moses and all the prophets in the Torah, and he can even question the divinity of the Torah. [26 November 2006]

Theodore Adorno

• If voting could change the system, it would be illegal.

Tanveer Ahmed

• As long as Muslims view their religion as sitting above history and culture – with the Koran as the literal word of God, which in their view makes Islam undebatable – there will always be Hilalis who can point to certain texts and argue for a social and legal structure consistent with 7th-century Arabia. Let's not forget that a senior British cleric lavished praise on Hilali in response to this incident, saying Australia was lucky to have him, and suggesting he was "one of the greatest Islamic scholars in the world". This is a man who knows the Koran in intimate detail and his views are consistent with a strict reading of the Muslim holy book. And if you believe the Koran is the literal word of God, how is anything other than a strict interpretation appropriate? All the world's religions have passages that are abhorrent or inappropriate to the modern age. But they were revolutionary in their time and can still inspire us today. If Islam is seen in its context, as a product of history and not above it, there could be a meaningful debate about whether a version of the religion, inspired by but not chained to its past, can and contribute to modernity and human progress. The Hilali incident and the loud chorus of his defenders suggest this is still some way off. [The Australian, 30 October 2006]

Zalikha Ahmed, Director, Apna Haq Refuge, Yorkshire

• We have to be careful with the police, especially the Asian ones. We don't visit the station where certain Asian officers are on because some of them are perpetrators and one of them on the record said he would not arrest someone who used force on his wife. [The Telegraph, 29 June 2008]

Decca Aitkenhead

• Christian faith in its modern Church of England incarnation is a stunningly senseless belief system. A few weeks ago, an almighty row broke out about the teaching of creationism in a Gateshead school. "Rational" Christians fell over themselves to make it plain that they were much too sensible to believe such fairy tales. "Modern" churchgoers were frantic to distance themselves from the crazies and their mad ideas about God creating the world in six days. What a preposterous suggestion! Where was the science in that? Everyone knew the story of Genesis was just a rhetorical flourish. God created evolution. Now, not a month later, the same Christians ask us to believe the story of Easter. One churchman, mourning the Queen Mother, spelt it out: "Hers was a faith that rested strongly on the glorious story of Easter," he assured us. And what did the story tell us? "Death is not the last word." In other words, we are supposed to believe that we will live for ever – rather than stop and ask, for instance: "Where is the science in that?" The disputes among Christians regarding interpretation are presented as evidence of what a tolerant, robust and enlightened church we have. Arguments over whether to take Genesis or the resurrection – or the feeding of the 5,000, or the healing of the blind, or all the other miracles in the Bible – as factually accurate accounts, or as spiritual metaphors, exhaust an enormous amount of Christians' intellectual energy. But who cares? What difference does it make if the world took a week to build, or billions of years; if the body of Jesus rose from the grave, or only his spirit? Attributing God's authorship to either version of events comes down to the same thing: you believe in a supernatural power. If you believe in God, you believe in a supernatural power which does not have to obey the laws of science. Trying to discredit it by pointing out scientific implausibility is futile. Believers shouldn't need science to justify their belief in God. They have faith. I'm with the creationists on this point – or, at least, I'm as much with them as with the self-styled "rational" Christians. Christianity is non-rational. It is a historical invention, and once the assumption that everyone should believe in it is removed, no amount of reshuffling the details can alter its essential absurdity. Trying to defend religion by invoking science is like claiming that three plus four equals ice cream. The monarchy is built on no sounder foundation. Modern royalists may couch their defence of the crown in secular terms – constitutional continuity, keeping Britain special, generating tourist revenue – but God's role remains as central now as it ever did. Without a divine being to anoint the royal family, how can we be expected to think of them as different? [The Guardian, 02 April 2002]

Sadiq Jalal al-Azm

• But it is obvious that the literal text of the Koran simply cannot be applied in modern society. Take for instance the corporal punishments prescribed in the Koran. Radical Islamists want to impose them, but they are a minority. The majority of Muslims have split personalities on this matter: They insist that this is the penal law of Islam and at the same time they admit that it is inapplicable. [Radio Netherlands, 27 March 2007]
• In the Muslim world, Islamists present themselves as an alternative for western culture, but they do not really have an alternative: Their slogan 'Islam is the solution' is an illusion. Islam simply cannot solve the problems of the 21st Century. That becomes clear as soon as the Islamists come to power: All islamist regimes end up in dramatic failure. That some Islamists today turn violent and even suicidal, is only an indication of their failure to realise their plans. Eventually Muslims will have to wake up to the reality that they are no longer the masters of history, but a deprived and underdeveloped minority in the global community. Only when Muslims face this reality, they will be able to proceed. [Radio Netherlands, 27 March 2007]

Aaron Alexovich

• i have this goofy idea in my head that doing a good job working on something i love is more important than cracking open the skulls of my competitors and feasting upon the runny brainmeats within. i know, i know… I'm such a commie. but in a dimension where barbra streisand and george w. bush are both considered to be at the pinnacle of their respective fields, playing the ranking game seems, to me, pretty devoid of 'meaning'. [Serenity Rose, vol 2]
• according to our best bumper sticker analysis, america is currently the country holding the coveted NUMBER ONE position among nations. (of course you remember when the U.N. prize patrol drove up to the white house and presented the president with that oversized novelty check. good times, good times…) it must suck to live someplace like australia, where everyone's constantly miserable on account of they aren't NUMBER ONE. not like here, where we're all just vomiting all over ourselves we're so fucking happy all the time. [Serenity Rose, vol 2]
• the 10 commandments according to my television (by a potato, aged 16)
  1. thou shalt not resist booze.
  2. thou shalt not disparage money.
  3. thou shalt not refuse sexual relations, as sexual relations are the only important thing in the whole wide world ever.
  4. thou shalt never be average in the looks department. (ugly is right out)
  5. thou shalt never deny the existence of some sort of god or something.
  6. thou shalt never fail to defend your friends and family (those similiar to you) regardless of the facts.
  7. thou shalt never fail to attack your enemies (those dissimiliar to you) regardless of the facts.
  8. thou shalt have a whole mess of spawn (min. 2)
  9. thou shalt never be alone.
  10. america rocks!!
  [Serenity Rose, vol 1]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

• Everyone followed the cartoon crisis, or the crisis about the cartoon drawings of Mohammed in Denmark. That led to an explosion of violence because large groups of Muslims still will not accept criticism of their religion. Over and over again, when in the name of Islam, human blood is shed, Muslims are very quiet. When drawings are made or some perceived slight or offences given by writing a book, or making a drawing, or in some way criticising the dogmas of Islam, people take to the streets. We have all these leaders of the organisation of Islam, the countries who oppressed on people, coming to demand the people apologise. And I think it's this discrepancy that more and more people see as violence and intolerance and the lack of freedom inherent in the creed of Islam. [ABC Interview, 05 August 2008]
• It is often said that Islam has been "hijacked" by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates. But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done? … I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam's image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up. Islamic justice is a proud institution, one to which more than a billion people subscribe, at least in theory, and in the heart of the Islamic world it is the law of the land. But take a look at the verse above*: more compelling even than the order to flog adulterers is the command that the believer show no compassion. It is this order to choose Allah above his sense of conscience and compassion that imprisons the Muslim in a mindset that is archaic and extreme. If moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the girl from Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate? When a "moderate" Muslim's sense of compassion and conscience collides with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful thinking. [New York Times, 07 December 2007] * Qur'an 24:2 = "The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication,- flog each of them with a hundred stripes: Let not compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by God, if ye believe in God and the Last Day: and let a party of the Believers witness their punishment."

Imam Ali

• Look into what is said, not at who says it.

Alikhat

• What do I dislike about theism?…
  Let me count the ways…
  I dislike the hypocrisy, the corruption, the greed and the lies.
  I dislike the veneration of ignorance, the glorification of idiocy, the wild-eyed hatred of progress and the fear of education, which send the faithful shrieking, vampire-like, from the light of knowledge.
  I dislike the way in which prejudice is passed off as piety.
  The way superstition is peddled as wisdom.
  The way intolerance is raised to the lofty heights of "Truth".
  I dislike how hatred is taught as love, how fear is instilled as kindness, how slavery is pressed as freedom, and how contempt for life is dressed up and adored as spirituality.
  I dislike the shackles religions place on the mind, corrupting, twisting and crushing the spirit until the believer has been brought down to a suitable state of worthlessness.
  So lost and self-loathing, so bereft of hope or pride, that they can look into the hallucinated face of their imaginary oppressor and feel unbounded love and gratitude for the additional suffering it has declined, as yet, to visit upon them.
  I dislike people's need for a communal delusion, like drug addicts who unite just to share the same needle.
  I dislike the way reason is reviled as a vice and reality is decreed to be a matter of convenience.
  The way common sense and ordinary human decency get re-named "holy law" and advertised as the sole province of the faithful.
  I dislike religions' wholesale theft of any number of ancient mythologies, only to turn around and proclaim how "unique their doctrine is.
  I dislike how intelligence is held as suspect and inquiry is reviled as a high crime.
  I dislike the pillaging of the impoverished, the extortion of the gullible, the manipulation of the ignorant and the domination of the weak.
  I dislike the invention of sins for the satisfaction of those who desire to punish.
  I dislike the demonization of unbelievers,
  The ill-concealed hate of proselytisers,
  The hysterical rants of holy rollers,
  The wigged-out warnings of psychic healers,
  The dismantling of public education via religious school vouchers,
  The erosion of civil rights by theocratic right-wingers,
  The righteous wrath of gun-toting true believers,
  The destruction wrought by holy warriors,
  The blood-drenched fatwas of ayatollas, and the apocalyptic prophesies of unmedicated messiahs.
  Most of all, though, I dislike the certain knowledge that religion, in one grotesque form or other, will be with us so long as there is a single dark, cobwebbed corner of the human imagination that a believer can stuff a god into.
  (And, oh yeah, what do I like about theism? Some nice art, some pretty music and some photogenic buildings.)
  [alt.atheism, 20 November 1998]

Ethan Allen

• While we are under the tyranny of Priests … it will ever be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith. [Reason The Only Oracle Of Man, 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. [Reason The Only Oracle Of Man, 1784]
• There is not any thing, which has contributed so much to delude mankind in religious matters, as mistaken apprehensions concerning supernatural inspiration or revelation; not considering that all true religion originates from reason, and can not otherwise be understood, but by the exercise and improvement of it. [Reason The Only Oracle Of Man, 1784]
• Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principles that they are labouring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument. [Reason The Only Oracle Of Man, 1784]

Paula Allen

• Being an activist means being aware of what's happening around you as well as being in touch with your feelings about it – your rage, your sadness, your excitement, your curiosity, your feeling of helplessness, and your refusal to surrender. Being an activist means owning your desire. [An Activist Love Story]

Eric Alterman

• The public supports the [Iraq] war, of course: Once the bombs begin to fall, Americans support every war, believing it unpatriotic to do otherwise. [The Nation, 11 January 1999]

John Amaechi

• It's the inconsistency [of bible-bashers] I can't stand. If you're going to quote Leviticus, then don't eat shellfish or wear mixed fabrics. Poke your eye out if you look at women other than your wife … then come to me. [The Guardian, 28 June 2007]
• Here in the US they say, "He's black and English and a basketball player and clever and gay…" It's all a bit overwhelming. They can only deal with one thing at a time and that one thing now is the gay bit. It's disappointing, because you spend all that time studying, researching, training, and after all that work I'm just that "big gay bloke". [The Guardian, 28 June 2007]

Walid Amayreh, Editor, Hebron Times

• It is lamentable that the United States which values press freedom at home is bullying the Palestinian Authority to suppress freedom in Palestine. What happened to the American First Amendment, or maybe it doesn't apply to non-Americans? [responding to CIA 'recommendations' his paper be closed for being critical of the US & Israel, Muslim News, 29 March 2002]

Henri Frédéric Amiel

• We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalise our own inequities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity. [Journal Intime, 1866]

Martin Amis

• It will also be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly. How many of them know, for example, that their government has destroyed at least 5% of the Iraqi population? How many of them then transfer that figure to America (and come up with 14m)? Various national characteristics – self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in western Europe, an assiduous geographical incuriosity – have created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away. Most crucially, and again most painfully, being right and being good support the American self to an almost tautologous degree: Americans are good and right by virtue of being American. Saul Bellow's word for this habit is "angelisation". On the US-led side, then, we need not only a revolution in consciousness but an adaptation of national character: the work, perhaps, of a generation. … Our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been called "species consciousness" – something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredulous misery, I have been trying to apply such a consciousness, and such a sensibility. Thinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear. [The Guardian, 18 September 2001]

Anaxagorus

• Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun a hot rock. [c475 BCE]

David Anderson

• Perhaps the greatest outrage about the new New York City government's policy of random bag searches in the subway is the lack of outrage about it. … We hear comparisons between this policy and airport searches. For a start, catching planes is optional, for most New Yorkers, catching public transport isn't. … courts have held that magnetometers and metal detectors are not "searches". By any standard, a policeman poking through your handbag or back pack is a search. … The final horror here is that there's nothing to suggest this is the government's last demand. Freedom is usually destroyed in a gradual manner, it is less noticeable then. It is a short step from random subway bag searches, to random street searches, from making it optional to making it compulsory, from not asking for ID, to demanding it. And this latest policy has been put in place without even any terrorist actions against the United States! Imagine how few rights we'll have left when something does happen here? What freedom do we have when the government can do exactly what it wishes because it has manufactured a climate of fear like this administration has, and what freedom do we deserve when we as a society and as individuals just lie down and take it? [Counterpunch, 26 July 2005]

Gillian Anderson

• How would you feel about a co-star who earns more than you for no discernable reason and feels he's worth it? [speaking of David Duchovny]

Anemones

• Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

Kofi Annan's Astonishing Facts [New York Times, 29 September 1998]

• The richest fifth of the world's people consumes 86 percent of all goods and services while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3 percent. Indeed, the richest fifth consumes 45 percent of all meat and fish, 58 percent of all energy used and 84 percent of all paper, has 74 percent of all telephone lines and owns 87 percent of all vehicles.
• Since 1970, the world's forests have declined from 4.4 square miles per 1,000 people to 2.8 square miles per 1,000 people. In addition, a quarter of the world's fish stocks have been depleted or are in danger of being depleted and another 44 percent are being fished at their biological limit.
• The Ganges River symbolises purification to Hindus, who believe drinking or bathing in its waters will lead to salvation. But 29 cities, 70 towns and countless villages deposit about 345 million gallons of raw sewage a day directly into the river. Factories add 70 million gallons of industrial waste and farmers are responsible for another 6 million tons of chemical fertiliser and 9,000 tons of pesticides.
• The three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 48 least developed countries.
• The average African household today consumes 20 percent less than it did 25 years ago.
• The world's 225 richest individuals, of whom 60 are Americans with total assets of $311 billion, have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion – equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the entire world's population.
• Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics – $2 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide basic education for everyone in the world.
• Of the 4.4 billion people in developing countries, nearly three-fifths lack access to safe sewers, a third have no access to clean water, a quarter do not have adequate housing and a fifth have no access to modern health services of any kind.
• Americans each consume an average of 260 pounds of meat a year. In Bangladesh, the average is six and a half pounds.
• By 2050, 8 billion of the world's projected 9.5 billion people – up from about 6 billion today – will be living in developing countries.
• Of the estimated 2.7 million annual deaths from air pollution, 2.2 million are from indoor pollution – including smoke from dung and wood burned as fuel which is more harmful than tobacco smoke. 80 percent of the victims are rural poor in developing countries.
• Two thirds of India's 90 million lowest-income households live below the poverty line – but more than 50 percent of these impoverished people own wristwatches, 41 percent own bicycles, 31 percent own radios and 13 percent own fans.
• Sweden and the United States have 681 and 626 telephone lines per 1,000 people, respectively. Afghanistan, Cambodia, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have only one line per 1,000 people.
• Europeans spend $11 billion a year on ice cream – $2 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide clean water and safe sewers for the world's population.
• At the end of 1997 nearly 31 million people were living with HIV, up from 22.3 million the year before. With 16,000 new infections a day – 90 percent in developing countries – it is now estimated that 40 million people will be living with HIV in 2000.
• More than 110 million active landmines are scattered in 68 countries, with an equal number stockpiled around the world. Every month more than 2,000 people are killed or maimed by mine explosions.
• Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion a year on pet food – $4 billion more than the estimated annual additional total needed to provide basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world.
• It is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and clean water and safe sewers for all is roughly $40 billion a year – or less than 4 percent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.

Anon / Unknown

• It's your hell, you burn in it.
• Only sheep need a shepherd.
• Blasphemy is a victimless crime.
• I'll go my way and you go yahweh.
• Don't vote, it only encourages them.
• INRI = Idiots Need Reassuring Ideologies.
• If forgiveness is divine, why is there a hell?
• Fundamentalism means never having to say "I'm wrong."
• Anyone who says God is on their side is dangerous as hell.
• The Religious Right aren't, and Scientific Creationism isn't.
• Ubi dubium ibi libertas. (Where there is doubt, there is freedom.)
• Fundamentalism = fund (to give money) + amentalism (without brains).
• It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets elected.
• Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. (There is no salvation within the church.)
• The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
• Faith is that quality which enables us to believe what we know to be untrue.
• The only difference between a delusion and a religion is the number of believers.
• Proof that cats are smarter than dogs: you cannot get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
• Power corrupts; Absolute power corrupts absolutely; God is all-powerful. Draw your own conclusions.
• Christian: "I'll pray for you."
  Atheist: "Then I'll think for both of us."
• Traveller: "God has been mighty good to your fields, Mr. Farmer."
  Farmer: "You should have seen how he treated them when I wasn't around."

Anonymous Gay Vicar In Northern England

• Come on – it's 2003, and anyone who has done any half-decent theological thinking in the last 50 years knows that Leviticus is irrelevant and St. Paul, for all his redemption, never quite escaped the expectations of his culture. Only the utterly sex-obsessed would show the slightest interest in what I do in bed. I have a great home life and a great supportive relationship – permanent, faithful and stable – and Christian people rejoice in that. Including our parishioners, apparently. Three years ago a move to a new post was cancelled at the last minute because the bishop in the new area insisted on asking questions that Issues forbids him to ask, and which in any case should never be asked of any Englishman, gentleman or priest. As I told them the news before the service, making something up about problems with the appointment, they cheered because I would be staying. And afterwards, to the surprise of both of us, they were hugging my partner and saying: "You must be so upset," because nobody had ever said, but they knew. It should be getting better – but it isn't, it's getting worse. … The thoroughly English, thoroughly Anglican policy of "don't ask, don't tell" has been torn up by the Carey bishops who seem bent on turning the national church into some weird puritanical sect: the only officially anti-homosexual organisation in the country, and the only organisation with an exemption – that's right, an exemption – from the new Human Rights Act, for the very special purpose of retaining their right to persecute and eliminate their gay staff, one by one. … We know who we are, we know what it is to be fully human, we know what it is to discover love, we know that love is costly, we know what it is to know our Saviour and to have our lives transformed – and we seek to share God's compassion in a needy world. And so to find some calm at the eye of the storm, and get on with the week ahead … [The Guardian, 24 June 2003]

Anonymous Iranian woman

• Indignant Muslims all over the world justify the violent reactions to cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad by emphasizing the sanctity of Allah's messenger. Islam's devotees argue that these cartoons have desecrated a symbol of their faith, a pillar of their belief. As members of free, democratic and civilized societies, we too have our sacred principles: liberty, dignity and humanity (including the right to be secure against cruel and unusual treatment). We believe that ALL human beings not only are entitled to these rights, but are obliged to respect and protect these basic values. Muslims demanded apology, prosecution, and even assassination of artists and editors who allowed the publication of these cartoons. I too demand the apology and prosecution of those who are behind the belligerent violation of human rights in Islamic nations. I demand appropriate actions to be taken against those responsible for the arrest, torture, and death of political and religious dissidents. Where is our rage after William Sampson and Zahra Kazemi were subjected to medieval torture and, in the case of the latter, murdered viciously in the prisons of Islamic world? I demand apology for the amputations that are carried out in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Severing hands and legs and removing eyes as forms of punishment are deeply offensive to the collective conscience of humanity; it is a desecration of dignity, and it fills us with disgust. I demand prosecution of all those who commit heinous crimes in the name of honour. I want accountability from the parents of the Jordanian girl who burned and disfigured their own daughter "because she was dating a boy." I want the father of Nobahar, the young Iranian woman who gave birth to a baby boy out of wedlock, to be tried for torching his own daughter to death, and poisoning his own infant grandson. I demand that all prisoners of conscience be released from the dungeons of Islamic countries where they are kept in dreadful and inhumane conditions. I am outraged by clerics in the Middle East and elsewhere who preach violence against Westerners. The cartoons in question are harmless (unless, of course, the offended Muslims decide to bring harm upon themselves by resorting to violence). Preaching death and violence, as has been proven by the deadly terrorist attacks, is going to cost the lives of innocents. This is but a small fraction of abuses committed almost daily by governments and people in the Muslim world. These actions are far more ruthless than depicting a sacred character in a few cartoons. It is time we stood up to these perpetrators of brutality. I am offended. And I demand justice. [March 2006]

Anonymous Young Muslim Man

• These people, ladies and gentleman, have a good look at them. They actually believe if you kill women and children, you will go to heaven. This is not ideology. It's a mental illness. [speaking of radical Islam, Trinity College, Dublin, October 2006]

Peter A. Angeles

• What was God doing (in His Time) for an eternity into His past before He Created the Universe Ex Nihilo? God existed by Himself through an Eternity before the Creation without needing a Universe. Why did He suddenly desire to create the Universe? [The Problem Of God: A Short Introduction, 1986]
• To say that this Timeless God began Time along with the Universe at a time when there was no Time implies that at that moment when He initiated this Unique Event He was engaged in a Time, or at a time in order to bring this Event about. He did something. What brought that Event about? [The Problem Of God: A Short Introduction, 1986]

Natalie Angier

• Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive. We all may talk about religion as a powerful social force, but unlike other similarly powerful institutions, religion is not to be questioned, criticised or mocked. [Confessions Of A Lonely Atheist, New York Times Magazine, 14 January 2001]
• I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channelled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren't, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection. [Confessions Of A Lonely Atheist, New York Times Magazine, 14 January 2001]

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. [1896]

Hussein Ahmed Amin, former Egyptian Diplomat

• Such behaviour comes to undermine the image of Islam and even to make some Muslims sceptical whether their faith can face the challenges of modernism. [protesting the Afghanistan Taliban's destruction of the 1500 year-old statues of Buddha, March 2001]

Bert Archer

• Would we allow teachers in publicly funded schools to tell students that they should believe Zeus, a god who lives on a mountain in Greece, gave birth to a daughter from his head? It can be taught as a myth, sure; as an underpinning to much rich culture. But as fact? I hope we'd turf whoever tried. Because it's not true. True, many good and brilliant people believed it once. … Our constitution says that one religion gets its own schools, where its belief in impossible things can be propagated. But it's mostly nonsense. If there were even one shred of provable truth, the world would shake. But of course there isn't. … It's circular logic, and I don't want to subsidize it. Ordinarily, all this twaddle would be protected under the general principle of freedom of expression. But there are limits on this freedom, and uttering a threat is one of the most basic. When your boss of bosses is believed to hold the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and when you are believed to speak for that boss, the words you utter carry special weight. … In the case of priests and imams, the weight they carry when they speak in religious terms puts them in a different category from anyone else standing on a soapbox or writing in a newspaper. We do, occasionally, see religion reasonably: when a religion is new we call it a cult. We then seek to protect our children from it. If children are born to cultists, we feel sorry for them, but there is little we can do. It ought to be the same for all cults, no matter how old or popular they are. Lamentable a use of the right though it may be, parents ought to be able to spread whatever untruths to their children, under the rubric of faith, they see fit. We shouldn't stand in their way. But we certainly shouldn't approve, or, as we so often do, applaud it as some sort of moral good. It is the opposite of moral good. Misleading children is quite bad, whether the justification is that you're Catholic, Anglican, Muslim or Jewish. A baseless belief, so long as it doesn't harm others, is a benign social ill. When it does harm others, it must be exposed for what it is and dealt with. With religious leaders of all stripes, most recently Catholic bishops, Muslim leaders and President Bush, all seeking to abrogate the rights of people in love with people of the same gender in the name of their beliefs, it does no one any good to continue to treat religion with the exceptionalism it's used to. People are allowed to believe whatever they like, and listen to whatever crackpot they choose. But when those crackpots issue veiled threats to try to sway government policy, we should lose whatever tolerance we had for the general foolishness of religions and those who follow their leaders. [07 August 2003]

William Archer

• 'Theocracy' has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained, tyranny.
• I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring. [Theology & War]

Aristophanes

• Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?

Aristotle

• Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail.
• Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
• A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side. [Politics]
• The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, or of the few, or of the many, are perversions. For the members of a state, if they are truly citizens, ought to participate in its advantages. [Politics]

Don Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta

• Knowledge has to be socialised to democratise power.

Malene Arpe

• They were upset. Their feelings were bruised. As sullenly explained by Pakistani regional chief minister Akram Durrani, "Nobody has the right to insult Islam and hurt the feelings of Muslims." Hurt feelings? Are you fragging kidding me!? It used to be mommy would get you a cookie when your feelings got hurt if nobody wanted to play with you because you wore the wrong clothes or had stupid hair. It is sort of cute and appropriate when you're a toddler. It's not so cute when grown men call for shows to be shut down or for the hands of artists to be chopped off, because they've been offended! … And let us not forget the music teacher in Colorado who showed students clips of the opera Faust. It "glorifies Satan," an outraged and offended parent said. Well, of course it does, dear. … Just spare us the nonsense about the hurt feelings and the offence taken. What are you? Five? … Consider carefully the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. … Or check out those videos of people getting their heads sawed off. … If being offended is such a necessity to your enjoyment of life or your sense of self, think about the censorship you implicitly advocate. Consider that you may not be the one who gets to decide what is offensive and should be banned. [Toronto Star, 12 February 2006]

Timothy Garton Ash

• One is still gobsmacked by things American Republicans say. Take the glorification of the military, for example. In his speech [Fort Bragg, 28 June 2005], Bush insisted "there is no higher calling than service in our armed forces". What? No higher calling! How about being a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, an aid worker? Unimaginable that any European leader could say such a thing. [The Guardian, 30 June 2005]
• The erosion of liberty. Four words sum up four years. Since the attacks of September 11 2001, we have seen an erosion of liberty in most established democracies. If he's still alive, Osama bin Laden must be laughing into his beard. For this is exactly what al-Qaida-type terrorists want: that democracies should overreact, reveal their "true" oppressive face, and therefore win more recruits to the suicide bombers' cause. We should not play his game. In the always difficult trade-off between liberty and security, we are erring too much on the side of security. Worse still: we are becoming less safe as a result. [The Guardian, 17 November 2005]
• On the contrary, in free countries every faith must be allowed – and every faith must be allowed to be questioned, fundamentally, outspokenly, even intemperately and offensively, without fear of reprisal. Richard Dawkins, the Oxford scientist, must be free to say that God is a delusion and Alistair McGrath, the Oxford theologian, must be free to retort that Dawkins is deluded; a conservative journalist must be free to write that the Prophet Muhammad was a paedophile and a Muslim scholar must be free to brand that journalist an ignorant Islamophobe. That's the deal in a free country: freedom of religion and freedom of expression as two sides of the same coin. We must live and let live – a demand that is not as minimal as it sounds, when one thinks of the death threats against Salman Rushdie and the Danish cartoonists. The fence that secures this space is the law of the land. [The Guardian, 21 December 2006]

Thomas R. Asher

• Americans' anxiety has been magnified by our insularity. We are notoriously, often proudly, uninformed about the rest of the world. Our ignorance is geographic, cultural and historical; indeed, we regard the study of history, especially non-American history, as largely irrelevant. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]
• American's self-absorption and narcissism are reinforced by a steady media stream of propagandist euphemism: the Bush slogan 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' was used as a 24/7 'news' banner by at least two TV networks. We stand for 'liberty' yet tolerate the USA Patriot Act, a blunt expansion of arbitrary police powers; the 'Axis of Evil' obscures a world of nuance; we 'liberate' Iraq and will bring 'democracy' to the Middle East; a skimpy 'coalition of the willing' morphs into 'the allies', a false echo of World War II, accepted uncritically by most US media, including the authoritative New York Times. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]

Alan Ashley-Pitt

• The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.

Isaac Asimov

• Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
• Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
• Anger is the common substitute for logic among those who have no evidence for what they desperately want to believe. [The Tyrannosaurus Prescription]
• Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
• I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
• Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularised version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
• The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has.
• Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug superstition to their breasts. [on why he opposes religion]
• It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense. They thus become part of the armies of the night, the purveyors of nitwittery, the retailers of intellectual junk food, the feeders on mental cardboard, for their ignorance keeps them from distinguishing nectar from sewage. [The Armies Of The Night]
• 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.
• Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. [Canadian Atheists Newsletter, 1994]
• To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the "scientific" establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it.

Lodewijk Asscher, Alderman, Amsterdam

• A primary school in Amsterdam-Noord has decided no longer to teach about living on a farm. Various pupils began to demolish the classroom when the pig came up for discussion. Apparently it has gone that far. These children, 9, 10 years old, have not been given even the most elementary rules at home about why they must go to school. [De Volkskrant, 27 April 2007]

Prof. Catherine Atherton

• As a subscriber of long standing I was outraged by the low quality of the letters from subscribers expressing outrage at the cover of issue 1121. Mind you, if you'd published that cover in parts of the US that voted heavily for Bush, – known to the rest of us over here as "Jesusland", "Dumbfuckistan", or, more simply, "The former slave states" – you'd have all been strung up double quick and no mistake. [replying to letters of protest at Private Eye's Christmas issue (#1121) which complained at the use of Breugel's Adoration Of The Magi with a caption of "Apparently, it's David Blunkett's.", Private Eye #1123, 07-20 January 2005]

Brooks Atkinson

• People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know. [Once Around The Sun,1951]

Rowan Atkinson

• The freedom to criticise ideas – any ideas even if they are sincerely held beliefs – is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. And the law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed. It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness – and the other represents oppression. [commenting on the proposal to introduce a law that would outlaw incitement to racial hatred (covered by existing laws), but whose knock-on effect would be to ban all criticism of religion and its believers, 07 December 2004]

Marcus Aurelius

• The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong doer.
• Receive wealth or prosperity without arrogance; and be ready to let it go.
• No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.
• The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.
• The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
• Imagine every man who is grieved at anything or discontented to be like a pig which is sacrificed and kicks and screams.
• He who does wrong does wrong against himself. He who acts unjustly acts unjustly to himself, because he makes himself bad.
• There is but one thing of real value – to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men.
• All existing things soon change, and they will either be reduced to vapour, if indeed all substance is one, or they will be dispersed.
• What kind of people are those whom men wish to please, and for what objects, and by what kind of acts? How soon will time cover all things, and how many it has covered already.
• If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.
• Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.

Aviva

• You mean you like the thought that you've been created especially to worship your creator, and after you die you'll honour it throughout eternity? That's your purpose in existence – to be a cosmic cheering squad for a deity so vain and insecure that it needs constant reassurance that it's supreme? No thank you! [alt.atheism]

Francis Bacon

• Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
• It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty. [Of Great Places, Essays, 1625]
• Truth can never be reached by just listening to the voice of an authority.
• Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

Roger Bacon

• The whole clergy is given up to pride, luxury, and avarice. [Compendium Studii Philospohiae, 1272]

Joe Bageant

• As the elections proved for once and for all, Christian fanatics are plenty thick in the good ole U S of A these days and can no longer be written off as Dogpatch religionists. Historically, they have always been around and in about the same numbers too, just less visible. But currently they are hopped up about god giving them their own president and even their own political party. … It is one thing for them to have it in for their enemies, and quite another to have their own president, cabinet, Supreme Court, and newly established Department of Fatherland Surveillance backing them up. … And as usual, the fundies have blood in their eye, this time for liberal humanism, free thought, Trojan rubber products and the number 666. … Meanwhile, it's hard to tell who is controlling whom. Do the Christian Fundamentalists in this country now have significant control of the Republican Party? Or were they simply duped into backing the latest U.S. capitalist imperialist grab for empire and exploitation of ordinary working Americans. My guess is that the big Republican capitalists do not give a fuck, so long as they can grab the money and run when the lights are shot out, and that the Christians don't care as long as they get a shot at swapping the Constitution with the Bible. On one hand the Republicans want to own the world. On the other the godwacks want to dominate it, or destroy it if they can't: "Ya bow to my god buddy, or we blow this whole pop stand off the map… take everybody out… startin' with the Middle East." As near as I can tell, fundamentalists in every religion have this in common – destroying the world to bring on their brand of paradise. The majority of Americans disagree with Christian or Jewish fundamentalist ideas, but there is no way to call the fundies on it because their agenda is couched in religious language and symbols. And we all know for crap sake that America stands for religious freedom. Even fruitcake religious freedom. So we do not challenge the Christian or right wing Zionist freaks among us (It's open season on Muslims however.) We few who do challenge religion are declared satanic secular humanists, anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic. All of which works well for only one group – the rightwing political crazies who, in their quest for oil, capital, territory, or whatever, use god rhetoric to drive these zealots like a pack of blind slobbering dogs. This story is so old that it is sometimes hard to have much faith in the human race at all, isn't it? … When your mythology happily calls for the end of the world to bring on a paradise no one has ever seen, well, it makes for some piss poor politics. I think we can all agree on that. And as if that weren't enough of a headache for the rest of us, it calls for our conversion to their delusion, elsewise be destroyed as infidels. You are either with them or against them. Most of us would rather be away from them, but the world is too small to run from these days. At the same time, the faithful presume themselves to be aggrieved holy victims, every last damned one of them. And when you are a victim, whether it be of the removal of the Ten Commandments from your white cracker court house by onanist liberal heathens "frum up nawth," or the refusal of the Great Satan Kansas School board to add humus and sheep's eyes to the school lunch program, you are entitled to revenge in the form of taking down the entire world. What the hell? God is gonna do it anyway at the end time, which anybody who reads the Good Book knows is any day now. Just look around at the amount of thigh showing these days, or the lesbians jumping little school girls in the Oklahoma high school restrooms (according to republican Senate candidate Tom Coburn.) Sure signs of the end times. About the only thing all three gods agree on is that exposed belly buttons and young folks having too much fun leads to the end of the world. So blow it the fuck up now. Start a nuclear war, then watch Jesus return to earth and turn feckless liberal eyeballs to jelly. Just like in the Left Behind series. And even if these turn out not to be the end times (again) what the hell good is a religion if you don't get to kill somebody or at least have a certified infidel to make miserable? [Hung Over In The End Times, Dissidentvoice, 16 November 2004]

Vanessa Baird

• If you believe – as more than half of the US population does – that your particular religion is the one and only true faith sanctioned by the Almighty, you are carrying around with you one hell of a pious power charge. And while not all religions evangelize, the two most widely held to in the world today – Christianity and Islam – seem to have had great difficulty distinguishing between spreading the word and spilling the blood. Today we are witnessing a new evangelical crusade coming from the West which has been dubbed 'evangelical capitalism'. This is more than laissez-faire economics: it sees 'the hand of God' in economic liberty, which in reality turns out to be the unfettered freedom of huge corporations to dominate national and global markets. The gospel according to Halliburton. Pitch this against the surge of Saudi-financed Wahabist fundamentalism imposing its all-conquering version of the only true Islam, and it's hard not to get trampled underfoot. … For some nothing can redeem religion, except possibly its demise. … Many humanists and sceptics take a less hostile view and respect the existence of diverse philosophies and belief systems. But if such faiths do not themselves respect human life or basic rights, then respect for religion is likely to be withdrawn. [New Internationalist, August 2004]

Carolyn Baker

• Axiomatic in the worldview of the fundamentalist, born-again Christian is: "I have the truth, I'm right; you don't have the truth, you're wrong." As a result, critical thinking, research, or intellectual freedom of exploration are not only unnecessary, they are dangerous and potentially heretical. … Moreover, because of one's "superior" spiritual status, one has the so-called "divine authority" to subvert, by whatever means necessary, the very machinery of government in order to establish a theocracy in which one's worldview is predominant. Scoop Independent News, 12 May 2005]
• The mainstream media does not seem to comprehend the inherent danger of the religious right let alone report it accurately. All of us need to challenge the addictive tyranny of Christian fundamentalism at every turn – for the sake of our sanity and for the sake of our civil liberties. We don't allow street junkies into the halls of Congress, the Supreme Court, or the pulpits of America to admonish us how we should live and why we should demolish our Constitution. In fact, we confront the insanity and criminality of such individuals. Similarly, it's time to confront the domination drug for what it is – a grave and perverse spiritual and moral illness. [Online Journal, 19 May 2005]
• One of the most significant aspects of my abandonment of Christian fundamentalism was the awareness that born-again Christians worship the Bible and not God. They argue that the only way to know God is through the Bible. They are forced to believe this because if they concede that God might speak through an inner voice, through a tree, or through a particular life experience, their entire belief system is toast. When I realized that contrary to their much-touted Ten Commandments, Bible worship is nothing less than "having other gods before me," I finally realized the depth of the hypocrisy of their system. Part of my, and anyone's recovery from fundamentalism is a commitment to develop a relationship with a Higher Power – whatever that may be – and not with a book. [Online Journal, 19 May 2005]
• The convert to fundamentalist Christianity must be convinced that his / her thinking is irreparably in error. The underlying message is: "You don't believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God because your mind has been occupied by Satan. This has happened principally because you are a human being, but also because you have made the enormous mistake of trying to think for yourself. Of course you think there are contradictions in the Bible because Satan controls your mind. If you surrender your mind to Jesus (actually to me / us / the enlightened flock of believers), you will understand that there are no contradictions in the Bible and that your life should be guided only by the Bible and nothing else. What you cannot now understand, you must take on faith, and more will be revealed to you later. It may not be revealed on this earth, but by accepting Christ as your personal saviour and having faith, you will be guaranteed eternity in heaven where everything you never understood will be completely revealed to you." Curiously, as stated in the above definition of addiction, under ancient Roman law, addiction was grounds for slavery. I found this detail particularly significant because obviously, addicted people are "enslaved" people. [Online Journal, 19 May 2005]
• The religious right of twenty-first century America is anti-American, inherently violent, and a cruel, tyrannical, punitive, force of death and destruction. In its mindset, adult human lives do not matter because the human condition itself is inherently evil resulting in eternal and everlasting punishment in hell unless its members are redeemed in a prescribed manner by the fundamentalist God/man/saviour, Jesus Christ. Moreover, with an embarrassingly adolescent flamboyance, Dominionists shamelessly rape, pillage, and desecrate the earth because in the first place, their Bible has given them authority over all things human and in the second place, their "imminent" apocalyptic rapture, transporting them from the human "veil of tears" to live happily ever after in heaven, entitles them to do so. Meanwhile, we the unredeemed, the unbelievers, the poor, the feminists, the gay and lesbian, the disabled, the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted, and those who are conscientiously following divergent spiritual paths of their choice, are suffering in the wake of Christian fundamentalism's devastation of the economy, the earth, and the human race. But this is what we deserve for not becoming born-again devotees of their Jesus. And we deserve even worse-to burn in hell for all of eternity. Hence, we are expendable, inconsequential, and a force to be conquered, broken, imprisoned, or killed. [Scoop Independent News, 12 May 2005]

Robert A. Baker

• What happens when the same number of people pray for something as pray against it? How does God decide whose prayer to answer? Does the total number of people praying for or against something matter? How about the righteousness of the supplicants? Are positive prayers answered more frequently than negative ones? Does God take the positive ones and Satan the negative? Does the intensity of the praying have any effect on the outcome? Does the length of time one devotes to praying have any effect on the frequency with which one's prayers are answered? Do the words and phrases used in the prayer – either positive or negative – have any bearing on the success rate? Does the nature of the thing or things prayed for have any bearing on the prayer's success rate – either positive or negative prayers? Why or why not? [Skeptical Briefs, September 1997]

Tom Baker

• Philosophy asks questions but religion provides answers. The function of religion is to console us, so we swallowed all that guff. [TV Times, 07-11 July 2003] The first part is based on Anemones
• I mean if you can believe in the Christian religion you can believe in anything, you know it's so utterly preposterous. [UK TV show about Dr. Who]

Joan Bakewell

• The Pope is, of course, held to be infallible by the Catholic church. Islam's response to all this – "if you dare to say we're a violent religion, then we'll kill you!" – compounds not only the idiocy of rival dogmas but also the dangers. Islam's sharia law invests the law of the land with its own religious and often brutal priorities. Apostasy is punishable by death, as is homosexuality. Christian observance is put under increasing pressure. Dawkins is right to be not only angry but alarmed. Religions have the secular world running scared. This book is a clarion call to cower no longer. primed by anger, redeemed by humour, it will, I trust, offend many. [review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, The Guardian, 23 September 2006]
• But why are religions so tough on women? In the Victorian heyday of muscular Christianity, the rules of feminine dress would have met the highest standards of the Qur'an. It was in religiously devout America that Janet Jackson's breast caused so much fuss. Only as we have become more secular have we shed our clothes and our inhibitions. Who are these gods that they should require their own creatures to be ashamed of their bodies? Granted, there are limits of polite society. An attempt to have topless newsreaders was only ever a porno joke. But the notion that the supposed creator is offended by the natural beauty of his own creation is well nigh blasphemous. Shaima Rezyee was at the crossroads of a punitive tradition that fears and resents women and the new tradition of global music and universal entertainment that celebrates them. If religious extremists of all faiths now want to put the clock back, they will have to reconfigure the role of women as we have, within my lifetime, come to enjoy it. The control of dress might seem a petty matter, but it is loaded with significance. It is for individual women to decide for themselves where along the cultural spectrum – from the easy ways of western display to the comfort of regular concealment – they choose to live. [on the murder of TV and radio presenter Shaima Rezyee, The Guardian, 17 June 2005]

Mikhail Bakunin

• Religion is a collective insanity.
• Theology is the science of the divine lie.
• We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact.
• … if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. [God And The State]
• If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. [God And The State]
• Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker. [God And The State]
• No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.
• [An anarchist] takes his stand on his positive right to life and all its pleasures, both intellectual, moral and physical. He loves life, and intends to enjoy it to the full. [The Philosophy Of Freedom]
• Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
• All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. [God And The State]
• Until now all human history has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honour of some pitiless abstraction – God, country, power of State, national honour, historical rights, judicial rights, political liberty, public welfare. [God And The State]
• What I preach then is, to a certain extent, the revolt of life against science, or rather against the government of science, not to destroy science – that would be high treason to humanity – but to remand it to its place so that it can never leave it again. [God And The State]
• God admitted that Satan was right; he recognised that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he had induced them to commit; for, immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said (see Bible [Genesis 3:22]): "Behold, the man is become as one of the gods, to know good and evil; prevent him, therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life, lest he become immortal like Ourselves." [God And The State]
• What is permitted to the State is forbidden to the individual. Such is the maxim of all governments. Machiavelli said it, and history as well as the practice of all contemporary governments bear him out on that point. Crime is the necessary condition of the very existence of the State, and it therefore constitutes its exclusive monopoly, from which it follows that the individual who dares commit a crime is guilty in a two-fold sense: first, he is guilty against human conscience, and, above all, he is guilty against the State in arrogating to himself one of its most precious privileges. [Ethics : Morality Of The State]
• Every time a State wants to declare war upon another State, it starts off by launching a manifesto addressed not only to its own subjects but to the whole world. In this manifesto it declares that right and justice are on its side, and it endeavours to prove that it is actuated only by love of peace and humanity and that, imbued with generous and peaceful sentiments, it suffered for a long time in silence until the mounting iniquity of its enemy forced it to bare its sword. At the same time it vows that, disdainful of all material conquest and not seeking any increase in territory, it will put and end to this war as soon as justice is re-established. [Ethics : Morality Of The State]
• The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. And since all States, ever since they came to exist upon the earth, have been condemned to perpetual struggle – a struggle against their own populations, whom they oppress and ruin, a struggle against all foreign States, every one of which can be strong only if the others are weak – and since the States cannot hold their own in this struggle unless they constantly keep on augmenting their power against their own subjects as well as against the neighbourhood States – it follows that the supreme law of the State is the augmentation of its power to the detriment of internal liberty and external justice. [Ethics : Morality Of The State]
• For there is no terror, cruelty, sacrilege, perjury, imposture, infamous transaction, cynical theft, brazen robbery or foul treason which has not been committed and all are still being committed daily by representatives of the State, with no other excuse than this elastic, at times so convenient and terrible phrase Reason of State. A terrible phrase indeed! For it has corrupted and dishonoured more people in official circles and in the governing classes of society than Christianity itself. As soon as it is uttered everything becomes silent and drops out of sight: honesty, honour, justice, right, pity itself vanishes and with it logic and sound sense; black becomes white and white becomes black, the horrible becomes humane, and the most dastardly felonies and most atrocious crimes become meritorious acts. [Ethics : Morality Of The State]
• The state then is the most flagrant negation, the most cynical and complete negation of humanity. It rends apart the universal solidarity of all men upon earth, and it unites some of them only in order to destroy, conquer, and enslave all the rest. It takes under its protection only its own citizens, and it recognizes human right, humanity, and civilization only within the confines of its own boundaries. And since it does not recognize any right outside of its own confines, it quite logically arrogated to itself the right to treat with the most ferocious inhumanity all the foreign populations whom it can pillage, exterminate, or subordinate to its will. If it displays generosity or humanity toward them, it does it in no case out of any sense of duty: and that is because it has no duty but to itself, and toward those of its members who formed it by an act of free agreement, who continue constituting it on the same free bases, or, as it happens in the long run, have become its subjects. [Ethics : Morality Of The State]
• The immense advantage of positive science over theology, metaphysics, politics, and judicial right consists in this – that, in place of the false and fatal abstractions set up by these doctrines, it posits true abstractions which express the general nature and logic of things, their general relations, and the general laws of their development. This separates it profoundly from all preceding doctrines, and will assure it for ever a great position in society: it will constitute in a certain sense society's collective consciousness. … Positive science, recognizing its absolute inability to conceive real individuals and interest itself in their lot, must definitely and absolutely renounce all claim to the government of societies; for if it should meddle therein, it would only sacrifice continually the living men whom it ignores to the abstractions which constitute the sole object of its legitimate preoccupations. [God And The State]
• Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty – Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge. [God And The State]
• Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity. God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognised as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church. … The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice. [God And The State]

James Baldwin

• Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. [Letter From A Region In My Mind, New Yorker, 17 November 1962]

Balor

• Freedom of religion also should include freedom FROM religion. This is coming from a Protestant. I believe in my beliefs. I don't believe in forcing my beliefs on others, because, frankly, it isn't going to make them believe… Conversion by force ain't conversion… it's oppression. [alt.atheism, August 1999]

Judith Bandsma

• Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give a man a religion and he'll starve to death praying for a fish.

Benjamin R. Barber

• The victory of the dollar over every other conceivable interest, public or private, entails not just a crass commercialism in the place where quality information and diversified entertainment should be, but also a monopoly antipathetic to democratic society and free civilisation, if not also to capitalism itself. [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]
• The ancient capitalist economy in which products are manufactured and sold for profit to meet the demand of consumers who make their unmediated needs known through the market is gradually yielding to a postmodern capitalist economy in which needs are manufactured to meet the supply of producers who make their unmediated products marketable through promotion, spin, packaging, and advertising. [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]
• Choosers are made, not born. For free markets to offer real choice, consumers must be educated choosers and programming must proffer real variety rather than just shopping alternatives. Much of McWorld's strategy for creating global markets depends on a systematic rejection of any genuine consumer autonomy or any costly program variety – deftly couple, however, with the appearance of infinite variety. [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]
• The elementary theory of markets argues that with the dismantling of state communication monopolies, monopoly will go while the public interest stays; in fact, the public interest has gone and monopoly has persisted, in new privatised and thus unaccountable forms. There is nothing wrong with profit. As the engine of capitalism, it is a good thing for shareholders, consumers, and society at large. but it has turned out to exercise a sovereignty no less coercive but far less public-spirited than the state's. It imposes a uniformity all its own, but one hidden behind the screen of free-market competition. [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]
• Go into a Protestant church in a Swiss village, a mosque in Damascus, the cathedral at Reims, a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, and though in every case you are visiting a place of worship with a common aura of piety, you know from one pious site to the next you are in a distinctive culture. The sit in a multiplex movie box — or, much the same thing, visit a spectators sports arena or a mall or a modern hotel or a fast-food establishment in any city around the world — and try to figure out where you are. You are nowhere. You are everywhere. Inhabiting an abstraction. Lost in cyberspace. You are chasing pixels on a Nintendo: the world surrounding you vanishes. You are in front of or in or on MTV: universal images assault the eyes and global dissonances assault the ears in a heart-pounding tumult that tells you everything except which country you are in. Where are you? You are in McWorld. [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]
• Markets are simply not designed to do the things democratic polities do. They enjoin private rather than public modes of discourse, allowing us as consumers to speak via our currencies of consumption to producers of material goods, but ignoring us as citizens speaking to one another about such things as the social consequences of our private market choices (too much materialism? too little social justice? too many monopolies? too few jobs? what to do we want?). They advance individualistic rather than social goals, permitting us to say, one by one, "I want a pair of running shoes" or "I need a new VCR" or "but yen and sell D-Marks!" but deterring us from saying, in a voice made common by interaction and deliberation, "our inner city community needs new athletic facilities" or "there is too much violence on TV and in the movies" or "we should rein in the World Bank and democratise the IMF!" Markets preclude the "we" thinking and "we" action of any kind at all, trusting in the power of aggregated individual choices (the invisible hand) to somehow secure the common good. Consumers speak the elementary rhetoric of "me," citizens invent the common language of "we." [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]

Dan Barker

• If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray? [Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist, 1992]
• You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time, But I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime. [Friendly Neighbourhood Atheist]
• I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief. [Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist, 1992]
• 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
• You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say "God is love" they will claim that you are taking things out of context! [Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist, 1992]
• Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender. [Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist, 1992]
• Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, "yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down. down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.
• To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance. That implies that everyone else (such as the opposing football team, driver, student, parent) is de-selected, unfavoured by God, and that I am special, above it all. [Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist, 1992]

Ronald J. Barrier, National Spokesperson, American Atheists

• In the unreal world of supernaturalism, myth is more productive than fact. Myth-conception is an endless function of faith. Who it hurts or how much it costs is incidental. As long as religious purposes are served, ethics, inquiry and reason are abandoned. Does anyone care about truth? Are we becoming a country of mindless followers, content to wallow in a world full of concocted hysteria and senseless sensationalism? Is it that easy to believe fantastic claims rather than it is searching for truth? The truth is not always comfortable. Ascertaining truth takes work, lots of it. But let's not waste what little precious time we have. Let's not quibble over facts. Truth is anathema to religious exploitation and hysteria. And so is reason. [30 August 1998]

Simon Barrow, Ekklesia

• Creationists and IDers keep saying, 'teach the controversy'. But there is no such controversy among those with a proper grasp of science and theology. The call for 'debate' is a phony way of keeping discredited ideas alive and distorting the search for truth. [10 April 2006]
• Churches do not need the protection of blasphemy laws, which violate free expression in plural cultures. They can expect and hope to be safeguarded against violence and intimidation, and will also feel called to express solidarity with all people (whatever their faith or lack of it) who experience threat and oppression. But in following Christ they will not want or need to claim special forms of protection denied to others. This is not where their security can or should lie. [Redeeming Religion In The Public Square, 24 July 2006]
• According to polls some 45 percent of US citizens now deny evolutionary theory and advocate 'creationism', a farrago of nonsense based on an ideologically fallacious misreading of the Genesis narratives. Millions also believe that America's right to remake the world militarily in its own image is divine will. For this new 'moral majority' ethics begins in the bedroom, stalks the classroom and apparently ends as soon as someone is able to accumulate, kill and pollute on behalf of 'God's nation'. [13 January 2005]
• At the moment Christianity seems obsessed with sex and self-preservation. Institutionally, it has lost touch with the radical nature of the Gospel and has become, for many, an irrelevant cultural artefact. The result is massive decline. The idea of 'a Christian nation' is collapsing – but this notion, which some church leaders still try to cling on to, has nothing to do with the person of Jesus, whose message remains a huge challenge to both religious and political establishments. … Sadly, many would affirm Gandhi's observation that "we like your Christ, but not your Christians". The onus on churches now is to wake up and dream a new future after Christendom. [23 December 2006]
• People of faith should embrace this truth. But they must also recognise that it has a cost, and be prepared to pay it. In a plural society Christians are no longer sole owners of their symbols and words. They can be used against us, too. We can get angry if we like. But such energy might be better used offering practical alternatives to a culture of contempt, violence and 'porn-utopia'. Above all our willingness to embrace sometimes painful free speech should flow from understanding that following Jesus isn't about taking offence or demanding control. Rather, it means learning how to absorb hurts so that they can be turned into concrete expressions of love – not fear. [15 June 2006]
• What people are rejecting is religion as a coercive, arbitrary and esoteric force over and against full human flourishing and understanding. Rightly understood, the Gospel rejects this too. Christians should be seeking to renew their intellectual, spiritual and social justice traditions through openness and hospitality towards others, rather than by being defensive or expecting special favour. The idea that we are all going to agree if religion goes away is as naïve as the view that you cannot have morality without religion. Difference is here to stay. The challenge is how to establish ground rules for fairness and equal treatment in social life and public debate. All people, whether religious or non-religious, as conventionally defined, have a role to play in that. [24 November 2006]
• The response of some Christian groups to natural and human disasters like AIDS, the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina provides ample evidence of the disturbingly dark and irrational side of faith to which Dawkins refers. Indeed their talk of God using such occurrences to punish those they do not like serves to remind us just how vindictive, superficial, confused and facile our presumptions about God can be. The difficulty is compounded by widespread public ignorance of even the basic categories of religious language (that it is inescapably metaphorical, for example), by the prominence of forms of religion that justify themselves through narrow zeal, and by the struggle of more thoughtful theologians to communicate in a sound-bite media culture. [04 November 2006]
• Creationism and ID are in no way comparable to scientific theories of origins and have no place in the modern science classroom. They also distort mature Christian understandings of the universe as coming into being through the whole world process, not through reversals or denials of that process. The roots of creationism, whether in its 'hard' form, or in attenuated ID ideas, lie not in science but in misinterpretations of the Bible. Claims that such notions can be justified from a 'literal' reading of Genesis are nonsensensical. This book has not one, but two 'creation stories'. They differ widely in detail, are highly figurative, and were written to combat fatalistic Ancient Near East cosmogonies by stressing the underlying goodness of the world as a gift of God, not to comment on modern scientific matters. [25 September 2006]
• The comprehensive and integrated equalities agenda across Britain's public institutions is no threat to freedom of religion, diversity or tolerance. On the contrary, equal treatment is a cornerstone of fair access and open expression for all – including people of faith and those of non-religious outlook. It is sad that some faith organisations seem fearful of equal rights, especially when it applies to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons. But there is a clear distinction to be made between the moral stipulations of a community of commitment, and the obligation on public institutions to ensure far treatment. Religious bodies do not have to take public money, run schools and work in cooperation with community and public services. But if they do so, they need to occupy the same level playing field as others. [07 September 2007]
• What is entailed here is not a simple disagreement about taste (that in itself is no bad thing), but the attempt by some Christians – and those of allied convictions – to impose their view on such matters through public policy. This attempt comes in two forms. The old-fashioned kind is about making Britain "a Christian country" once again. In other words, seeking to restore religious hegemony in public life. The new-fashioned kind claims to be about "the rights of communities rather than individuals", but is actually about some members of a community imposing their claims on others within and without that community. This is symptomatic of widespread confusion about the distinction between maintaining religious liberty on the one hand and seeking religious control on the other. Some evangelical groups, for instance, wish to defend their right to offend other faiths or outlooks, but protest strongly when anyone does the same to their beliefs. [13 January 2005]
• Church reactions to the Equality Act, which most people see as a matter of consistency and fairness, hark back to the Christendom era when the action of government was based solely or largely on principles determined by the churches. However, we are no longer in that era. Britain is a plural society in which the great majority of the population are no longer regular Christian adherents. The churches can therefore no longer assume that their definitions of what is right will be accepted by everybody, especially when public money is going into service intended for the whole community. Church agencies are reported to have adopted children to remarried divorcees, to lone parents who are gay, and to cohabiting couples. These all contravene official church teaching. If you are an atheist, a Muslim or a Buddhist you can adopt, but not if you are a faithful Christian couple who happen to be homosexual. People are bound to argue that this is discrimination, not religious principle. [30 January 2007]
• Most of those who condemn Jerry Springer - The Opera have little evident appreciation for irony, satire or the comedic portrayal of darkness, danger and confusion. Either that or they think that their fellow adults need nannying away from such things on pain of corruption. Many of them probably still think that Monty Python's Life Of Brian is blasphemous, failing to understand that what is being laughed at in the film is not Jesus but mindless messianism, political or religious. I still cringe when I recall those TV debates when the Python movie first came out, with self-styled Christian campaigners completely missing the theological point that was only too apparent to the filmmakers they were attacking. Talk about irony. To put it bluntly, the religiously offended are bad at interpreting texts – which is why they also make unreliable, rigid and unimaginative expositors of the Bible. The Word made flesh, taking on the mess of humanity, is too much for them to bear. They prefer something safe, prescriptive and sanitised. [13 January 2005]
• Blasphemous libel is difficult to define and privileges only the established church. It is unfair in a plural society, harms free speech, discriminates against people of other or no religion, and has recently (and rightly) been described by the former Archbishop of Canterbury as "redundant". Ekklesia opposes a law of blasphemy not on pragmatic grounds alone, but centrally on theological ones. Christian faith (and indeed any faith) is corrupted when its allegiance or defence is legally required by the state. Instead of being a liberating tradition rooted in God's favour-free love, it becomes a matter of coercion and oppression. It is not without significance that Jesus himself was tried and executed by a coalition of political and religious forces who objected to his subversive message. Moreover, blasphemy laws in other parts of the world (Pakistan is a good example) have become a threat to life and limb not just for Christians, but for a variety of minority groups. [24 October 2005]
• Making profession of religious belief mandatory for participation in a supposedly open public body which receives statutory funding is surely unjust, objectionable and unacceptable in a plural society. It also violates of the freedom of belief which many Christians and others hold to be key to the integrity of faith as something that can never be imposed, because it is a matter of grace and gift. I hope people of faith will join with non-religious people in courteously but persistently pointing out to the Scout Association, and to the statutory bodies that give them public money, how wrong and unacceptable their stance is - a clear and regrettable abrogation of 'Scout's honour'. The exclusion of the non-religious is also classic example of the 'Christendom mentality' that faith should be made normative in public life, irrespective of the beliefs and convictions of others. Such an approach is deeply counter-productive. It brings genuine, free religious conviction into disrepute, associating it with compulsion and injustice, rather than love, truthfulness and peaceableness. [speaking about the Scouts, 02 February 2007]

Alan Barth

• Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions. [The Loyalty Of Free Men, 1951]

Bruce Bartlett

• Just in the past few months, I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do. This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts, he truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence. But you can't run the world on faith. [New York Times, 17 October 2004]

Jonathan Bartley, Ekklesia

• The simple fact that so many Parliamentarians have a religious faith that amounts to far more than a cultural veneer, and that this number is being added to, clearly calls into question the claims by some Bishops and Church leaders that Christianity is being marginalised in public life. [commenting on the appointment of Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor (who shifted around known paedophiles) to the House of Lords, 27 February 2009]

Basilides

• Those who confess Jesus as the crucified one are still enslaved to the God of the Jews. He who denies it has been freed and knows the plan of the unbegotten Father.

Pierre Bayle

• In matters of religion it is very easy to deceive a man, and very hard to undeceive him. [Dictionary, 1697]

Bert B. Beach, Religious Liberty Executive, Seventh-Day Adventist

• Freedom of religion also implies the right not to have or profess a religion. This is sometimes overlooked. It is a sad commentary on religion that religionists, probably quite well-meaning at times, have throughout history tried to force fellow human beings into a required religious mould. Apart from the very wrong theological assumptions involved, this is a flagrant violation of the dignity of the human person. Coerced religion is demeaning and of little value. [Bright Candle Of Courage, 1989]

Simone de Beauvoir

• I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.

August Bebel

• Christianity is the enemy of liberty and of civilisation. It has kept mankind in chains. [Reichstag speech, 31 March 1881]
• Christ came, and Christianity arose … But originating in Judaism, which knew woman only as a being bereft of all rights, and biased by the Biblical conception which saw in her the source of all evil, Christianity preached contempt for women. [Woman And Socialism]

John Beevers

• I do not know that Christianity holds anything more of importance for the world. It is finished, played out. The only trouble lies in how to get rid of the body before it begins to smell too much. [World Without Faith, 1935]

Catherine Bennett

• With rival churches monitoring balance and airtime with a jealous watchfulness that used to be the monopoly of the Scottish Nationalists, an intervention by the cardinal is inevitably followed, pronto, by one from the chief rabbi depicting abortion as "mere convenience", and then, not to be outdone, by the increasingly familiar figure of Iqbal Sacranie telling us that we should be "alarmed". Nowadays the melancholy, long withdrawing roar is all but drowned out by the angry squawks of marginal churches demanding that this play be banned, or this book pulped, or that musical taken off, or this broadcaster mobbed, or that charity boycotted, such is the intolerable hurt and offence that would otherwise be sustained by sensitive practitioners of their particular faith. As pre-election debate degenerates into a Thought for the Day abortion special, it can be seen that the indulgence shown by this government to those who demand public recognition of their private spiritual beliefs when it should have been advocating disestablishment – and in particular its decision to present fundamentalists with their own special schools and a dedicated zealot's law so that no one can ever be rude about them – are already having an effect. So too, no doubt, is Tony Blair's promotion of his own faith-based, prayer-fuelled politics. [The Guardian, 17 March 2005]
• It is strange, isn't it, to think that this fine-looking couple [the Travoltas], recently seen experiencing spiritual ecstasy in East Grinstead, presumably believe in Scientologist founder Ron L Hubbard's story of Xenu, the galactic tyrant who froze his victims and stored them in the Earth's volcanos? It can't be more absurd to venerate a turtle than to follow Hubbard (who also prohibits psychiatry and making a noise in childbirth). Or a Kabbalist who thinks "all created things are directly affected by their Hebrew names, as well as by the component letters of their names". Or a Muslim who believes in a paradise full of willing virgins. Or a Christian who thinks God's got it in for Jerry Springer: the Opera. When he hasn't got it in for Pakistanis, New Orleans or the unfortunate US minister recently electrocuted in the act of baptism. If, as Madonna says, she has been ridiculed for professing her beliefs, her best expedient would be to stop professing them, at length, to a British public that is already wearied by haranguing, complaints and demands from rival believers whose only common ground is their indifference to the fact that most other people don't share their faith. On men, on sex, even on the correct raising of a mannerly nine-year-old, I would be delighted to hear anything Madonna has to say. Concerning religion, we can only hope she soon alights on the joys of trappism, and subsequently takes all the other faith communities in this country with her. [The Guardian, 03 November 2005]
• In parts of Bradford, there must be great rejoicing over Blunkett's updating of Voltaire's defend-to-the-death doctrine, which might be summarised as follows: "I don't know whether I agree with you or not, as I have devised a law denying you the right to speak." At last, 12 years after they first burned copies of the Satanic Verses, Rushdie's fiercest opponents finally have a chance to ban the book in Britain for ever. Maybe Rushdie, his publishers and distributors will end up with seven years in prison! To adherents of the less popular or established creeds and cults, Blunkett's bold repudiation of the Enlightenment offers no end of benefits. Once he has, in effect, extended the blasphemy laws to include all religions, Christians will no longer have the monopoly on taking offence. To be sure, British Christians have not often acted on the opportunity to persecute their detractors – there has been only one prosecution for blasphemy in more than 70 years – but that is no reason why more thin-skinned believers should not move to have their critics tried and imprisoned. … Blunkett's law may be of no immediate benefit to red-haired people, fat people, Welsh people, estate agents, journalists and politicians, to name just a few routinely ridiculed and slighted minorities, but they should also take heart. Soon they, too, may see their tormentors in court, accused of saying horrid things. Why should the objects of religious hatred be privileged over all the other victims of insults and harsh words? But the principal beneficiaries of Blunkett's law will be lawyers, so much so that the more enterprising among them may wish to establish new specialist chambers, just as Mrs Blair did with Matrix in time for the human rights act, especially dedicated to wrangling, at tremendously lucrative length, over the subtle distinctions between ridicule and inciting hatred, speaking your mind and inciting hatred, writing a novel and inciting hatred and following your religion and inciting hatred. Of course, Blunkett's law is not good news for everyone. Imagine how tricky, if not impossible, it is going to be for the clerics who must soon find forms of worship that do not demean or insult all those who belong to other, contradictory faiths. Think of the difficulties for the new, faith-based schools. And then, spare a thought for all those who still cherish the right to say what one thinks in a free society. Rowan Atkinson has already drawn attention to the threat Blunkett's law would constitute to comedians – which may have had some people racking their brains for examples of sketches or sitcoms making fun of Muslims, an Islamic equivalent to the Vicar of Dibley, say, or Father Ted. The lack of any recent instances of comical Mullah-baiting suggests that the charge of Islamophobia has not, for some time, been lightly sought. Blunkett's enforced extension of this self-censorship may not, in practice, even be much of a blessing to the Muslims it is designed to protect. They also enjoy freedom of expression. Until quite recently, more colourful Muslim enthusiasts such as Omar Bakri Mohammed, formerly of Saudi Arabia, joyfully exercised that freedom, calling for, among other things, a holy war in Britain. Won't they, too, miss it when it's gone? [The Guardian, 18 October 2001] No, they won't, because they don't want freedom of any kind for their people, and they are the ones who set the rules and decide what is 'permissible'. These are precisely the people who want it.

Bernard Berenson

• Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her?

Isaiah Berlin

• As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any. I do not at all ask what it is, but I suspect that it has none and this is a source of great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some cosmic all-embracing libretto or God are, believe me, pathetically mistaken.

David K. Berninghausen

• In order to get the truth, conflicting arguments and expressions must be allowed. There can be no freedom without choice, no sound choice without knowledge. [Arrogance Of The Censor, 1982]

Dennis Bernstein, Radio KPFA

• Any US journalist, columnist, editor, college professor, student-activist, public official or clergy member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an anti-Semite. His reward for was to receive emails: You mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!, God willing a Palestinian will murder you, rape your wife and slash your kids' throats.", and I hope that you, Barbara Lubin and all other Jewish Marxist Communist traitors anti-American cop haters will die a violent and cruel death just like the victims of suicide bombers in Israel..

Ernest Bevin

• There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented. … The common man, I think, is the great protection against war. [Speech in the House of Commons, 23 November 1945]

John Bice

• In e-mail discussions, religionists often ask why, as an atheist, I bother to behave morally. It's as though, to them, the only thing stopping humanity from morphing into sadistically selfish malevolent monsters is belief in an invisible being who holds us responsible for fulfilling his/her/its moral expectations. Usually, I turn the question around and ask, "Would your behavior change if you no longer believed in the existence of god? Is belief in that "eye in the sky," the only thing that keeps you from raping, pillaging, plundering and killing your parents or children?" If so — which I don't believe for a moment — what a sad contrast it would be to the ethical behavior of nonbelievers who adhere to social and personal moral standards with no expectation of otherworldly reward. An entirely god-dependent morality is nothing but child-like obedience, a shallow ethical framework informed only through fear of punishment or anticipation of reward. [The State News, 17 April 2007]
• The details of the [Xenu] story are outrageously funny. … Amusement aside, weird beliefs are important to consider. Most significantly, these beliefs demonstrate how extraordinarily gullible and irrational people can be. If approached at the right time, with the right message, by a charismatic spokesperson, people are capable of all sorts of bizarre and utterly unsubstantiated beliefs. However, it's important to stress that this observation isn't limited to fringe cult beliefs. As bumper-sticker philosophy points out, "religions are just cults with more members." One reason the beliefs of Scientologists seem so bizarre, in addition to the fact they are freakishly nutty, is because they are exotic and unfamiliar. It's important to bear in mind, however, that Scientology doctrine is no more absurd than many other widely embraced religious concepts. The core beliefs of well-known world religions are equally devoid of supporting evidence, and are just as farfetched and fanciful. What's the difference, rationally speaking, between believing in body-infesting souls and ancient galactic confederations, or in the stories of virgin birth, Vishnu, the Garden of Eden, transubstantiation, Noah's ark, judgment day, or the baseless concept of the Trinity? The answer: not much. … Tom Cruise and Scientology offer amusing reminders that a critical and rational examination of one's core beliefs just might be a good idea. Any story or concept requiring religious faith to be accepted, due to a complete lack of substantiating evidence, ought to be approached with a healthy skepticism. [Statenews, 28 June 2005]

Joe Biden

• I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad, and I was telling the president of my many concerns [growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields]. 'Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?' Bush stood up and put his hand on [my] shoulder. 'My instincts,' he said. 'My instincts.' I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!' [March 2004, quoted in New York Times, 17 October 2004]

Ambrose Bierce

• Faith. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. [The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
• Heathen. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel. [The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
• Pray. To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. [The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
• Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. [The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]

Scott Bidstrup

• There is a saying in Buddhism that where the student is ready, the teacher is provided. Such a concept certainly affirms the power of God to bring the word of God to the sincere seeker. Why then, does the fundamentalist almost always assume that God needs him to go out and spread God's word? If God is omnipotent, He doesn't need anyone to proselytise on His behalf. He's quite capable of steering the seeker in the direction of His word all by Himself.
• It is my opinion that the reason education in America has floundered to such a degree is that a man who understands his rights, who can think critically and analytically, and who can challenge what he is taught is a politically dangerous individual. Such a person understands oppression. He knows the meaning of tyranny. He can figure out for himself when he is being cheated, robbed, and systematically denied his rights and the material wealth he himself has created.

Steve Biko

• The most powerful weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Richard Birnie

• How large a share of vanity must spur the piety of the missionary. There is something melodramatic in landing on some Fiji island, in baptising, debauching and ultimately murdering the unsuspecting savage; then in taking his land in the name of the Most High. [Essays: Social, Moral And Political, 1879]

William Blake

• I went to the Garden of Love, / And saw what I never had seen; / A Chapel was built in the midst, / Where I used to play on the green. // And the gates of this Chapel were shut, / And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door; / So I turned to the Garden of Love / That so many sweet flowers bore. // And I saw it was filled with graves, / And tombstones where flowers should be; / And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, / And binding with briars my joys and desires. [The Garden Of Love, Songs Of Experience, 1794]

William Blum

• The "trickle down" theory is based on the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals. [Irreverent Observations]
• If business and industry leaders were truly responsible, there would be no FDA, OSHA, NLRB, FTC, FDIC, FCC, SEC, FAA, EPA, or many other agencies that protect us from those who cannot otherwise be held accountable. [Irreverent Observations]
• Romanians cut the Communist Party symbol out of the national flag during the 1989 revolution. At the May Day parade in Moscow, 1990, one marcher carried a Soviet flag with the hammer and sickle cut out as a symbol of his repudiation of Soviet rule, and was not arrested. American leaders call such people freedom fighters. Yet, if these people came to this country and wanted to protest by burning an American flag, if the same leaders had their way, they would be punished. [Irreverent Observations]
• But in any event, defining the issue as a choice between the A-bomb and a land invasion is an irrelevant and wholly false dichotomy. By 1945, Japan's entire military and industrial machine was grinding to a halt as the resources needed to wage war were all but eradicated. The navy and air force had been destroyed ship by ship, plane by plane, with no possibility of replacement. When, in the spring of 1945, the island nation's lifeline to oil was severed, the war was over except for the fighting. By June, Gen. Curtis LeMay, in charge of the air attacks, was complaining that after months of terrible firebombing, there was nothing left of Japanese cities for his bombers but "garbage can targets". By July, U.S. planes could fly over Japan without resistance and bomb as much and as long as they pleased. Japan could no longer defend itself. After the war, the world learned what U.S. leaders had known by early 1945: Japan was militarily defeated long before Hiroshima. It had been trying for months, if not for years, to surrender; and the U.S. had consistently rebuffed these overtures. A May 5 cable, intercepted and decoded by the U.S., dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue for peace. Sent to Berlin by the German ambassador in Tokyo, after he talked to a ranking Japanese naval officer, it read: Since the situation is clearly recognised to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavour an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard. As far as is known, Washington did nothing to pursue this opening. [Needless Slaughter, Useful Terror, Spring 1995]

Napoleon Bonaparte

• All religions have been made by men. [letter to Gaspard Gourgaud, 28 January 1817]
• Hostile newspapers are more to be dreaded than a hundred thousand bayonets.
• If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.
• Everything is more or less organised matter. To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same.

Pamela Bone

• The holy books on which Jews, Christians and Muslims rely were written at a time when ideas about human rights and the scope of scientific knowledge were very different from today. We are expected to respect religious texts that contain invitations to genocide, rape and slavery. We are supposed to respect all religions when the central tenet of every religion is that its holy book is the right one and all others are in error or at best incomplete. Unbelievers are those who declare, "God is the Messiah, the son of Mary," says the Koran. "Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people." We are supposed to respect beliefs that if they were held by one person, rather than millions of people, the person holding them would be judged insane. Catholics are enjoined to believe that during the mass a piece of wafer is transformed not into a symbol of the body of Christ, but into the actual body of Christ. … As the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved, it is no more moral to believe than not to believe. The best hope for a less religious and thus safer world is for religion – all religion – to be open to rational and stringent examination and criticism, and yes, to ridicule. [The Australian, 15 August 2006]

G. Richard Bozarth

• It becomes clear now that the whole justification of Jesus' life and death is predicated on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without the original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam's fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None. [The Meaning Of Evolution, American Atheist, 20 September 1979]
• Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus' earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus was not the redeemer that died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing. [The Meaning Of Evolution, American Atheist, 20 September 1979]

Charles Bradlaugh

• The word heretic ought to be a term of honour…
• If special honour is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of humankind. [25 September 1881]
• The Atheist does not say "there is no god", but he says "I do not know what you mean by god; I am without the idea of god; the word god is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny god, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception and the conception of which by its affirmer is so imperfect that he is unable to define it to me." [National Review, 25 November 1883]

Katy Brand

• I was a Christian when I started my [theology] degree and wasn't when I finished, so that tells you something. It clarified some things. It turns out the Bible wasn't written by God with a giant silver pencil. There might have been a certain amount of human error in there. It made me re-evaluate things. [Metro, 29 August 2008] A perfect example of why the more repressive religions are opposed to any form of discourse or examination, or even education, because that involves thinking rather than the blind obedience called believing.

Poppy Z. Brite

• The Christian Right always needs scapegoats, and the rise of AIDS since the mid-eighties has made a convenient scapegoat of anyone whose sexuality encompasses more than breeding in the missionary position. [Ex Cathedra, 05 November 1995]

David Brooks

• To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy. [The Necessity Of Atheism]

Andrew Brown

• I do not see how anyone could come fresh to the Bible and see any regard for human life at all in the early parts. From the extermination of every living thing outside the ark to the ethnic cleansing of the promised land, the story is one of utter disregard to human life except when it suits God's purposes.

James A. C. Brown

• Education teaches people how to think, while propaganda teaches people what to think. [Techniques Of Persuasion, 1963]
• Propaganda by censorship takes two forms: the selective control of information to favour a particular viewpoint, and the deliberate doctoring of information in order to create an impression different from that originally intended. [Techniques Of Persuasion, 1963]

Roy W. Brown

• Not only does the concept of defamation of religion have no validity in international law, the resolution is unnecessary because the problem it purports to address, increasing discrimination and incitement to hatred experienced by Muslims, is already dealt with under international law. Article 20 of the ICCPR specifies the steps that states must take to outlaw incitement to hatred or violence. So it is clear that the OIC have another reason for pushing these resolutions; namely, extending restrictions on freedom of expression that already exist in the Islamic states – blasphemy laws – into international law, and thereby silencing critics of Islam in the rest of the world. [The slow death of freedom of expression, Index On Censorship, 26 March 2009]

Scott Brown

• There are many extraordinary tales from antiquity, including women with snakes for hair, creatures whose gaze turns you to stone, creatures with equine bodies and human torsos, many accounts of people rising from the dead, lots of tales of magic, and numerous accounts of physical encounters with fantastic beings. Ancient people were a superstitious, scientifically primitive lot, and believed in many things that today we know are silly. I find it bizarre that so many people see nothing suspicious about the extraordinary or supernatural claims of the bible, yet don't hesitate to express disbelief in equally well documented claims of minotaurs, basilisks, and wizards.

Yasmin Alibhai Brown

• To speak at all these days, to attempt to tell any kind of truth, means offending someone. The words which carry no offence of any kind may carry as little meaning. [The Enemy Within, Free Expression Is No Offence, 2005]
• I've heard powerful Muslims say this, they want the same power that the Jewish board of deputies has. "Look at how they've used anti-Semitism, we can use Islamophobia". I've heard them say this. But I think there's another much more dangerous thing than that. By and large the lowest achieving community in this country – whether we're talking about schools Universities, occupations professions and so on – are by and large, the majority are Muslims. When you talk to people about why this is happening, the one reason they give you, the only reason, is Islamophobia. Uh uh. It is not Islamophobia that makes parents take 14 year old bright girls out of school to marry illiterate men, and the girl has again to bring up the next generation who will again be denied not just education but the value of education. What Islamophobia does is it just becomes a convenient label – a figleaf, a reason – that is so comfortable for Muslims whenever they have to look at why they aren't in the places that they have to be. [Are Muslims Hated?, 30 Minutes, Channel 4, 08 January 2005]

Lenny Bruce

• If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

Giordano Bruno

• Ma pur' si muove! (And nevertheless it does move!) [last words whilst he was being burned alive, 16 February 1600] Sometimes incorrectly attributed to Galileo, though even here it's apocryphal.
• Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it. [quoted by Gaspar Schopp of Breslau in a letter to Conrad Rittershausen, written on the day of Bruno's burning at the stake]
• It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. [1548]
• There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things.

E. A. Wallis Budge

• … it is clear that the early Christians bestowed some of her [Isis'] attributes upon the Virgin Mary. There is little doubt that in her character of the loving and protecting mother she appealed strongly to the imagination of all the Eastern peoples among whom her cult came, and that the pictures and sculptures wherein she is represented in the act of suckling her child Horus formed the foundation for the Christian figures and paintings of the Madonna and Child. Several of the incidents of the wanderings of the Virgin with the child in Egypt as recorded in the Apocryphal Gospels reflect scenes in the life of Isis as described in the texts found on the Metternich Stele, and many of the attributes of Isis, the God-mother, the mother of Horus, and of Neith, the goddess of Saïs, are identical with those of Mary the Mother of Christ. [The Gods Of The Egyptians, vol 2, 1904]

Pearl S. Buck

• Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation. [Advice To Unborn Novelists]
• I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.

Buckle

• As long as men refer the movements of the comets to the immediate finger of God, and as long as they believe that an eclipse is one of the modes by which the deity expresses his anger, they will never be guilty of the blasphemous presumption of attempting to predict such supernatural appearances. Before they could dare to investigate the causes of these mysterious phenomena, it is necessary that they should believe, or at all events that they should suspect, that the phenomena themselves were capable of being explained by the human mind. [History Of Civilization, vol I]

Buddha

• Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, accept it and live up to it.

Luis Buñuel

• God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

Luther Burbank

• This should be enough for one who lives for truth and service to his fellow passengers on the way. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to me.
• The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed! I don't want to have anything to do with such a God.

Rob Burcham

• I sometimes see religion as the mother of all chain letters. It promises great things but if you break the chain, horrible misfortune will fall upon you. Most people won't risk breaking the chain.

Marilyn Burge

• Fundies lie. Fossils don't.
• Atheism is no more a religion than abstinence is a form of drinking.

Anthony Burgess

• I gain the impression that few of the protesting Muslims in Britain know directly what they are protesting against. Their Imams have told them that Mr. Rushdie has published a blasphemous book and must be punished. They respond with sheeplike docility and wolflike aggression. They forget what the Nazis did to books – or perhaps they do not: after all, some of their co-religionists approved of the Holocaust – and they shame a free country by denying free expression through the vindictive agency of bonfires. [The Independent, 16 January 1989]
• If members of Britain's community of some two million Muslims do not want to read Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, all they have to do is abstain from buying it or taking it out of the local library. They should not seek to impose their feelings about its contents – or, more probably, what they have been told about them – on the rather larger non-Islamic part of the population. Their campaign to have the book banned, on the grounds that it blasphemes Islam, led to a demonstration over the weekend in Bradford in which, following the example of the Inquisition and Hitler's National Socialists, a large crowd of Muslims burnt some copies of the book. [The Independent, 16 January 1989]

Edmund Burke

• Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
• All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.

W. Burkert

• Only dead dogma is preserved without change, doctrine taken seriously is always being revised in the continuous process of reinterpretation. [Lore And Science In Ancient Pythagoreanism, 1972]

William S. Burroughs

• Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
  Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
  Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
  Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
  Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
  Thanks for the American dream,
  To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
  Thanks for the KKK.
  For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches.
  For decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
  Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.
  Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
  Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
  Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind the own business.
  Thanks for a nation of finks.
  Yes, thanks for all the memories - all right let's see your arms!
  You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
  Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
  [A Thanksgiving Prayer]

Richard Burton

• What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, "We shall wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth?" Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity. [speaking of Winston Churchill before portraying him]
• The more I read about man and his maniacal ruthlessness and his murderous envious scatological soul, the more I realise that he will never change. Our stupidity is immortal, nothing will change it. The same mistakes, the same prejudices, the same injustice, the same lusts wheel endlessly around the parade ground of the centuries. Immutable and ineluctable. I wish I could believe in a god of some kind but I simply cannot. [personal diary, 1969]

Samuel Butler

• Belief, like any other moving body, follows the path of least resistance.
• People are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised.
• What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, "I bet that my Redeemer liveth."
• Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them seriously.

General Smedley Butler

• I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service in the country's most agile military force, the Marines. I served in all ranks from second lieutenant to major general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. Thus I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers and Co. in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honours, medals, and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel that I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents. [New York Times, 21 August 1931]

Lord Byron

• If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom. [Byron's Letters And Journals, vol. 3, 27 November 1813]
• We have fools in all sects, and impostors in most; why should I believe mysteries no one can understand, because written by men who chose to mistake madness for inspiration and style themselves Evangelicals?
• A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer? [Detached Thoughts 96]

Julius Caesar

• Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervour, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar. Actually, not by him at all, and certainly not by the equally-often cited William Shakespeare (who didn't write in this style). It seems to have appeared around 2001, and does in any case use anachronisms.

Agnès Callamard

• Article 19's analysis of this [Danish cartoon] case is that, in the absence of a specific intention to promote hatred, criminal or other censorship measures against the newspaper would not be legitimate. We recognise that the cartoons were offensive to many Muslims, but offence and blasphemy should not be threshold standards for curtailing freedom of expression. Blasphemy laws protect beliefs as opposed to people. Restrictions on freedom of expression which privilege certain ideas cannot be justified. At the same time, international human rights law does protect the right of everyone to hold beliefs, and to be free of violence or discrimination. [The Guardian, 02 February 2006]

Bruce Calvert

• Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than thinkers.

Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian Archbishop

• When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

Joseph Campbell

• My favourite definition of religion is 'a misrepresentation of mythology'. And the misrepresentation consists precisely in attributing historical references to symbols which properly are spiritual in their reference. [An Open Life, 1988]
• The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian saviour Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight, the instant of the turn of the year from increasing darkness to light. [The Mythic Image, 1981]

Keith Cantrell

• When I was chastised by a scientist for making a stupid, trivial mistake in my evaluation of life, I was happy because it meant someone was looking out for the truth. This is paramount. Nothing else really matters in the world of science, or the universe for that matter. If it's not true, it's not real. So, where is this leading? Well, I've noticed that you never find this kind of self-correction going on in religion. Especially Christianity. I've never heard a fundamentalist or creationist ever say, "OOPS, sorry, I made a mistake! The world wasn't made in 6 days after all!" Even if you point out the lack of evidence for their claims they will still stubbornly insist that God's Word is absolutely true and infallible. This baffles me because no one can be that certain of their conclusions. Even scientists who spend their lives poring over the tiny details of a thesis will admit that they aren't certain about some things. Not so, the pious Christian. They claim that God said it and that settles it! Well, let God speak for himself. If he did create the world in six days only 6000 years ago, he can tell me himself. I don't need to be berated by Bible thumpers warning me about hellfire and damnation if I don't believe! [Useless-Knowledge.com, 07 February 2005]

George Carlin

• I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don't have as many people who believe it. [Brain Droppings]
• I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day, and the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to 'God' are all answered at about the same 50% rate.

Robert Todd Carroll

• There is nothing dull about a life without fairies, Easter bunnies, devils, ghosts, magic crystals, etc. Life is only boring to boring people. [ The Sceptic's Dictionary]

Linda Carter

• No one has the right to dictate, particularly in this country, to force your own personal views upon the populace — religious views. I think that is suppressive, oppressive, and anti-American. We are the loyal opposition. That's the whole point of this country: freedom of speech, personal rights, personal freedom. … Separation of church and state is the one thing the creators of the Constitution did agree on — that it wasn't to be a religious government. People should feel free to speak their minds about religion but not dictate it or put it into law. What I don't understand, honestly, is how anyone can even begin to say they know the mind of God. Who do they think they are? I think that's ridiculous. I know what God is in my life. … People need to speak up. Doesn't mean that I'm godless. Doesn't mean that I am a murderer. What I hate is this demonization of everybody but one position. You're un-American because you're against the war. It's such bullshit. Fear. It's really such a finite way of thinking about God to think that your measley little mind can know the mind of God. It's a very little God that way. I think that God's bigger. I don't presume to know his mind. Or her mind. [Philadelphia Magazine, 11 September 2008]

Bartolomé de las Casas

• The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians. [A Short Account Of The Destruction Of The Indies, 1552]
• Once he [the native Cuban lord Hatuey] was tied to the stake, a Franciscan friar who was present, a saintly man, told him as much as he could in the short time permitted by his executioners about the Lord and about our Christian faith, all of which was new to him. The friar told him that, if he would only believe what he was now hearing, he would go to Heaven there to enjoy glory and eternal rest, but that, if he would not, he would be consigned to Hell, where he would endure everlasting pain and torment. The lord Hatuey thought for a short while and then asked the friar whether Christians went to Heaven. When the reply came that good ones do, he retorted, without need for further reflection, that, if that was the case, then he chose to go to Hell to ensure that he would never again have to clap eyes on those cruel brutes. This is just one example of the reputation and honour that our Lord and our Christian faith have earned as a result of the actions of those 'Christians' who have sailed to the Americas. On one occasion, when the locals had come some ten leagues out from a large settlement in order to receive us and regale us with victuals and other gifts, and had given us loaves and fishes and any other foodstuffs they could provide, the Christians were suddenly inspired by the Devil and, without the slightest provocation, butchered, before my eyes, some three thousand souls – men, women and children – as they sat there in front of us. I saw that day atrocities more terrible than any living man has ever seen nor ever thought to see. [A Short Account Of The Destruction Of The Indies, 1552]

Fidel Castro

• The world economy is today a huge casino. Recent analyses indicate that for every dollar that goes into trade, over one hundred end up in speculative operations completely disconnected from the real economy. As a result of this economic order, over 75 percent of the world population lives in underdevelopment, and extreme poverty has already reached 1.2 billion people in the Third World. So, far from narrowing the gap is widening. The revenue of the richest nations that in 1960 was 37 times larger than that of the poorest is now 74 times larger. The situation has reached such extremes that the assets of the three wealthiest persons in the world amount to the GDP of the 48 poorest countries combined. The number of people actually starving was 826 million in the year 2001. There are at the moment 854 million illiterate adults while 325 million children do not attend school. There are 2 billion people who have no access to low cost medications and 2.4 billion lack the basic sanitation conditions. No less than 11 million children under the age of 5 perish every year from preventable causes while half a million go blind for lack of vitamin A. The life span of the population in the developed world is 30 years higher than that of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa. A true genocide! … As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger. [International Conference On Financing For Development, Monterrey, 18-22 March 2002]

Celsus

• Many other persons would appear such as Jesus was, to those who were willing to be deceived.
• Is it not a wretched inference from the same acts, to conclude that the one is a God, and the others sorcerers?
• In all of these beliefs you have been deceived; yet you persist doggedly to seek justification for the absurdities you have made doctrines. [On The True Doctrine]
• The Christians excite their initiates to the point of frenzy with flute music like that heard among the priests of the goddess Cybele.
• One ought first to follow reason as a guide before accepting any belief, since anyone who believes without testing a doctrine is certain to be deceived. [On The True Doctrine]
• It is clear to me that the writings of the Christians are a lie, and that your fables are not well-enough constructed to conceal this monstrous fiction:
• They are forever repeating: 'Do not examine. Only believe, and thy faith will make thee blessed. Wisdom is a bad thing in life, foolishness is to be preferred.'
• There is nothing new or impressive about their ethical teaching; indeed, when one compares it to other philosophies, their simple-mindedness becomes apparent. [On The True Doctrine]
• Let's assume for a minute that he foretold his resurrection. Are you ignorant of the multitudes who have invented similar tales to lead simple minded hearers astray? [On The True Doctrine]
• What an absurdity! Clearly the Christians have used the myths of Danae and the Melanippe, or of the Auge and the Antiope in fabricating the story of Jesus' virgin birth. [On The True Doctrine]
• Although a thing may seem to you to be evil, it is by no means certain that it is so; for you do not know what is of advantage to yourself, or to another, or to the whole world.
• If Jesus desired to show that his power was really divine, he ought to have appeared to those who had ill-treated him, and to him who had condemned him, and to all men universally.
• The Christians babble about God day and night in their impious and sullied way; they arouse the awe of the illiterate with their false descriptions of the punishments awaiting those who have sinned.
• These things are stated much better among the Greeks (than in the Scriptures), and in a manner which is free from all exaggerations and promises on the part of God, or the Son of God.
• If only it were possible that all the inhabitants of Asia, Europe, and Libya, Greeks and Barbarians, all to the uttermost ends of the earth, were to come under one law! but any one who thinks this possible, knows nothing.
• The resurrection of the dead, and the divine judgment, and of the rewards to be bestowed upon the just, and of the fire which is to devour the wicked, are stale doctrines and there is nothing new in your teaching upon these points.
• Christians weave together erroneous opinions drawn from ancient sources, and trumpet them aloud, and sound them before men, as the priests of Cybele clash their cymbals in the ears of those who are being initiated in their mysteries.
• God does not need to amend His work afresh. But it is not as a man who has imperfectly designed some piece of workmanship, and executed it unskilfully, that God administers correction to the world, in purifying it by a flood or by a conflagration.
• The great God, after giving his spirit to the creator, demands it back again. What god gives anything with the intention of demanding it back? For it is the mark of a needy person to demand back (what he has given), whereas God stands in need of nothing.
• After all, the old myths of the Greeks that attribute a divine birth to Perseus, Amphion, Aeacus and Minos are equally good evidence of their wondrous works on behalf of mankind – and are certainly no less lacking in plausibility than the stories of your followers. [On The True Doctrine]
• If these idols are nothing, what harm will there be in taking part in the feast? On the other hand, if they are demons, it is certain that they too are God's creatures, and that we must believe in them, sacrifice to them according to the laws, and pray to them that they may be propitious.
• Moreover, their cosmogony is extremely silly. The narrative of the creation of man is exceedingly silly. Perhaps Moses wrote these words with no serious object in view, but in the spirit of the writers of the old Comedy, who have sportively related that 'Proetus slew Bellerophon,' and that 'Pegasus came from Arcadia.'
• Taking its roots in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity, and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant.
• So too their fantastic story – which they take from the Jews – concerning the flood and the building of an enormous ark, and the business about the message being brought back to the survivors of the flood by a dove (or was it an old crow?). This is nothing more than a debased and nonsensical version of the myth of Deucalion, a fact I am sure they would not want to come light. [On The True Doctrine]
• Now it will be wondered how men so desperate in their beliefs can persuade others to join their ranks. The Christians use sundry methods of persuasion, and invent a number of terrifying incentives. Above all, they have concocted an absolutely offensive doctrine of everlasting punishment and rewards, exceeding anything the philosophers (who have never denied the punishment of the unrighteous or the reward of the blessed) could have imagined.
• God is the God of all alike; He is good, He stands in need of nothing, and He is without jealousy. What, then, is there to hinder those who are most devoted to His service from taking part in public feasts. If these idols are nothing, what harm will there be in taking part in the feast? On the other hand, if they are demons, it is certain that they too are God's creatures, and that we must believe in them, sacrifice to them according to the laws, and pray to them that they may be propitious.
• Certain Christians, having misunderstood the words of Plato, loudly boast of a 'super-celestial' God thus ascending beyond the heaven of the Jews. These things are obscurely hinted at in the accounts of the Persians, and especially in the mysteries of Mithras, which are celebrated amongst them. He who would investigate the Christian mysteries, along with the aforesaid Persian, will, on comparing the two together, and on unveiling the rites of the Christians, see in this way the difference between them.
• Plato is not guilty of boasting and falsehood, giving out that he has made some new discovery, or that he has come down from heaven to announce it, but acknowledges whence these statements are derived. Accordingly, we do not say to each of our hearers, 'Believe, first of all, that He whom I introduce to thee is the Son of God although he was shamefully bound, and disgracefully punished, and very recently was most contumeliously treated before the eyes of all men. Believe it even the more (on that account)'.
• The Christians say that God has hands, a mouth, and a voice; they are always proclaiming that 'God said this' or 'God spoke'. 'The heavens declare the work of his hands,' they say. I can only comment that such a God is no God at all, for God has neither hands, mouth nor voice, nor any characteristics of which we know. Their absurd doctrines even contains references to God walking about in the garden he created for man; and they speak of him being angry, jealous, moved to repentance, sorry, sleepy – in short as being in every respect more a man than a God.
• The more modest among the Jews and Christians endeavour somehow to give these stories an allegorical signification, although some of them do not admit of this, but on the contrary admit that they are exceedingly silly inventions. The allegorical explanations, however, which have been devised are much more shameful and absurd than the fables themselves, inasmuch as they endeavour to unite with marvellous and altogether insensate folly things which cannot at all be made to harmonize.
• It is equally silly of these Christians to suppose that when their God applies the fire (like a common cook!) all the rest of mankind will be thoroughly scorched, and that they alone will escape unscorched – not just those alive at the time, mind you, but (they say) those long since dead will rise up from the earth possessing the same bodies as they did before. I ask you: Is this not the hope of worms? For what sort of human soul is it that has any use for a rotted corpse of a body? [On The True Doctrine]
• Not only do they misunderstand the words of the philosophers; they even stoop to assigning words of the philosophers to their Jesus. For example, we are told that Jesus judged the rich with the saying 'It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god.' Yet we know that Plato expressed this very idea in a purer form when he said, 'It is impossible for an exceptionally good man to be exceptionally rich.' Is one utterance more inspired than the other? [On The True Doctrine]
• The old mythological fables which attributed a divine origin to Perseus, and Amphion, and Aeacus, and Minos were not believed by us. Nevertheless, that they might not appear unworthy of credit, they represented the deeds of these personages as great and wonderful, and truly beyond the power of man; but what hast thou done that is noble or wonderful either in deed or in word? Thou hast made no manifestation to us, although they challenged you in the temple to exhibit some unmistakable sign that you were the Son of God.
• Are these distinctive happenings unique to the Christians, and if so, how are they unique? Or are ours to be accounted myths and theirs believed? What reasons do the Christians give for the distinctiveness of their beliefs? In truth there is nothing at all unusual about what the Christians believe, except that they believe it to the exclusion of more comprehensive truths about God. They believe in eternal punishment; well, so do the priests and initiates of the various religions. The Christian threaten others with this punishment, just as they are themselves threatened. [On The True Doctrine]
• Again, if God, like Jupiter in the comedy, should, on awaking from a lengthened slumber, desire to rescue the human race from evil, why did He send this Spirit of which you speak into one corner (of the earth)? He ought to have breathed it alike into many bodies, and have sent them out into all the world. Now the comic poet, to cause laughter in the theatre, wrote that Jupiter, after awakening, despatched Mercury to the Athenians and Lacedaemonians; but do not you think that you have made the Son of God more ridiculous in sending Him to the Jews?
• And again, let us resume the subject from the beginning, with a larger array of proofs. And I make no new statement, but say what has been long settled. God is good, and beautiful, and blessed, and that in the best and most beautiful degree. But if he come down among men, he must undergo a change, and a change from good to evil, from virtue to vice, from happiness to misery, and from best to worst. Who, then, would make choice of such a change? It is the nature of a mortal, indeed, to undergo change and remoulding, but of an immortal to remain the same and unaltered. God, then, could not admit of such a change.
• God either really changes himself, as these assert, into a mortal body, and the impossibility of that has been already declared; Or else he does not undergo a change, but only causes the beholders to imagine so, and thus deceives them, and is guilty of falsehood. Now deceit and falsehood are nothing but evils, and would only be employed as a medicine, either in the case of sick and lunatic friends, with a view to their cure, or in that of enemies when one is taking measures to escape danger. But no sick man or lunatic is a friend of God, nor does God fear any one to such a degree as to shun danger by leading him into error.
• You surely do not say that if the Romans were, in compliance with your wish, to neglect their customary duties to gods and men, and were to worship the Most High, or whatever you please to call him, that he will come down and fight for them, so that they shall need no other help than his. For this same God, as yourselves say, promised of old this and much more to those who served him, and see in what way he has helped them and you! They, in place of being masters of the whole world, are left with not so much as a patch of ground or a home; and as for you, if any of you transgresses even in secret, he is sought out and punished with death.
• All things, accordingly, were not made for man, any more than they were made for lions, or eagles, or dolphins, but that this world, as being God's work, might be perfect and entire in all respects. For this reason all things have been adjusted, not with reference to each other, but with regard to their bearing upon the whole. And God takes care of the whole, and (His) providence will never forsake it; and it does not become worse; nor does God after a time bring it back to himself; nor is He angry on account of men any more than on account of apes or flies; nor does He threaten these beings, each one of which has received its appointed lot in its proper place.
• By far the most silly thing is the distribution of the creation of the world over certain days, before days existed: for, as the heaven was not yet created, nor the foundation of the earth yet laid, nor the sun yet revolving, how could there be days? Moreover, taking and looking at these things from the beginning, would it not be absurd in the first and greatest God to issue the command, Let this (first thing) come into existence, and this second thing, and this (third); and after accomplishing so much on the first day, to do so much more again on the second, and third, and fourth, and fifth, and sixth? After this, indeed, he is weary, like a very bad workman, who stands in need of rest to refresh himself! It is not in keeping with the fitness of things that the first God should feel fatigue, or work with His hands, or give forth commands.
• He has neither mouth nor voice. God possesses nothing else of which we have any knowledge. Neither did He make man His image; for God is not such an one, nor like any other species of (visible) being. God partakes of form or colour nor does He even partake of 'motion'. He is not to be reached by word. He cannot be expressed by name. He has undergone no suffering that can be conveyed by words. Deity is beyond all suffering. How, then, shall I know God? and how shall I learn the way that leads to Him? And how will you show Him to me? Because now, indeed, you throw darkness before my eyes, and I see nothing distinctly. Those whom one would lead forth out of darkness into the brightness of light, being unable to withstand its splendours, have their power of vision affected and injured, and so imagine that they are smitten with blindness.
• That I bring no heavier charge than what the truth compels me, any one may see from the following remarks. Those who invite to participation in other mysteries, make proclamation as follows: 'Every one who has clean hands, and a prudent tongue;' others again thus: 'He who is pure from all pollution, and whose soul is conscious of no evil, and who has lived well and justly.' Such is the proclamation made by those who promise purification from sins. But let us hear what kind of persons these Christians invite. Every one, they say, who is a sinner, who is devoid of understanding, who is a child, and, to speak generally, whoever is unfortunate, him will the kingdom of God receive. Do you not call him a sinner, then, who is unjust, and a thief, and a housebreaker, and a poisoner, and a committer of sacrilege, and a robber of the dead? What others would a man invite if he were issuing a proclamation for an assembly of robbers?
• And I think that it makes no difference whether you call the highest being Zeus, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Ammoun like the Egyptians, or Pappaeus like the Scythians. Nor would they be deemed at all holier than others in this respect, that they observe the rite of circumcision, for this was done by the Egyptians and Colchians before them; nor because they abstain from swine's flesh, for the Egyptians practised abstinence not only from it, but from the flesh of goats, and sheep, and oxen, and fishes as well; while Pythagoras and his disciples do not eat beans, nor anything that contains life. It is not probable, however, that they enjoy God's favour, or are loved by Him differently from others, or that angels were sent from heaven to them alone, as if they had had allotted to them 'some region of the blessed,' for we see both themselves and the country of which they were deemed worthy.
• Well, let us believe that these cures, or the resurrection, or the feeding of a multitude with a few loaves, from which many fragments remained over, or those other stories of a marvellous nature were actually wrought by you. These are nothing more than the tricks of jugglers, who profess to do more wonderful things, and to the feats performed by those who have been taught by Egyptians, who in the middle of the market-place, in return for a few obols, will impart the knowledge of their most venerated arts, and will expel demons from men, and dispel diseases, and invoke the souls of heroes, and exhibit expensive banquets, and tables, and dishes, and dainties having no real existence, and who will put in motion, as if alive, what are not really living animals, but which have only the appearance of life. Since, then, these persons can perform such feats, shall we of necessity conclude that they are 'sons of God,' or must we admit that they are the proceedings of wicked men under the influence of an evil spirit?
• Come now, let us grant to you that the prediction was actually uttered. Yet how many others are there who practise such juggling tricks, in order to deceive their simple hearers, and who make gain by their deception? – as was the case, they say, with Zamolxis in Scythia, the slave of Pythagoras; and with Pythagoras himself in Italy; and with Rhampsinitus in Egypt (the latter of whom, they say, played at dice with Demeter in Hades, and returned to the upper world with a golden napkin which he had received from her as a gift); and also with Orpheus among the Odrysians, and Protesilaus in Thessaly, and Hercules at Cape Taenarus, and Theseus. But the question is, whether any one who was really dead ever rose with a veritable body. Or do you imagine the statements of others not only to be myths, but to have the appearance of such, while you have discovered a becoming and credible termination to your drama in the voice from the cross, when he breathed his last, and in the earthquake and the darkness?
• Seeing you are so eager for some novelty, how much better it would have been if you had chosen as the object of your zealous homage some one of those who died a glorious death, and whose divinity might have received the support of some myth to perpetuate his memory! Why, if you were not satisfied with Hercules or Aesculapius, and other heroes of antiquity, you had Orpheus, who was confessedly a divinely inspired man, who died a violent death. But perhaps some others have taken him up before you. You may then take Anaxarchus, who, when cast into a mortar, and beaten most barbarously, showed a noble contempt for his suffering, and said, 'Beat, beat the shell of Anaxarchus, for himself you do not beat,' – a speech surely of a spirit truly divine. But others were before you in following his interpretation of the laws of nature. Might you not, then, take Epictetus, who, when his master was twisting his leg, said, smiling and unmoved, 'You will break my leg;' and when it was broken, he added, 'Did I not tell you that you would break it?'
• The Dioscuri, and Hercules, and Aesculapius, and Dionysus, who are believed by the Greeks to have become gods after being men, but Christians cannot bear to call such beings gods, because they were at first men, and yet they manifested many noble qualifies, which were displayed for the benefit of mankind, while they assert that Jesus was seen after His death by His own followers, as if they said that 'He was seen indeed, but was only a shadow!' A great multitude both of Greeks and Barbarians acknowledge that they have frequently seen, and still see, no mere phantom, but Aesculapius himself, healing and doing good, and foretelling the future. They will not endure his being compared with Apollo or Zeus. Faith, having taken possession of our minds of Christians, makes them yield the assent which they give to the doctrine of Jesus. Well, after he has laid aside these qualities, he will be a God: (and if so), why not rather Aesculapius, and Dionysus, and Hercules? Christians ridicule those who worship Jupiter, because his tomb is pointed out in the island of Crete; and yet they worship him who rose from the tomb, although ignorant of the grounds on which the Cretans observe such a custom.
• They have also a precept to this effect, that we ought not to avenge ourselves on one who injures us, or, as he expresses it, 'Whosoever shall strike thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other also.' This is an ancient saying, which had been admirably expressed long before, and which they have only reported in a coarser way. For Plato introduces Socrates conversing with Crito as follows: 'Must we never do injustice to any?' 'Certainly not.' 'And since we must never do injustice, must we not return injustice for an injustice that has been done to us, as most people think?' 'It seems to me that we should not.' 'But tell me, Crito, may we do evil to any one or not?' 'Certainly not, O Socrates.' 'Well, is it just, as is commonly said, for one who has suffered wrong to do wrong in return, or is it unjust?' 'It is unjust. Yes; for to do harm to a man is the same as to do him injustice.' 'You speak truly. We must then not do injustice in return for injustice, nor must we do evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.' Thus Plato speaks; and he adds, 'Consider, then, whether you are at one with me, and whether, starting from this principle, we may not come to the conclusion .that it is never right to do injustice, even in return for an injustice which has been received; or whether, on the other hand, you differ from me, and do not admit the principle from which we started. That has always been my opinion, and is so still. Such are the sentiments of Plato, and indeed they were held by divine men before his time. But let this suffice as one example of the way in which this and other truths have been borrowed and corrupted. Any one who wishes can easily by searching find more of them.
• They cannot tolerate temples, altars, or images. In this they are like the Scythians, the nomadic tribes of Libya, the Seres who worship no god, and some other of the most barbarous and impious nations in the world. That the Persians hold the same notions is shown by Herodotus in these words: 'I know that among the Persians it is considered unlawful to erect images, altars, or temples; but they charge those with folly who do so, because, as I conjecture, they do not, like the Greeks, suppose the gods to be of the nature of men.' Heraclitus also says in one place: 'Persons who address prayers to these images act like those who speak to the walls, without knowing who the gods or the heroes are.' And what wiser lesson have they to teach us than Heraclitus? He certainly plainly enough implies that it is a foolish thing for a man to offer prayers to images, whilst he knows not who the gods and heroes are. This is the opinion of Heraclitus; but as for them, they go further, and despise without exception all images. If they merely mean that the stone, wood, brass, or gold which has been wrought by this or that workman cannot be a god, they are ridiculous with their wisdom. For who, unless he be utterly childish in his simplicity, can take these for gods, and not for offerings consecrated to the service of the gods, or images representing them? But if we are not to regard these as representing the Divine Being, seeing that God has a different form, as the Persians concur with them in saying, then let them take care that they do not contradict themselves; for they say that God made man His own image, and that He gave him a form like to Himself. However, they will admit that these images, whether they are like or not, are made and dedicated to the honour of certain beings. But they will hold that the beings to whom they are dedicated are not gods, but demons, and that a worshipper of God ought not to worship demons.
• All things came into existence not more for the sake of man than of the irrational animals. Thunders, and lightnings, and rains are not the works of God. Even if one were to grant that these were the works of God, they are brought into existence not more for the support of us who are human beings, than for that of plants, and trees, and herbs, and thorns. Although you may say that these things, namely plants, and trees, and herbs, and thorns, grow for the use of men, why will you maintain that they grow for the use of men rather than for that of the most savage of irrational animals? We indeed by labour and suffering earn a scanty and toilsome subsistence, while all things are produced for them without their sowing and ploughing. But if you will quote the saying of Euripides, that 'The Sun and Night are to mortals slaves,' why should they be so in a greater degree to us than to ants and flies? For the night is created for them in order that they may rest, and the day that they may see and resume their work. If one were to call us the lords of the animal creation because we hunt the other animals and live upon their flesh, we would say, Why were not we rather created on their account, since they hunt and devour us? Nay, we require nets and weapons, and the assistance of many persons, along with dogs, when engaged in the chase; while they are immediately and spontaneously provided by nature with weapons which easily bring us under their power. With respect to your assertion, that God gave you the power to capture wild beasts, and to make your own use of them, we would say that, in all probability, before cities were built, and arts invented, and societies such as now exist were formed, and weapons and nets employed, men were generally caught and devoured by wild beasts, while wild beasts were very seldom captured by men. The world was uncreated and incorruptible, and that it was only the things on earth which underwent deluges and conflagrations, and that all these things did not happen at the same time. In this way God rather subjected men to wild beasts. If men appear to be superior to irrational animals on this account, that they have built cities, and make use of a political constitution, and forms of government, and sovereignties, this is to say nothing to the purpose, for ants and bees do the same. Bees, indeed, have a sovereign, who has followers and attendants; and there occur among them wars and victories, and slaughterings of the vanquished, and cities and suburbs, and a succession of labours, and judgments passed upon the idle and the wicked; for the drones are driven away and punished. The ants set apart in a place by themselves those grains which sprout forth, that they may not swell into bud, but may continue throughout the year as their food, When ants die, the survivors set apart a special place (for their interment), and that their ancestral sepulchres such a place is. And when they [the ants] meet one another they enter into conversation, for which reason they never mistake their way; consequently they possess a full endowment of reason, and some common ideas on certain general subjects, and a voice by which they express themselves regarding accidental things. Come now, if one were to look down from heaven upon earth, in what respect would our actions appear to differ from those of ants and bees?

Dan Ceppa

• Ok, you win. You proved that your god it the best there ever was at hide'n'seek. Now, trot him out here so that we can give him his reward.

Roland Challis, SE-Asia Correspondent, BBC

• It was a triumph for western propaganda. My British sources purported not to know what was going on, but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out; now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal. [Shadow Of A Revolution, 2001]

Charles Chaplin

• By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none.

Graham Chapman

• How difficult can it be to fly an airplane? I mean, John Travolta learned how.

Maggie Chapman

• We were brought up to fear, to fear, to fear. To fear the nuns, to fear God, to fear the Devil. We were never taught to love or given any love. I suffered physical abuse, mental abuse, psychological abuse and spiritual abuse. [survivor of church orphanage, Metro, 29 August 2000]

Rev. Robert Chase, United Church of Christ

• We find it disturbing that the networks in question seem to have no problem exploiting gay persons through mindless comedies or titillating dramas, but when it comes to a church's loving welcome of committed gay couples, that's where they draw the line. [commenting on CBS & NBC's ban of their 'controversial' commercial ("Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we. … No matter who you are, or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here."), as it mentioned the exclusion of gays from some areas of life, 30 November 2004]

G. K. Chesterton

• The only defensible war is a war of defence. [Autobiography]
• Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions. [Illustrated London News, 19 April 1930]
• To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. [A Short History Of England]
• A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. [Everlasting Man, 1925]

Noam Chomsky

• If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
• I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system. [Language And Responsibility]
• The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
• The system of computer-controlled machine tools could have been developed so as to empower mechanics and get rid of useless layers of management. But it was done the other way around: it was done to increase the layers of management and to de-skill workers. Again, that's not a technological or an economic decision, but it's a power decision – basically, part of class war. [Power In The Domestic Arena]
• In 1997 at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) when the European Union brought charges against the United States for blatant, flagrant violation of WTO rules in the embargo [a unilateral one against Cuba that began in 1961 and is unique in that it bars food and medicine], the US rejected its jurisdiction, which is not surprising, because it rejects the jurisdiction of international bodies generally. [Cuba And The US Government – David vs. Goliath]
• In short, the world does not agree with us, so it follows, by simple logic, that the world is wrong; that is all there is to the matter. No alternative possibility can be discussed, even conceived. Still more strikingly, even the fact that the world does not agree with us cannot be acknowledged. Since it fails to see the light, the world outside our borders does not exist (Israel aside). We see here the grip of doctrine in a form that would have deeply impressed the medieval Church, or the mullahs in Qum today. [Necessary Illusions]
• In 1958, President Eisenhower supervised one of the major US clandestine operations in an effort to break up Indonesia, meanwhile dismantling its parliamentary institutions and setting the stage for the massive terror of the next 40 years. At the same time, Washington subverted the first (and last) free election in Laos, supported an attack on Cambodia, undermined the Burmese government, and intensified the terror of its client regime in South Vietnam, escalated to direct US aggression by JFK a few years later. [Rogues' Gallery]
• In the past century the idea that such entities [corporations / capital / state] have special rights, over and above persons, has been very strongly advocated. The most prominent examples are Bolshevism, fascism, and private corporatism, which is a form of privatised tyranny. Two of these systems have collapsed. The third is alive and flourishing under the banner TINA – There Is No Alternative to the emerging system of state corporate mercantilism disguised with various mantras like globalisation and free trade. [Socioeconomic Sovereignty]
• I would like to believe that people have an instinct for freedom, that they really want to control their own affairs. They don't want to be pushed around, ordered, oppressed, etc., and they want a chance to do things that make sense, like constructive work in a way they control, or maybe control together with others. I don't know any way to prove this. It's really a hope about what human beings are like, a hope that if social structures change sufficiently, those aspects of human nature will be realised.
• In the US, the term "person" is officially defined "['Person' is broadly defined] to include any individual, branch, partnership, associated group, association, estate, trust, corporation or other organization (whether or not organised under the laws of any State), or any government entity," [Survey Of Current Business, vol 76 # 12, December 1996 (US Department of Commerce, Washington, D.C.)] … These newly created immortal persons, protected from scrutiny by the grant of personal rights, administer domestic and international markets through their internal operations, "strategic alliances" with alleged competitors, and other linkages. … While insisting on powerful states to serve as their tools, they naturally seek to restrict the public arena for others, the main tenet of "neoliberalism". [Recovering Rights]
• In short, Nicaragua and other countries should be free – to do what we want them to do – and should chose their course independently, as long as their choice conforms to our interests. If they use the freedom we accord them unwisely, then naturally we are entitled to respond in self-defence. Note that these ideas are a close counterpart to the domestic conception of democracy a a form of population control. … It follows that the use of force can only be an exercise in self-defence and that those who try to resist must be aggressors, even in their own lands. What is more, no country has the right of self-defence against U.S. attack, and the United States has the natural right to impose its will, by force if necessary and feasible. [Necessary Illusions]
• But, that's the whole point of corporatisation – to try to remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run – which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything – are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public. And there are various modalities for doing this. One is to have the communication system, the so-called information system, in the hands of a network of, fewer or more doesn't matter that much, private tyrannies. [Corporate Watch]
• … the U.N. voted on a series of disarmament resolutions. The General Assembly voted 154 to 1, with no abstentions, opposing the buildup of weapons in outer space, a resolution clearly aimed at Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars). It voted 135 to 1 against developing new weapons of mass destruction. In both cases, the United States was alone in opposition. The United States was joined by France in opposing a resolution, passed 143 to 2, calling for a comprehensive test treaty ban. Another vote calling for a halt to all nuclear test explosions passed by a vote of 137 to 3, with the United States joined by France and Britain in opposition. … All of these votes were unreported [in the U.S. mainstream press] … [Necessary Illusions]

Renuka Chowdhury

• Today, we have the odd distinction of having lost 10 million girl children in the past 20 years. Who has killed these girl children? Their own parents. The minute the child is born and she opens her mouth to cry, they put sand into her mouth and her nostrils so she chokes and dies. They bury infants into pots alive and bury the pots. They put tobacco into her mouth. They hang them upside down like a bunch of flowers to dry. We have more passion for tigers of this country. We have people fighting for stray dogs on the road. But you have a whole society that ruthlessly hunts down girl children. [Reuters, 14 December 2006]

Michael Crichton

• The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.
• One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts. [Remarks To The Commonwealth Club, 15 September 2003]

Nils Christie

• Enemies are not always a threat; they can be extremely useful. Enemies unite, allow governments to change their priorities, focus public attention on a single issue so others are forgotten. Crime is something a weak state cannot live without. Governments can rule through crime.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

• Know then that thou art a god. [The Republic]
• I wonder that a soothsayer doesn't laugh whenever he sees another soothsayer.
• Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason that he is a man.
• When we call corn Ceres or wine Bacchus, we use a common figure of speech, but do you imagine that anyone is so mad as to believe the thing he feeds upon is a god?

Arthur C. Clarke

• A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
• It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
• I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
• Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
• Their greatest tragedy in mankind's history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable – even necessary – that may have been in enforcing good behaviour on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.
• I have been appalled by the way in which the United States (and much of the world, East and West) appears to be sinking into cultural barbarism, harangued by fundamentalist ayatollahs of the airwaves, its bookstores, and newsstands poisoned with mind-rotting rubbish about astrology, UFOs, reincarnation, ESP, spoon-bending, and especially 'creationism'.

Jeremy Clarkson

• The church, to me, is just loathsome. I really do object to the fact that it's so powerful. Even though it actually represents fewer people than the local Tufty Club. And they quote from this book which is a fucking fairy tale. It's all just rubbish. You can't walk on water 'cos you'd sink. When you're dead, you can't come back to life. It's that simple. [GQ, May 1999]

Grover Cleveland

• As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters. [03 December 1888]

Voltairine de Cleyre

• Am I blasphemous? The word is theirs, not mine.
• The question of souls is old – we demand our bodies, now. We are tired of promises, God is deaf, and his church is our worst enemy. [1890]

W. K. Clifford

• It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. [The Ethics Of Belief, An Anthology Of Atheism And Rationalism, 1980]
• If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it – the life of that man is one long sin against mankind. If this judgment seems harsh when applied to those simple souls who have never known better, who have been brought up from the cradle with a horror of doubt, and taught that their eternal welfare depends on what they believe, then it leads to the very serious question, Who hath made Israel to sin?

Bill Clinton

• There are now 40m people living with Aids. The number is projected to rise to 100m by 2005. If that happens, it probably will be enough to crumble fledgling democracies. It probably will be enough to spread violence among young people who fear that they only have a year or so to live and therefore can't understand why they shouldn't be involved in whatever conflict is handy. … September 11 showed us a lot of things. It showed us that we can't claim the benefits of the modern world, the benefits of the global economy and information technology and scientific advance and openness and democracy and avoid the vulnerabilities of this age of interdependence. … If we really want a great future for our children, we will have to make the world without walls a home for all our children. [memorial lecture for the National Aids Trust, London, 13 December 2001] Nice speech except, of course, your own policies helped create the situation.

Richard Clopton

• For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill.

Benjamin Cohen

• A world in which others controlled the course of their own development … would be a world in which the American system would be seriously endangered.

Nick Cohen

• It is only the civilised who would be ashamed to have him in their family. Abraham's readiness to obey the order of a jealous, not to say psychopathic, God to "take now thy son, thine only son Issac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering" is divine justification for murderous servility. A servant who will slaughter his son on the whim of the Lord will do anything. [The Observer, 07 October 2001]

Richard Cohen

• I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.

Cole's Axiom

• The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.

Pat Condell

• I don't respect your beliefs and I don't care if you're offended. Cheers. [patcondell.net]

Joseph Conrad

• The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Francis Crick

• If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.

Barry Crimmins

• America speaks with one voice. Unfortunately, it emanates from its ass.

Quentin Crisp

• When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"

Critias

• It was man who first made men believe in gods.

Patricia Crone

• It is a peculiar habit of God's that when he wishes to reveal himself to mankind, he will communicate only with a single person. The rest of mankind must learn the truth from that person and thus purchase their knowledge of the divine at the cost of subordination to another human being, who is eventually replaced by a human institution, so that the divine remains under other people's control [TLS, 12 January 1994]

Alister Crowley

• If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.

Jim D'Entremont

• Immersion in a corporate propaganda bath may ease America's justifiably distressed response to 11 September, but it also enhances Main Street USA's predisposition to view the world on insular and Manichean terms. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]
• Many citizens are now so ill-informed about the actual contents of the US Constitution that they neither know what rights they have to lose nor why the loss would be of any consequence. Conditioning tells them, however, that America is always right; that international law does not apply to the United States; that individuals from other cultures are Americans manqués; and that anyone who challenges prevailing wisdom flirts with treason. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]

Theodore Dalrymple

• A man in prison who told me that he wanted to be a suicide bomber was more hate-filled than any man I have ever met. The offspring of a broken marriage between a Muslim man and a female convert, he had followed the trajectory of many young men in his area: sex and drugs and rock and roll, untainted by anything resembling higher culture. Violent and aggressive by nature, intolerant of the slightest frustration to his will and frequently suicidal, he had experienced taunting during his childhood because of his mixed parentage. After a vicious rape for which he went to prison, he converted to a Salafist form of Islam and became convinced that any system of justice that could take the word of a mere woman over his own was irredeemably corrupt. I noticed one day that his mood had greatly improved; he was communicative and almost jovial, which he had never been before. I asked him what had changed in his life for the better. He had made his decision, he said. Everything was resolved. He was not going to kill himself in an isolated way, as he had previously intended. Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he got out of prison he would not kill himself; he would make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he could. Enemies, I asked; what enemies? How could he know that the people he killed at random would be enemies? They were enemies, he said, because they lived happily in our rotten and unjust society. Therefore, by definition, they were enemies – enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it – and hence were legitimate targets. I asked him whether he thought that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters – and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him. The idea appalled him, not because it was yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he could not conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy. [City Journal, Autumn 2005]

C. W. Dalton

• The religionists apologise that although the Bible was inspired by God, it was, unfortunately, written by ancient, ignorant, half-civilized people. [The Right Brain And Religion]
• With science unable to give us the answers, religion steps in and fills the gap of our ignorance with nonsense, fantasies and pretentious lies. Prophets and priests rush in where scientists fear to tread. [The Right Brain And Religion]

Isioma Daniel

• As the idea [of the Miss World contest being held in Nigeria] became a reality, it also aroused dissent from many groups of people. The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeria and ask them to revel in vanity. What would Mohammed think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them. The irony is that Algeria, an Islamic country, is one of the countries participating in the contest. [ThisDay, 18 November 2003] The reaction to this was predictable : another fatwa, called by the Deputy Governor of the Nigerian state of Zamfara : "Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed. It is binding on all Muslims, wherever they are, to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty." This was confirmed a few days later as the state's policy by the information minister Umar Dangaladima : "It's a fact that Islam prescribes the death penalty on anybody, no matter his faith, who insults the Prophet."

Clarence Darrow

• Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
• I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
• You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
• The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.
• In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality. [The Sign, May 1938]
• I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.
• Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man. I'm not worried about my soul.

Charles Darwin

• 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. [The Ascent of Man]

Henrietta Darwin

• I was present at his deathbed. Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. … The whole story has no foundation whatever. [on her father's alleged conversion, 1922]

Ali Dashti

• [The Koran contains] sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without the aid of commentaries; foreign words, unfamiliar Arabic words and words used with other than the normal meaning; adjectives and verbs inflected without observance of the concords of gender and number; illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passages are often remote from the subjects. [Twenty-Three Years: A Study Of The Prophetic Career Of Mohammed, 1985]
• [The Koran] contains nothing new in the sense of ideas not already expressed by others. All the moral precepts of the Koran are self-evident and generally acknowledged. The stories in it are taken in identical or slightly modified forms from the lore of the Jews and Christians, whose rabbis and monks Mohammed had met and consulted on his journeys to Syria, and from memories conserved by the descendants of the people of 'Ad and Thamud. [Twenty-Three Years: A Study Of The Prophetic Career Of Mohammed, 1985]

David Davis

• There is a growing feeling that the Muslim community is excessively sensitive to criticism, unwilling to engage in substantive debate. Much worse, is the feeling of some Muslim leaders that as a community they should be protected from criticism, argument, parody, satire and all the other challenges in a society that has free speech as its highest value. It is straightforward. I respect your religion, you respect mine and we all respect our laws. No special treatment. [The Telegraph, 15 October 2006]

Richard Dawkins

• I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
• Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not. [River Out Of Eden]
• The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. [The Selfish Gene]
• 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.
• The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. [River Out Of Eden]
• I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she? [Viruses Of The Mind]
• If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? … Is he manoeuvring to maximise David Attenborough's television ratings? [River Out Of Eden]
• At the same time, modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. [A Devil's Chaplain]
• Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification. [The Selfish Gene]
• Faith is powerful enough to immunise people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunises them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb. [ The Selfish Gene]
• Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. All these myths have in common that they depend upon the deliberate intentions of some kind of supernatural being. [The Blind Watchmaker]
• Blind faith can justify anything. In a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die – on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith. [The Selfish Gene]
• Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists. But if I say something insulting about Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouchability is something religions have been allowed to get away with for too long.
• But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something – it doesn't matter what – in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. It is this that makes the often-parroted claim that "evolution itself is a matter of faith" so silly. People believe in evolution not because they arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence. [The Selfish Gene]
• It is often said, mainly by the "no-contests", that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
• The creationists' fondness for "gaps" in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don't work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God's gift to Kansas. [Creationism: God's Gift To The Ignorant, The Times, 21 May 2005]
• If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal demonstration of telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, whatever it is), he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy. or of the new fundamental force that moves objects around a table top, deserves a Nobel prize and would probably get one. If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake. [The Sunday Times, 25 August 25 1996]
• … Dan Rickman says "science provides an explanation of the mechanism of the tsunami but it cannot say why this occurred any more than religion can". There, in one sentence, we have the religious mind displayed before us in all its absurdity. In what sense of the word "why", does plate tectonics not provide the answer? Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety. Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering. [The Guardian, 30 December 2004]
• They [creation myths] are all different. Many of them are hauntingly beautiful. I think it is an excellent idea to teach them because it will bring home to the pupils that there is nothing to choose between them. And there is certainly no reason to prefer the Genesis creation myths (because Genesis itself has two different creation myths). Of all the thousands and thousands of origin accounts we can teach our students, one and only one stands out as different from all the rest. This is the complex of origin accounts given by science. And what singles out the scientific account by contrast with all the rest? It is supported by evidence. Lots and lots of evidence. Evidence that can be publicly demonstrated and which will persuade any reasonable person, no matter what their cultural background. [The Guardian, 19 June 2002]
• The 'Michael Reiss position' is defensible. Just as a chemistry teacher might discuss the phlogiston theory, or a physics teacher might discuss the Ptolemaic theory of the planets as history of science, so it is defensible to teach that there are people called creationists, and they believe what they believe. But if teaching creationism 'alongside' evolution means what it seems to mean, it is no more defensible than teaching the stork theory alongside the sex theory of where babies come from. If 29% of science teachers really think creationism should be taught as a valid alternative to evolution, we have a national disgrace on our hands, calling for urgent remedial action in the education of science teachers. We are failing in our duty to children, if we staff our schools with teachers who are this ignorant – or this stupid. [in response to a MORI poll in which 29% of 923 teachers said they agreed that "creationism should be taught in science lessons" (rather than explained as non-scientific religious dogma), The Guardian, 23 December 2008]
• Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened? … If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs. [(co-author with Jerry Coyne) The Guardian, 01 September 2005]
• Gerin Oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of symptoms, often of an anti-social or self-damaging nature. It can permanently modify the child brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which are hard to treat. … Gerin Oil intoxication can drive previously sane individuals to run away from a normally fulfilled human life and retreat to closed communities of confirmed addicts. These communities are usually limited to one sex only, and they vigorously, often obsessively, forbid sexual activity. Indeed, a tendency towards agonized sexual prohibition emerges as a drably recurring theme amid all the colourful variations of Gerin Oil symptomatology. Gerin Oil does not seem to reduce the libido per se, but it frequently leads to a preoccupation with reducing the sexual pleasure of others. A current example is the prurience with which many habitual 'Oilers' condemn homosexuality. … Oil-heads can be heard talking to thin air or muttering to themselves, apparently in the belief that private wishes so expressed will come true, even at the cost of other people's welfare and mild violation of the laws of physics. This autolocutory disorder is often accompanied by weird tics and hand gestures, manic stereotypes such as rhythmic head-nodding toward a wall, or Obsessive Compulsive Orientation Syndrome (OCOS: facing towards the east five times a day). … Gerin Oil in strong doses is hallucinogenic. Hardcore mainliners may hear voices in the head, or experience visual illusions which seem to the sufferers so real that they often succeed in persuading others of their reality. An individual who convincingly reports high-grade hallucinations may be venerated, and even followed as some kind of leader, by others who regard themselves as less fortunate. … Chronic abuse of Geriniol can lead to 'bad trips', in which the user suffers terrifying delusions, including fears of being tortured, not in the real world but in a postmortem fantasy world. Bad trips of this kind are bound up with a morbid punishment-lore which is as characteristic of this drug as the obsessive fear of sexuality already noted. The punishment-culture fostered by Gerin Oil ranges from 'smack' through 'lash' to getting 'stoned' (especially adulteresses and rape victims), and 'demanifestation' (amputation of one hand), up to the sinister fantasy of allo-punishment or 'cross-topping', the execution of one individual for the sins of others. [Free Inquiry #24, 09-11 January 2004]
• Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? If only! Nobody is that stupid, but how about this – it's a long shot, but it just might work. Given that they are certainly going to die, couldn't we sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life again afterwards? Don't be daft! No, listen, it might work. Offer them a fast track to a Great Oasis in the Sky, cooled by everlasting fountains. Harps and wings wouldn't appeal to the sort of young men we need, so tell them there's a special martyr's reward of 72 virgin brides, guaranteed eager and exclusive. Would they fall for it? Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next. It's a tall story, but worth a try. You'd have to get them young, though. Feed them a complete and self-consistent background mythology to make the big lie sound plausible when it comes. Give them a holy book and make them learn it by heart. Do you know, I really think it might work. As luck would have it, we have just the thing to hand: a ready-made system of mind-control which has been honed over centuries, handed down through generations. Millions of people have been brought up in it. It is called religion and, for reasons which one day we may understand, most people fall for it (nowhere more so than America itself, though the irony passes unnoticed). Now all we need is to round up a few of these faith-heads and give them flying lessons. Facetious? Trivialising an unspeakable evil? That is the exact opposite of my intention, which is deadly serious and prompted by deep grief and fierce anger. I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite – or too devout – to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life. I don't mean devaluing the life of others (though it can do that too), but devaluing one's own life. Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end. If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that naive and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions? There is no doubt that the afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a smart missile, and its guidance system is in many respects superior to the most sophisticated electronic brain that money can buy. Yet to a cynical government, organisation, or priesthood, it is very very cheap. Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. "Mindless" may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used. [The Guardian, 15 September 2001]

Jeremy Dear, General Secretary, NUJ

• To take away a server is like taking away a broadcaster's transmitter. It is simply incredible that American security agents can just walk into a London office and remove equipment. In this nightmare world they can apparently close the operation down without any reason being given, without any chance to question or protest. [responding to the seizure of Indymedia's servers, 13 October 2004]

Democritus

• Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

Daniel C. Dennett

• It is undeniable that astrology provides its adherents with a highly articulated system of patterns that they think they see in the events of the world. The difference, however, is that no one has ever been able to get rich by betting on the patterns, but only by selling the patterns to others. [Brainchildren]
• 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. [Darwin's Dangerous Idea]

John Dewey

• Talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication.

Khaled Diab

• Mohamed never claimed to be anything but human, and so Muslims who revere him so obsessively should take a chill pill and ask themselves whether they are not turning their own prophet into an idol of sorts. Idols do not have to be visual; they can also be mental. In fact, reforming Islam would involve granting Mohamed a more human status and following an approach that does not take his every move as gospel. Just as Muslims do not want non-Muslims to impose their alien values on Islamic societies, they should not try to force their own mores on to other societies. It is a longstanding tradition in Europe to mock and satirise religion and religious figures. In the last century, the holy cow of religion has been sacrificed at the altar of European secularism. Jesus Christ jokes are an entire genre of humour, Monty Python's Life of Brian satirises Christianity and monotheism, and was voted the greatest comedy of all time in Britain. The Last Temptation Of Christ explores the human fallibility of Jesus, as he is tempted by the devil on the cross. Christian fundamentalists have been angered by such expressions for decades but, despite their best efforts, have not managed to suppress them. However repugnant or repulsive Muslims find such irreverent and sacrilegious practices, they should be aware that they are a manifestation of the general retreat of organised religion in the West and not exclusively anti-Islamic in nature. All faiths are mocked mercilessly. Muslims have no right to try to curb these practices or punish those who commit them. [February 2006]

Dicentra

• And now, a grand jury will actually indict a ham sandwich. Look, I'm a Mormon, and I'm forbidden from drinking coffee and tea. Do I freak out because of the proliferation of coffee makers at work? Do I wig out because there is ice tea in the vending machines? (Though I'll admit I was grossed out by what looked like a large urine sample on someone's desk — turned out to be iced green tea.) Cripes, if someone spills coffee on me I might be peeved because of the stain, but I'm not going to act like I've been made ritually unclean or that God will send me to hell if I die by a tea-drenched bullet. Their behaviour is downright superstitious, not religious. They need to get a grip. [comment on proteinwisdom regarding the "ham sandwich = 'hate crime' incident", 19 April 2007]

Philip K. Dick

• Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
• The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Charles Dickens

• Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.

Emily Dickinson

• When we think of his lone effort to live and its bleak reward, the mind turns to the myth "for His mercy endureth forever," with confiding revulsion.

Denis Diderot

• Mankind shall not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.
• To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.
• The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers. [Observations On Drawing Up Of Laws, 1774]
• It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.
• 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.
• Which is the greater merit, to enlighten the human race, which remains forever, or to save one's fatherland, which is perishable?
• When God, from whom I have my reason, demands of me to sacrifice it, he becomes a mere juggler that snatches from me what he pretended to give. [A Philosophical Conversation, 1777]
• To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster! [Philosophic Thoughts, 1746]
• The Judaical and Christian theology show us a partial god who chooses or rejects, who loves or hates, according to his caprice; in short, a tyrant who plays with his creatures; who punishes in this world the whole human species for the crimes of a single man; who predestines the greater number of mortals to be his enemies, to the end that he may punish them to all eternity, for having received from him the liberty of declaring against him. [footnote to d'Holbach's The System Of Nature]
• There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common. [On the Interpretation of Nature, 1753]

Marlene Dietrich

• If there is a supreme being, he's crazy. [Rave, November 1986]

Ellen Battelle Dietrick

• The human race is guided by its own ideas, and only by its ideas. If thought were left perfectly free from ban of legislative or ecclesiastical censor, the best thoughts would as naturally prevail over the worst as the best seeds of the forest naturally triumph over the worst seeds. [Women In The Early Christian Ministry: A Reply To Bishop Doane, And Others, 1897]
• Persistently leavening public opinion, in a grossly superstitious age, with the theological doctrine of popular preachers, that woman is a sex of superior wickedness and inferior mentality, could have but one general result throughout Christendom. Not only did it gradually create within women themselves a passion of self-depreciation, humility and a self-hatred which led thousands of them to slowly and persistently torture themselves until relieved by insanity or death, it planed within the minds of men a jealous hatred and superstitious horror of the natural powers of women, which ultimately culminated in a veritable crusade of ecclesiastics against womankind. [Women In The Early Christian Ministry: A Reply To Bishop Doane, And Others, 1897]

Annie Dillard

• An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?" [Pilgrim At Tinker Creek]

Diogenes

• When I look upon seamen, men of physical science, and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings. When I look upon priests, prophets, and interpreters of dreams, nothing is so contemptible as man.

David Dionisi

• The major media outlets are owned by a handful of corporations interested in promoting advertising and pro-government messages. Anything that challenges the existing power structure very often fails to receive air time. I highlight Fox as an extreme example of the Republican propaganda machine. But when your country is fighting a war, you have an obligation to understand what's really going on. If you don't, you can become an agent of injustice. If people can find the time to watch baseball or soccer etc, they can make an effort to read, travel, talk and not be limited to the messages of fear. They also need to understand their history. In 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a plan called Operation Northwood, which is now declassified. It proposed conducting mass casualty attacks on American targets and blaming it on Cuba to rally public support for war against Fidel Castro. President Kennedy rejected the plan. So we shouldn't just assume any future attack on our soil is the work of al-Qaida. [aljazeera.net, 27 November 2005]

Benjamin Disraeli

• Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

Frank Dobson

• The government wants more religious schools … The idea that religious schools have a distinctive, presumably superior, ethos in an insult to the dedicated teachers at non-religious schools. … At present, religious schools may select 100% of pupils from parents who share their faith. They are given taxpayers' money and allowed to discriminate against other children on the grounds of religion. Yet it would be totally unacceptable to exclude children on the grounds or race or colour. … After all, more than 40% of the population do not subscribe to an organised religion. … To separate children by religion is bound to promote discrimination. Children develop loyalty to their school, in which they are "us" and children at other schools are "them". … Would Protestant louts have endangered children at the Catholic Holy Cross school in Belfast if their own children had been attending that school? … Now the Church of England wants 100 extra secondary schools, a figure it hopes to achieve mainly by taking over existing community schools. That must reduce parental choice. … Children not of that particular faith will only be able to go to the remaining non-religious school or be bussed elsewhere. … In 1944 , the taxpayer had to contribute just half ["just"?!] the capital cost of a religious school. Now the taxpayer is to pick up 90% of the bill. … Everything we do now must reduce divisions between young people, not widen them. [The Guardian, 08 February 2002]

E. L. Doctorow

• On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. … But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, … He doesn't understand why he should mourn. … you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be. … they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. … He wanted to go to war and he did. … This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing – to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. … He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills – it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel. But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honour them by raising them into the professional class. And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it. … The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using it extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war. … How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective war-making, the constitutionally insensitive law-giving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves. [The Easthampton Star, 09 September 2004]

Chester Dolan

• Rigidly conforming children have a way of growing up to be rigidly conforming adults. They are not educated; they are formed. They are not trained to think, but to defend. They are not asked to reflect, but to memorise. [Blind Faith]

Amanda Donohoe

• I'm an atheist, so it was actually a joy. Spitting on Christ was a great deal of fun. I can't embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages. And that persecution still goes on today all over the world. [speaking of her role in Ken Russell's film Lair Of The White Worm (very loosely based on the Bram Stoker novel) in which she played a pagan priestess belonging to a snake-worshipping cult destroyed by Christians: she spat venom onto a crucifix, Interview]

Phil Donahue

• The God-loving people who fashioned the soaring vaults and delicate windows of Chartres had murder on their minds. Some of the workers may well have been veterans of the First Crusade, an expedition to save the Holy Land from the Muslims that was part religious frenzy, part military adventure and part social fad. On that excursion, begun four years after work on Chartres began, the Crusaders slaughtered thousands of noncombatants, levelled whole communities, and finally 'saved' the holy city of Jerusalem by massacring all its inhabitants – men, women, children, Muslims, Jews: everybody… We can pray one minute and kill the next… We like to think that our erratic behaviour is a thing of the past, that we've outgrown the excesses of the Crusades. But nothing could be further from the truth. There are people in Belfast today who will repeat the catechism, then go toss a bomb into a crowded pub … [The Human Animal, 1985]

Frederick Douglass

• I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
• For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! [The Meaning Of July Fourth For The Negro]

John William Draper

• We must bear in mind that the majority of men are imperfectly educated, and hence we must not needlessly offend the religious ideas of our age. It is enough for us ourselves to know that, though there is a Supreme Power, there is no Supreme Being. There is an invisible principle, but not a personal God, to whom it would be not so much blasphemy as absurdity to impute the form, the sentiments, the passions of man. All revelation is, necessarily, a mere fiction. That which men call chance is only the effect of an unknown cause. Even of chances there is a law. There is no such thing as Providence, for Nature proceeds under irresistible laws, and in this respect the universe is only a vast automatic engine. The vital force which pervades the world is what the illiterate call God. The modifications through which all things are running take place in an irresistible way, and hence it may be said that the progress of the world is, under Destiny, like a seed, it can evolve only in a predetermined mode. [History Of The Conflict Between Religion And Science, 1910]

John Drayton

• I continue to be bemused by women fighting for the right to be xtian priests. The whole religion and its textbooks are so sexist that it seems as mad as a jew fighting for the right to join a nazi party. [alt.atheism, 08 January 1999]

Theodore Dreiser

• Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

William Drummond

• He who will not reason, is a bigot; He who cannot, is a fool; And he who dares not, is a slave.

Ann Druyan

• Contrary to the fantasies of the fundamentalists, there was no deathbed conversion, no last-minute refuge taken in a comforting vision of a heaven or an afterlife. For Carl, what mattered most was what was true, not merely what would make us feel better. Even at this moment when anyone would be forgiven for turning away from the reality of our situation, Carl was unflinching. As we looked deeply into each other's eyes, it was with a shared conviction that our wondrous life together was ending forever. [Billions And Billions: Thoughts On Life And Death At The Brink Of The Millennium, on her husband's (Carl Sagan) alleged death-bed conversion]
• "There was no deathbed conversion," Druyan says. "No appeals to God, no hope for an afterlife, no pretending that he and I, who had been inseparably for twenty years, were not saying goodbye forever." "Didn't he want to believe?" she was asked. "Carl never wanted to believe," she replies fiercely. "He wanted to know." [Newsweek]

Rev Malcolm Duncan, Evangelical Faithworks Movement

• We welcome the SORS as an attempt to ensure that goods and services are delivered inclusively and in non-discriminatory ways. It is right that any organisation receiving public funding should deliver services to genuine public benefit. The delivery of goods and services can relate to situations such as hiring out of rooms, something many churches have voiced their concerns over. A commitment to diversity through doing this does not mean losing your faith identity: it actually presents an opportunity to develop a dialogue and put the Gospel into action through demonstrating love and service. … Many opponents of the SORs have stated concerns that a Christian hotel owner would be forced to let out rooms to gay couples, but would they be as vociferous about letting out a room to an unmarried heterosexual couple? Why this inconsistency? It brings the Church into grave danger of sounding homophobic. Christians are called to follow Jesus' example, and he says remarkably little about sexuality in scripture. Rather, he treats all people he comes across with love and acceptance, and does not refuse his service to anyone, even if he does not agree with their lifestyle. Would it really be 'Christian' to refuse bereavement counselling to a gay man, or to exclude a gay person and their child from a parent-and-toddler group? … The proposed SORs are an opportunity for Christians to demonstrate the love and grace of Christ. [08 January 2007]

Ronald Dworkin

• Campaigns and laws [of censorship] … are particularly attractive in western democracies because they urge censorship in the interests not of the powerful but of the vulnerable; in the name not of injustice but of equality. They must nevertheless be resisted … because if we deny freedom of speech to opinions we hate, we weaken the legitimacy of our entire political system, particularly the legitimacy of the very laws we pass to protect victims of stereotype and prejudice. [1997]

Shirin Edabi, Nobel Peace Prize, 2003

• The only logical conclusion I can come to is that the texts of our religion, as with all texts, can and should be interpreted in accordance with the needs of society and the time we live in. [Index On Censorship, 4/2004]
• The Qur'an provides a basic law; experts interpret the rules and adapt them to new situations … Of one thing I am certain: none of our societies today resemble the Arabia of 1400 years ago for which they were designed. [Index On Censorship, 4/2004]

Sir Arthur Eddington

• We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong. [New York Times Magazine, 09 October 1932]

David Edgar

• It's not just that the idea of copyrighting an entry in the English dictionary, or someone's face, haircut or name, is ridiculous. There is an issue of principle. By declaring images, titles and now words to be ownable brands, these various organisations and individuals are contributing to an increased commodification and thus privatisation of materials previously agreed to be in the public domain. For scientists, this constrains the use of public and published knowledge, up to and including the human genome. For artists, it implies that the only thing you can do with subject matter is to sell it. As a consequence, people's view of what representation does becomes narrowly literal. Presumably, the Disney corporation felt that John Keane must have been either denigrating or exploiting its product when he used a doll on a beach to comment on the ironies of war. Similarly, painters, novelists and playwrights are attacked for representing Myra Hindley or Frederick West or James Bulger's murderers, on the grounds that to portray an action must be to promote it. Consulted by its British branch about the Olympic Mind Games case, the International Olympic Committee expressed two major concerns: that the word Olympic was used in the title of a work of fiction and that "there is no such thing as Olympic mind games". Clearly, the IOC hasn't grasped what the word "fiction" means. [The Guardian, 08 October 2007]

Richard & Maria Edgeworth

• … it is essential to arrange facts so that they shall be ready for use, as materials for the imagination, or the judgement, to select and combine. The power of retentive memory is exercised too much, the faculty of recollective memory is exercised too little, by the common modes of education. Whilst children are reading the history of kings, and battles, and victories, whilst they are learning tables of chronology and lessons of geography by rote, their inventive and their reasoning faculties are absolutely passive; nor are any of the facts which they learn in this manner associated with circumstances in real life.[Practical Education, 1798] Over two centuries later, not only has no one changed the system to improve it, but also it's more entrenched than ever, because 'thinking' and 'imagination' are anathema to those in control, who desire only meek unquestioning subjects.

Taner Edis

• Asking about a time before the beginning of our spherical spacetime is like asking what lies north of the North Pole. There is no such thing. [Is Anybody Out There?]
• In the popular imagination, the Big Bang is a great explosion; at one time there was nothing, then matter erupted into previously empty space. However, the Big Bang is the beginning of spacetime itself, not an event in time. [Is Anybody Out There?]
• Creation out of absolute nothing is a metaphysical quagmire for theists anyway, since nothing must at least have the potentiality for becoming something. Since theists are stuck with potentiality, it might as well be something like a quantum vacuum. [Is Anybody Out There?]
• Quantum events have a way of just happening, without any cause, as when a radioactive atom decays at a random time. Even the quantum vacuum is not an inert void, but is boiling with quantum fluctuations. In our macroscopic world, we are used to energy conservation, but in the quantum realm this holds only on average. Energy fluctuations out of nothing create short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs, which is why the vacuum is not emptiness but a sea of transient particles. An uncaused beginning, even out of nothing, for spacetime is no great leap of the imagination. [Is Anybody Out There?]

Thomas Alva Edison

• I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. [Columbian Magazine]
• Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

Jonathan Edwards, Olympic Athlete

• Once you start asking yourself questions like, "How do I really know there is a God?" you are already on the path to unbelief. During my documentary on St Paul, some experts raised the possibility that his spectacular conversion on the road to Damascus might have been caused by an epileptic fit. It made me realise that I had taken things for granted that were taught to me as a child without subjecting them to any kind of analysis. When you think about it rationally, it does seem incredibly improbable that there is a God. … One thing that I can say, however, is that even if I am unable to discover some fundamental purpose to life, this will not give me a reason to return to Christianity. Just because something is unpalatable does not mean that it is not true. [The Times, 27 June 2007]

Paul Edwards

• Atheisim may be defined as the view that "God exists" is a false statement. But there is also a broader sense in which an atheist is someone who rejects belief in God, not necessarily because such belief is judged to be false. It may be rejected because it is incoherent or meaningless, because it is too vague to be of any explanatory value, or because, as LaPlace put it in his famous exchange with Napoleon, there is no need for this "hypothesis". Atheism in this broader sense remains distinct from agnosticism, which advocates suspense of judgement. It is surely possible to justify atheism in this broader sense without having to "examine every object in boundless space and eternal time." [God And The Philosophers]

Barbara Ehrenreich

• When the powerful start acting irresponsibly then it is the responsibility of the rest of us to take power. New Internationalist, #351
• Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody's mom in that she knows what's best for us. But if you look at the historical record – Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages – you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway? [The Great Syringe Tide, The Worst Years of Our Lives]
• Katrina's a perfect example of how militarized the government has gotten even when it's supposedly trying to help people. The initial response of the government was a military one. When they finally got people down there, it was armed guards to protect the fancy stores and keep people in that convention centre – at gunpoint! I mean, this is unbelievable. [A Guided Tour of Class in America , Mother Jones, 05 June 2006]
• The worst [customers], for some reason, are the Visible Christians – like the ten-person table, all jolly and sanctified after Sunday night service, who run me mercilessly and then leave me $1 on a $92 bill. Or the guy with the crucifixion T-shirt (SOMEONE TO LOOK UP TO) who complains that his baked potato is too hard and his iced tea too icy (I cheerfully fix both) and leaves no tip at all. As a general rule, people wearing crosses or WWJD ("What Would Jesus Do?") buttons look at us disapprovingly no matter what we do, as if they were confusing waitresses with Mary Magdalene's original profession. [Nickel And Dimed, 2001]
• All this made me realise, thinking back to those personality tests and drug tests, that we have got a two-tier system of morality in America. If you're an ordinary person you've got to be an absolute straight arrow. You've got to pass that drug test. You've got to promise that you will never, ever do anything wrong, and that you never have. I'm sure that the same kind of tests apply if you are – or were, I should say – a low-level employee at a place like Enron. But if you're high up, close to the CEO level, you can do whatever you damn well please. If you steal $50 you're going to lose your job and you're going to jail. If you steal $50 million you're going to live in luxury for the rest of your life. If you put graffiti on a wall you go to juvenile centre. If you despoil a whole town, if you wreck the environment for thousands of people, somebody's going to describe you as an entrepreneurial genius. The Attorney General wants us to start informing on each other, through the new TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program. You're supposed to watch out for unusual behaviour and get to that 'enemy within' in this way. Mr Ashcroft, wherever you are, I have a tip for you. I have identified the enemy within. For so many years now the affluent and their paid hacks at the various right-wing think tanks have denounced, over and over again, the so-called underclass – the 'welfare-lovers', the people of colour, the low-wage workers – as dishonest, immoral, a burden on society. Well, it's the overclass that is the dishonest, criminal and corrupt burden on society. [New Internationalist, #351]
• The clerics who are struggling to make sense of the tsunami must not have noticed that this is hardly the first display of God's penchant for wanton, homicidal mischief. Leaving out man-made genocide, war, and even those "natural" disasters, like drought and famine, to which "man" invariably contributes through his inept social arrangements, God has a lot to account for in the way of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and plagues. Nor has He ever shown much discrimination in his choice of victims. A tsunami hit Lisbon in 1755, on All Saints Day, when the good Christians were all in church. The faithful perished, while the denizens of the red light district, which was built on strong stone, simply carried on sinning. Similarly, last fall's hurricanes flattened the God-fearing, Republican parts of Florida while sparing sin-soaked Key West and South Beach. The Christian-style "God of love" should be particularly vulnerable to post-tsunami doubts. What kind of "love" inspired Him to wrest babies from their parents' arms, the better to drown them in a hurry? If He so loves us that He gave his only son etc., why couldn't he have held those tectonic plates in place at least until the kids were off the beach? So much, too, for the current pop-Christian God, who can be found, at least on the Internet, micro-managing people's careers, resolving marital spats, and taking excess pounds off the faithful – this last being Pat Robertson's latest fixation. If we are responsible for our actions, as most religions insist, then God should be, too, and I would propose, post-tsunami, an immediate withdrawal of prayer and other forms of flattery directed at a supposedly moral deity – at least until an apology is issued, such as, for example: "I was so busy with Cindy-in-Omaha's weight-loss program that I wasn't paying attention to the Earth's crust." It's not just Christianity. Any religion centred on a God who is both all-powerful and all-good, including Islam and the more monotheistically inclined versions of Hinduism, should be subject to a thorough post-tsunami evaluation. As many have noted before me: If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn't give a damn. [The Progressive, March 2005]

Albert Einstein

• The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
• Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
• The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously. [letter to Hoffman & Dukas, 1946]
• I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him. [letter to Edgar Meyer, 02 January 1915]
• A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually 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. [Religion and Science, New York Times Magazine, 09 November 1930]
• … It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. … [24 March 1954]
• He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilisation should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is no different than murder.
• I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God. [25 August 1927]
• I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvellous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. [The World As I See It]
• He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable an ignorable war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
• The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image-a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being. For this reason, people of our type see in morality a purely human matter, albeit the most important in the human sphere. [1939]
• The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them. [letter to Eric Gutkind, 03 January 1954]
• Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being. However, it must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and fragmentary, so that, actually, the belief in the existence of basic all-embracing laws in Nature also rests on a sort of faith. All the same this faith has been largely justified so far by the success of scientific research. But, on the other hand, every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive. 24 January 1936]

General Dwight Eisenhower

• Don't join the book-burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
• The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.
• Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
• Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary. … I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face". The secretary [of War, Henry Stimson] was deeply perturbed by my attitude, almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusions.

T. S. Eliot

• To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.

Albert Ellis

• In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding.

H. Havelock Ellis

• And it is in his own image, let us remember, that Man creates God.

Harlan Ellison

• Jesus is not going to come down from the mountain to save your lily-white hide or your black ass. Save yourselves.
• And science fiction fans will go for any goddamm thing. They'll believe anything, man, they will believe in the Abominable Snowman and the Bermuda Triangle, in Pyramid Power, in EST, in Scientology, in the Second Coming, they'll believe in any goddamm thing, they don't give a shit. They go to see Star Wars; they think it is for real!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
• Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. [Journals, 1838]
• Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. [Considerations By The Way, The Conduct Of Life, 1860]

Friedrich Engels

• People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.

Epicurus

• … it is upon sensation that reason must rely when it attempts to infer the unknown from the known. [Letter To Herodotus]
• Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another. [Principal Doctrines]
• Dreams have neither a divine nature nor a prophetic power, but they are the result of images that impact on us. [Collection : Vatican Sayings (possibly by a contemporary Epicurean)]
• I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know. [Fragments]
• Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us. [Principal Doctrines]
• Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence commeth evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? Though attributed to him in many sites of quotes, this doesn't appear anywhere on http://www.epicurus.net/ so it may not be genuine, or by a later Epicurean.
• It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honourably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honourably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honourably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life. [Principal Doctrines]
• The fact that the weather is sometimes foretold from the behaviour of certain animals is a mere coincidence in time. For the animals offer no necessary reason why a storm should be produced and no divine being sits observing when these animals go out and afterwards fulfilling the signs which they have given. For such folly as this would not possess the most ordinary being if ever so little enlightened, much less one who enjoys perfect felicity. [Letter To Pythocles]

Epictetus

• We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. [Discourses]

Anders Eriksson & Francisco Lacerda

• Charlatans may be found in all walks of life, especially in activities where there is a possibility of making money, and forensic speech science is no exception. The old disreputable voiceprint technique is still around and used by many private investigators in the OS in particular. In Germany, a physics professor specialized in crystallography appears in courts claiming to have invented an automatic speaker recognition method based on methods borrowed from crystallography but refusing to subject his methods to independent testing or revealing exactly how the method is supposed to work. These are just two examples. … It should be stated right away that at the present time no method for reliable lie detection is known and it is not even known if it should be possible to develop such methods in the future. There are nevertheless several products on the market claimed to be working lie detectors, They do not always call their products lie detectors but use some euphemism like 'stress analyzer' or 'emotion analyzer', but by looking at how the vendors present their products there can be no question that lie detectors are what they want us to believe their products are. [The International Journal Of Speech, Language And The Law, December 2007]

Susan Ertz

• Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy afternoon. [Anger In The Sky, 1943]
• Parsons always seem to be specially horrified about things like sunbathing and naked bodies. They don't mind poverty and misery and cruelty to animals nearly as much.

Gavin Esler

• Think about it. George Bush could involve Syria, Saudia Arabia and France in the Gulf War coalition, and persuade Russia and Israel not to make trouble. He could launch an information-age cruise missile strike on Baghdad guided by spy and communications satellites whirling in space. But he did not know that in every supermarket in America bar code scanners could add up the prices at the checkout. [America's Fifty Years War, 1997]
• August 1995, Anaheim, California. Billie Jean Matay, aged fifty-two, takes her three grandchildren to Disneyland and is robbed in the car park. The Disney people helped her to recover in a backstage area but Ms Matay sued. She was, quote, 'traumatised' when she saw Disney characters taking off their costumes. Her lawsuit claimed emotional distress because, among other things, the children were exposed 'to the reality that the Disney characters were make-believe'. The truth that dare not speak its name in 1990s America is that Mickey Mouse is – gasp! – not a real mouse. [Death Of The American Hero, The Culture Of Victims, 1997]
• A few years ago, those voters in Palm Beach County who claim they were disenfranchised by a confusing ballot paper would probably have been too embarrassed to admit they punched the wrong hole in the polling booths. But now, like millions of litigants all over the United States, stupidity, ignorance or misfortune is a passport to Victimhood. The Victim Voters were Victims of a system that they couldn't understand, and Victims, we will undoubtedly hear, of a conspiracy to steal the election. Florida's Victim Voters fall exactly into the dismal new American tradition exemplified by lawsuits of the 1990s, including the woman who sued McDonald's because she scalded herself with the cup of coffee she placed between her legs while driving. [The Independent, 13 November 2000] To quote from Esler's earlier Death Of The American Hero, The Culture Of Victims. 1997: "Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the notorious story of eighty-one-year-old Stella Liebeck who bought a coffee in McDonald's, stuck it between her legs while driving her car and spilled it, causing third-degree burns requiring eight days in hospital and extensive skin grafts. Damages were reduced from $2.7 million to a mere $600,000." A mere $600,000?! Oh, of course, it's not her fault for not being able to think for herself – it's everyone else's fault for not telling her what might go wrong. Don't dry your hair in a microwave, don't clean your dog in a washing-machine, don't set petrol alight if you get some on your hands, don't …
• A British politician who cloaks himself in the mantle of God is immediately regarded with suspicion. When told that it was time to offer moral leadership, Harold Macmillan quipped that if people wanted that sort of thing they should consult their clergy. In Britain, politicians who openly discuss their spirituality are about as welcome as Jehovah's Witnesses on the doorstep, and the British associate the mixture of politics and religion as a heady cocktail best reserved for the mass irrationality of Northern Ireland, Iran, Kashmir, and the Middle East. The very idea of a Party of God, Hizbollah, puts the fear of God into British hearts. But in the continuing re-invention of American politics, Al Gore's Democratic Party has metamorphosed into America' s own Hizbollah. Here at the Democratic National Convention in America's Sodom, Tinseltown, the party ticket formally now says Gore-Lieberman, but it is quite clear that the Democrats are fielding the Holy Trinity of Gore, Lieberman and God. In his first joint appearance with Al Gore in Nashville, Tennessee, Senator Joe Lieberman, who is an Orthodox Jew, mentioned God a dozen times. In one remarkable passage he pointed out that the saintly Al Gore has a hot line not, as you might imagine, to the Kremlin, but to the Man Upstairs. "He has never, never wavered in his responsibilities as a father, as a husband and yes, as a servant of God Almighty," Senator Lieberman told his audience. [The Independent, 19 August 2000]
• This culture of victims, like most things American, is spreading to Europe and beyond. In one variant, what the art critic Robert Hughes calls 'linguistic Lourdes', all pain is supposed to be healed by changing the words to soften the meaning. It begins innocently, with polite euphemisms. Jeff Woodward in Dayton said he was 'phased out' after a company take-over. Other workers said they were 'downsized' or 'rightsized'. People who were once 'handicapped' are now 'challenged', though their problems remain the same. This is the beginning of Alice In Wonderland-speak where nothing is 'right' or 'wrong' any more, only 'appropriate' or 'inappropriate'. … Yet the number one fact about America's culture of victims is that it cannot possibly coexist with common sense. [Death Of The American Hero, The Culture Of Victims, 1997]
• During the 1993 siege of David Koresh's compound in Texas, I travelled to Waco airport to meet the family of a British member of Koresh's Branch Dividian cult. I knew that the father was flying to Texas in the hope of rescuing his son from the compound. I was told the man was middle-aged, black, and from the English Midlands, but I had no other description. While I stood at the airport with other British journalists waiting for the flight to arrive, a white American television reporter, who had also been tipped off about the incoming relative, sidled up to me.
  "How will you recognise him?" she asked.
  "Well, he is British and black," I replied.
  "Oh," she said, "he is African-American."
  It is now regarded as politically correct to refer to black Americans and 'African-American'. But this was a British man who happened to be black.
  "No," I protested, amused at the mistake. "The man is not African-American. He is British."
  "But," the reporter persisted, "you said he was African American."
  "No. I said he was British and black."
  There was an embarrassed silence as, slowly, the last glimmer of common sense tried to reassert themselves. The journalist was adrift in the new rules, desperate not to offend anyone, yet managing precisely the opposite.
  "Well," she wondered, "could I say he was African-British?"
  Before I could answer, behind me a British voice called sarcastically, "Maybe you should try African-West Indian-British. Just to be on the safe side."
  [Death Of The American Hero, The Culture Of Victims, 1997]

Greg Erwin

• Religion stills a thinking mind.

Leonhard Euler

• When my brain excites in my soul the sensation of a tree, or of a house, I pronounce, without hesitation, that a tree, or a house, really exists out of me, of which I know the place, the size, and other properties. Accordingly, we find neither man nor beast who calls this truth in question. If a peasant should take it into his head to conceive such a doubt, and should say, for example, he dos not believe that his bailiff exists, though he stands in his presence, he would be taken for a madman, and with good reason; but when a philosopher advances such sentiments, he expects we should admire his knowledge and sagacity, which infinitely surpasses the apprehensions of the vulgar. [Refutation Of The Idealists, Letters Of Euler To A German Princess, Vol I, 1796]

Gareth Evans, Medical Genetics Consultant, St. Mary's Hospital, Manchester

• To say that the combination of a technique and newly isolated gene represents an inventive step is like saying that America could have been patented when Columbus discovered it using the technique of sailing a ship. [on behalf of the Clinical Genetics Service, letter to MEPs, 15 July 1997]

Morris Farhi

• If we cannot accept the existence of a 'divine power' – 'higher and unseen' – why should we believe that this divinity has control of our destiny and is entitled to obedience, reverence and worship? … we soon realise that the teaching that this divinity controls our destiny and that, therefore, he must be worshipped, has been imposed by the very institutions created around that divinity's persona. … The institution, claiming to base its authority either on its own 'profound understanding of the deity' or on the putative 'direct' (and therefore sacrosanct) teachings received by that deity's luminaries, elevates itself to the status of the deity's representative on earth. Thenceforth, it is the institution which exacts obedience, reverence and worship not only to the deity, but also, and particularly, to the institution itself and to its functionaries. [God Save Us From Religion!, Free Expression Is No Offence, 2005]

Dr. Frederic William Farrar

• If miracles be incredible, Christianity is false. If Christ wrought no miracles, then the Gospels are untrustworthy. [Witness Of History To Christ]

James K. Feibleman

• A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes. [Understanding Philosophy, 1973]

Niall Ferguson

• The United States is the empire that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial, and US denial of this poses a real danger to the world. An empire that doesn't recognise its own power is a dangerous one. … how can you not be an empire and maintain 750 military bases in three-quarters of the countries on earth? … The Americans simply don't believe they are there. But since they annexed the Philippines in 1898, they have acted as an imperial power. … conquest as a form of liberation, of building an empire of democracy, is not new. Britain did it too in its liberal heyday. What we are looking at is a second Anglophonic empire similar in many ways to the first, and that has to be recognised. [The Guardian, 02 June 2003]

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

• Now the corporations claim intellectual property rights in food as a reward for their investment in GM research. Vadana Shiva has launched a judicial challenge against RiceTec corporation's claim to patent Basmati rice, "which," she points out, "women farmers in my valley have been growing for centuries". Monsanto-owned companies have patented seed, genetically engineered so that it does not germinate on harvest, leaving farmers at the mercy of the company for the renewal of their crop. … Poor people in the west, deluded into over-spending on the fat-rich, starch-heavy, quick-energy fixes supplied by the junk-food industry, suffer from a modern form of malnutrition. Like the peasants at the other end of the industrialised food-chain, they are victims of the system. … Fast food and febrile routines atomise mealtimes: different family members choose to eat different things at different times. Microwave technology rends households. People radiate their packaged pap then withdraw to eat it alone, nerdy-eyed, in front of their personal screens. The companionship of the common table, which has helped to bond humans in collaborative living for at least 150,000 years, is in danger of reversal. [The Guardian, 24 May 2003]

Francisco Ferrer

• Let no more gods or exploiters be served. Let us learn rather to love one another. [final will written on the wall of his prison cell in Barcelona, 1909]
• When the masses become better informed about science, they will feel less need for help form supernatural Higher Powers. The need for religion will end when man becomes sensible enough to govern himself.

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

• There is no God, it is clear as the sun and as evident as the day that there is no God, and still more that there can be none.
• Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. [The Essence Of Christianity]

Richard Feynman

• The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.
• It's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
• For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
• It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvellous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!
• I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
• I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.
• I have argued flying saucers with lots of people. I was interested in this: they kept arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not.
• You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here… I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me. [Genius, The Life And Science]
• God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time – life and death – stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.

W. C. Fields

• They [prayers] may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy – but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas.

Victoria Finney

• I would love to know why it is, that when confronted by a disaster such as this, God is not responsible. If a wonderful event occurs clearly he is to be thanked. Is it the case that the Christian God is like a child, and for that reason cannot be blamed for this? If he created all with a plan, then obviously he has caused this. [commenting on the Indonesian tsunami, BBC News Magazine, 03 January 2005]

Camille Flammarion

• Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.

Antony Flew

• Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakeably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever. [The Presumption Of Atheism]
• If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic. So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition. [The Presumption Of Atheism]
• Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So, they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener… So they set up a barbed wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol it with bloodhounds… But no shrieks even suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves." At last the Skeptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even no gardener at all?"

Panama Floyd

• Why does every human society have religion in it's culture? The same reason every baby has shit in it's diaper. It is a wonderful creature with a great potential, but it needs to grow up a little first. [alt.atheism, 07 August 2006]

George W. Foote

• It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible.
• The man who worships a tyrant in heaven naturally submits his neck to the yoke of tyrants on earth.
• Atheists are often charged with blasphemy, but it is a crime they cannot commit … When the Atheist examines, denounces, or satirises the gods, he is not dealing with persons but with ideas. He is incapable of insulting God, for he does not admit the existence of any such being … We attack not a person but a belief, not a being but an idea, not a fact but a fancy. [Who Are The Blasphemers?, Flowers Of Freethought]

Clayton Forno

• Saying the second law of thermodynamics means evolution can't happen is like saying the theory of gravity means birds can't fly.

Jodie Foster

• I absolutely believe what Ellie believes – that there is no direct evidence, so how could you ask me to believe in God when there's absolutely no evidence that I can see? I do believe in the beauty and the awe-inspiring mystery of the science that's out there that we haven't discovered yet, that there are scientific explanations for phenomena that we call mystical because we just don't know any better. [on her role as Dr. Eleanor Arroway in the film of Carl Sagan's novel Contact, Vancouver's Georgia Strait, 10 July 1997]

Anatole France

• If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

France Soir

• It is necessary to crush once again the infamous thing, as Voltaire liked to say. This religious intolerance that accepts no mockery, no satire, no ridicule. We citizens of secular and democratic societies are summoned to condemn a dozen caricatures judged offensive to Islam. Summoned by who? By the Muslim Brotherhood, by Syria, the Islamic Jihad, the interior ministers of Arab countries, the Islamic Conferences – all paragons of tolerance, humanism and democracy. So, we must apologise to them because the freedom of expression they refuse, day after day, to each of their citizens, faithful or militant, is exercised in a society that is not subject to their iron rule. It's the world upside down. No, we will never apologise for being free to speak, to think and to believe. Because these self-proclaimed doctors of law have made this a point of principle, we have to be firm. They can claim whatever they like but we have the right to caricature Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, Yahve and all forms of theism. It's called freedom of expression in a secular country. [Editorial, 01 February 2006]

Victor Frankl

• Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one's belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one's right to believe, and obey, his own conscience. [The Will To Meaning]

Benjamin Franklin

• Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
• The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. [Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758]
• Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
• I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it. [Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion, 20 November 1728]
• Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor safety. [11 November 1755]

Frederick the Great

• Religion is the idol of the mob: it adores everything it does not understand. [letter to Voltaire, 06 July 1737]

Jonathan Freedland

• No politician can utter a word that seems to question the armed services: so Kerry does not mention the Abu Ghraib scandal. Next is 9/11, which has been all but sanctified in American discourse. Because of that event, the US has re-imagined itself as a victim nation: witness the yellow-ribbon bumperstickers, usually bearing the slogan "Support America". (Ribbons were previously reserved for the suffering: red for Aids, pink for breast cancer.) As a result, any action taken in the name of 9/11 cannot be questioned. Oppose the Patriot Act, with its restrictions on civil liberties, and you are a friend of the terrorists – and, if you are a Democratic congressional candidate, Republicans will air TV ads against you placing your face alongside that of Osama bin Laden. Show concern for international opinion, and you are some kind of traitor. Kerry spoke French to a Haitian audience in Florida on Monday, the first time he had done so in public for many months: even to appear to have links with the outside world is a negative in today's politics, which has become all about America first. All this is partly caused by, and certainly reinforces, that gut feeling of certainty that animates today's American right. Bill Clinton used to joke that when Democrats are in the White House, they think they are renting it. Republicans believe they own the place. [The Guardian, 20 October 2004]
• The scale of British giving has been moving, especially acts of kindness by those with least to spare: cleaners or pensioners or the unemployed donating sums that either took a week to earn or were a week's keep. People have drawn a legitimate pride in this and in the public's outpacing of government, whose earliest pledge of £1m looked so paltry. Ministers increased that to £50m … hardly overwhelming. Others have pointed out the contrast between that contribution, even if it rises to, say, £100m, and the £6bn the UK government found so readily for the war on Iraq. … The major companies doubtless feel proud of their generosity. They shouldn't. They should be ashamed. Vodafone announced it would be giving £1m … the company made substantially more than a million pounds an hour. … BP gave a healthy looking £1.6m: … profits for 2004 weigh in at £9bn. … Tesco … with annual profits of £1.7bn, it only managed to give an anaemic £100,000. … According to the Charities Aid Foundation, the wealthiest 10% of UK income earners give just 0.7% of their household expenditure to charity, while the poorest 10% allocate 3% of theirs. … Maybe we ought to turn to the big companies and say: you can no longer have it both ways. Either you give as generously as we do – or we will take it off you in tax. Either way, it's time to start paying. [The Guardian, 05 January 2005]
• The Palestinian-Israeli conflict affects Palestinians and Israelis profoundly, but it does not begin to explain the dire state of today's Arab and Muslim world, nor why it has spent decades languishing in economic stagnation and political suffocation. The Saudi royal family does not behead criminals because of Israel; Syria did not slaughter thousands of its own people in 1982 because of Israel; Afghanistan is not in the dark ages because of Israel. Of course, the governments of those countries would like their peoples to think precisely that – that Israel is the satanic force responsible for all their woes. "Don't look at us, with all our corruption and incompetence; it's Israel's fault!" has been the cry of rotting dictatorships from Algeria to Iran. That's why their state-controlled presses are full of cartoons that could come straight from the Nazi press of the 1930s. Check out the Steve Bell slot in Egypt's al-Ahali: a regular procession of hooked-nosed, fanged Jews, their hands dripping in blood. In the absence of a free press, it's perhaps understandable that the people of those closed societies have fallen for this diversionary tactic by their rulers. But western liberals have no such excuse. We should know better than to fall prey to what amounts to a latter-day socialism of fools. When August Bebel first coined that phrase a century ago, he was urging German workers not to be duped into hating Jews when their real foe was capitalism. Today's brand of anti-Israelism risks becoming a new socialism of fools – blaming the Jewish state for the Islamic world's troubles, rather than the vast, structural malaise afflicting that region. Progressives should not let up the pressure on Israel for a just settlement: two secure states, sharing Jerusalem as their capital. They should do that because it will bring justice to those two peoples and some symbolic balm to bruised Arab and Muslim pride. But it's a dangerous delusion to imagine such a breakthrough will address what the Muslim-American intellectual, Fareed Zakaria, calls "the political, economic and cultural collapse that lies at the roots of Arab rage". That is a task that will take decades, cost billions and demand tectonic change for hundreds of millions of people. There are no magic short cuts, not even via the holy land. [The Guardian, 17 October 2001]

Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy

• The great irony is that, if they could but see it, Christian and Islamic Fundamentalists are the same people. Their vision of life and how to live it is driven by the same needs and neuroses. What they hate in each other is a projection of what they hate in themselves. If fate had birthed them in the other culture they would be Fundamentalists of the other persuasion. [Jesus And The Goddess, 2001]
• It is Literalists who fight wars of religion with Literalists from other traditions, each claiming that God is on their side. Literalists' enmity also extends to Gnostics within their own tradition who question their bigotry. Most spiritual traditions have a tragic history of the brutal oppression of Gnostics by intolerant Literalists. Interestingly, it is never the other way around. [Jesus And The Goddess, 2001]
• Above all, however, Literalist Christianity's success was due to one great quality it had from the beginning and continues to foster – intolerance. This is not a quirk of history, it is a logical by-product of taking the Jesus story as historical fact. Paganism and Gnosticism were inherently tolerant because they were based on myths. Different cults believed in different myths, but this didn't mean they were in opposition to each other. Plurality was acceptable because what mattered most was the inner meaning, not the particular expression. But intolerance in inherent in Literalism. If Jesus is the one and only Son of God who requires the faithful to acknowledge this as historical fact, then Christianity must be in opposition to all other religions who do not teach this. Moreover, if all unbelievers are to be damned for eternity it becomes the moral duty of Literalist Christians to spread their beliefs, by force if necessary, to save as many souls as possible, even if it means destroying their bodies to do so. The Roman Church's attacks upon Paganism and Gnosticism were a religious crusade, a God-given duty. Self-righteous intolerance had become holy. [The Jesus Mysteries, 1999]
• 21^st Century Gnosticism :

  Original sin.

  That's such a bad idea. Let's never again tell our children they've been born bad and reassure them instead that they are naturally good.

  The Bible is the word of God.

  Ridiculous idea.

  There is only one way to God.

  Obvious nonsense.

  The Day of Judgement and the resurrection of the flesh.

  Spooky ideas.

  The world is a bad place and we should hate it.

  In the face of the wonders all around us that's just ungrateful.

  Eternal damnation.

  Horrible, grotesque, really, really bad idea.

  God likes some people more than others.

  Please! What sort of God is that?

  Sex is evil.

  If you believe this you must be doing it wrong.

  God is male.

  What could that possibly mean? Does God have a penis?

  Men are more spiritual than women.

  This idea must have been thought up by a man who never had a mother.

  God has opinions – and only some people know what they are.

  That's got to be one of the worst ideas ever, because it is regularly used to justify a whole edifice of bad ideas.

  Jesus And The Goddess, 2001

Sigmund Freud

• Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis. [The Future Of An Illusion, 1927
• Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man. [New York Times Magazine, 06 May 1956]
• In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
• Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. [Civilization And Its Discontents]
• When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect. [The Future Of An Illusion, 1927]

Johann P. Fritz, Director, International Press Institute

• The growing acceptance of this phrase ["defamation of religions"] at the international level has worrying implications for freedom of the media. In a conference in mid-July hosted by the OSCE, I warned that the UN's willingness to use the word 'defamation' in conjunction with religion remains a lingering concern. It could provide suitable legal cover and justification for several countries wishing to introduce fresh blasphemy laws. If this were to happen the media would find it increasingly difficult to comment upon religious principles, religious practices and even religious leaders. While I accept that journalists should be tolerant of religion and, when necessary, express themselves sensitively, I am very concerned that the 'space' for the media to report critically is gradually being eroded. I am also worried that this disturbing trend is being aided and abetted by governments and inter-governmental organisations who share the view that the news media are playing a role in encouraging and promoting terrorism. Xenophobia and racism should be rightfully condemned at every possible opportunity. However, in the argument about their impact on the promotion of terrorism, it seems that press freedom and freedom of expression are being increasingly ignored to the detriment of all who believe that a critical media has a role to play in democratic societies. [IPI Public Statement, 29 September 2006]

Erich Fromm

• Once a doctrine, however irrational, has gained power in a society, millions of people will believe it rather than feel ostracised and isolated. [An Analysis Of Some Types Of Religious Experience]
• If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated. [Man For Himself, 1947]
• Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race, or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human.
• Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God's command… From the standpoint of the Church, which represents authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom.

Northrop Frye

• The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones. [Theory Of Archetypal Meaning, Anatomy Of Criticism, 1957]

J. William Fulbright

• We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts.

Robert W. Funk

• If the evidence supports the historical accuracy of the gospels, where is the need for faith? And if the historical reliability of the gospels is so obvious, why have so many scholars failed to appreciate the incontestable nature of the evidence? [Honest To Jesus, 1996]

Matilda Joslyn Gage

• The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world's civilization.
• The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it. [Woman, Church And State, 1893]

Galileo Galilei

• It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved. [The Authority Of Scripture In Philosophical Controversies
• In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
• I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations. [The Authority Of Scripture In Philosophical Controversies]
• I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forego their use.
• It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment. [The Authority Of Scripture In Philosophical Controversies]
• They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbour, no matter how unjustly. … Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit… [1615]
• To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover. [The Authority Of Scripture In Philosophical Controversies]

Mohandas Gandhi

• The principle of an eye for an eye will some day make the whole world blind.
• Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
• You may hit me, beat me, even kill me, and then you will have my dead body, not my cooperation.
• The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives. [Young India, 1927]
• Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism… true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the centre. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.
• We are constantly being astonished at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt-of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence.
• It is not a mistake to commit a mistake, for no one commits a mistake knowing it to be one. But it is a mistake not to correct the mistake after knowing it to be one. If you are afraid of committing a mistake, you are afraid of doing anything at all. You will correct your mistakes whenever you find them.

Manuel García

• To criticize religion is unkind, like ridiculing a child's thumb sucking and security blanket. Then why discuss it, since for many, discussion is equivalent to critique? Because concepts of God are at the root of attitudes about community, security and power, and these in turn affect our shared external reality – country. Church and State, God and Country, they are never far apart. The ideal would be to keep our Gods contained within ourselves so they do not destroy what we enjoy together. Reality is otherwise. … Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. [Swans.com, 17 January 2005]
• Rationality will often undermine religions belief, and this is a good thing when the rationality leads away from superstition, bigotry, cruelty and ignorance. Examples of rationality lifting humanity above religiously-induced backwardness would have to include the absence of witch-burning, the advance in human thought sparked by the recognition of biological evolution, birth-control technology, condom use for AIDS prevention, and advances in women's health-care and more equitable participation in economic activity. Most of these advances still find opposition by religious leaders of Christianity and Islam. … Religious belief in and of itself has no social value. It may have a particular personal value, but note that it is the morality of the individual and not his/her religiousness that has social impact. This is "the separation of church and state" at a personal level; you can believe what you want, it is how you act that touches us all. There is no logical connection between religion and morality, though many influenced by religious marketing imagine this to be so. … Religion does not automatically make people moral. Neither does rationality, but it is more likely have that effect in social evolution. The American government under the G. W. Bush Administration is an example of a thoroughly immoral entity of excessive religiosity. Objectively, one sees blatant dishonesty, criminality, the theft of public resources abetted by cronyism and influence peddling, and a bald appeal to white-power bigotry and greed in all aspect of government operations. In short, capitalism as the piracy by selected elites operates at the expense of a nation, and is justified to the public with appeals to the irrational: be afraid, sink into bigotry, sink into greed and fear of material loss, sink into religion, but above all don't think and especially don't socialize your thinking – or opposition. … So yes, religion is a mental disease when it curtails human potential. [Counterpunch, 22 September 2005]

Helen H. Gardener

• Every injustice that has ever been fastened upon women in a Christian country has been "authorised by the Bible" and riveted and perpetuated by the pulpit. [Men, Women And Gods]
• This religion and the Bible require of woman everything, and give her nothing. They ask her support and her love, and repay her with contempt and oppression. [Men, Women And Gods]

Dan Gardner

• When the Pope says that a few words and some hand-waving causes a cracker to transform into the flesh of a 2,000-year-old man, Dawkins and his fellow travellers say, well, prove it. It should be simple. Swab the Host and do a DNA analysis. If you don't, we will give your claim no more respect than we give to those who say they see the future in crystal balls or bend spoons with their minds or become werewolves at each full moon. And for this, it is Dawkins, not the Pope, who is labelled the unreasonable fanatic on par with faith-saturated madmen who sacrifice children to an invisible spirit. This is completely contrary to how we live the rest of our lives. We demand proof of even trivial claims ("John was the main creative force behind Sergeant Pepper") and we dismiss those who make such claims without proof. We are still more demanding when claims are made on matters that are at least temporarily important ("Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" being a notorious example). So isn't it odd that when claims are made about matters as important as the nature of existence and our place in it we suddenly drop all expectation of proof and we respect those who make and believe claims without the slightest evidence? Why is it perfectly reasonable to roll my eyes when someone makes the bald assertion that Ringo was the greatest Beatle but it is "fundamentalist" and "fanatical" to say that, absent evidence, it is absurd to believe Muhammad was not lying or hallucinating when he claimed to have long chats with God? [The Ottowa Citizen, 05 may 2007]

Bill Gates

• We need to put the power to prevent HIV in the hands of women. This is true whether the woman is a faithful married mother of small children or a sex worker trying to scrape out a living in a slum. No matter where she lives or what she does, a woman should never need her partner's permission to save her own life. [16th International Aids Conference, Toronto, 13 August 2006]

Melinda Gates

• In the fight against Aids, condoms save lives. If you oppose the distribution of condoms, something is more important to you than saving lives. [16th International Aids Conference, Toronto, 13 August 2006] Saving 'sinners' and souls for God?

Henry George

• No theory is too false, no fable too absurd, no superstition too degrading for acceptance when it has become embedded in common belief. Men will submit themselves to torture and to death, mothers will immolate their children at the bidding of beliefs they thus accept.

André Gide

• Christianity, above all, consoles; but there are naturally happy souls who do not need consolation. Consequently, Christianity begins by making such souls unhappy, for otherwise it would have no power over them. [journal entry, 10 October 1893]

Terry Gilliam

• With Life of Brian we were vilified by Christians. Yet Christianity is alive and well. Come on, if your religion is so vulnerable that a little bit of disrespect is going to bring it down, it's not worth believing in, frankly. [The Independent, 18 January 2005]

John Stuart Glennie

• In ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, we find the worship of a divine mother and child. In ancient Osirianism as in modern Christianism, there is a doctrine of atonement. In ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, we find the vision of a last judgment, and resurrection of the body. And finally, in ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, the sanctions of morality are a lake of fire and torturing demons on the one hand, and on the other, eternal life in the presence of God. [Christ And Osiris]

Emma Goldman

• Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal.
• The most violent element in society is ignorance.
• The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
• Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society. [The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth, April 1913]
• The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
• Real wealth consists of things of utility and beauty, in things that help create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. [Red Emma Speaks]
• Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name. [The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth, April 1913]
• The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond. [The Philosophy of Atheism, Mother Earth, 1916]
• I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made. [speaking from a pulpit in Detroit, 1898]
• The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.
• The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done. [The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth, 1913]
• Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man.
• The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation. [The Philosophy of Atheism, Mother Earth, 1916]
• We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations. Such is the logic of patriotism. [Patriotism – A Menace To Liberty]
• Whether I do or do not entirely agree with these iconoclasts [Nietzsche & Stirner], I believe, with them, that Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day. Indeed, never could society have degenerated to its present appalling stage, if not for the assistance of Christianity. The rulers of the earth have realised long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun. [The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth, April 1913]
• Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it. The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven. [The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth, April 1913]
• Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others. The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that, from early infancy, the mind of the child is poisoned with bloodcurdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamouring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition. It is for that purpose that America has within a short time spent four hundred million dollars. Just think of it – four hundred million dollars taken from the produce of the people. [Patriotism – A Menace To Liberty]

Gora

• Hallucinations and illusions are not facts useful for scientific investigation.

Stephen J. Gould

• The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning. [The Mismeasure Of Man]
• A real world regulated by genuine causes exists "out there" in nature, independent of our perceptions (even though we can only access this external reality through our senses and mental operations). [I Have Landed: The End Of A Beginning In Natural History]
• The fundamentalists, by knowing the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science – or of any honest intellectual inquiry. [Bully for Brontosaurus]
• In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
• We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a higher answer – but none exists. [Life, December 1988]
• 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 characterise the ideas of their opponents. [The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 1987]
• Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage – good teaching – than a bill forcing honourable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise? [The Skeptical Inquirer]
• Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered. [Science and Creationism, 1984]

Remy de Gourmont

• God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.

Ulysses S. Grant

• Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separate. [1875]

Muriel Gray

• The argument for and against compulsory ID cards has so far focused mainly on the delicate relationship between state and citizen, concentrating on the very real potential for the government to betray our trust and covertly use the information for its increasingly barking mad purposes. What has been ignored, however, is that the inevitable commercial and practical implications of a compulsory card will have consequences just as far-reaching as the MI5 man being able to idly scan your hospital appointments to see when your warts were burned off. … The "innocent have nothing to hide" cliche implies that it is only the guilty who wish to deceive, to be deeply secretive, when in fact the innocent also have plenty of valid reasons to wish to do so. Since it will be the commercial demands for the proof of identity that will bring about the practical and daily curtailment of freedom, the government will be able to hold up its hands in mock horror and say: "But we never insisted you show your ID card to join a health club or buy a TV set." Yeah, right. Ironically, criminals will be ably assisted by the ID card, which they will doubtless forge with great skill. Meanwhile those of us who like our secrets kept will be exposed by market forces when they bully us to conform. The innocent have much to hide. It's called a private life. [The Guardian, 02 July 2005]

A. C. Grayling

• It should by now be a commonplace, though alas it is not, that the right response to attempts by violent enemies to coerce our society, is to reassert the very liberties and values that make them attack us in the first place. To restrict ourselves out of fear of what they might do is to give them the victory they seek. If they were able to impose their will on our society, they would deprive us of many of the liberties distinctive of a Western democracy. Why do it to ourselves? And one of the first would be free speech. It scarcely needs iterating that the only way to deal with speech that one disagrees with or finds offensive, as with all forms of hate speech, is more free speech in response: that is, refutation, argument, rebuttal, countering the offensive speech and showing why it is wrong. … Freedom of speech is one of the two cornerstones of individual liberty, the other being due process at law. Without free speech it is impossible to give and receive information, debate important matters of opinion, take a responsible and informed part in political processes, stand up for one's rights, defend one's interests or the interests of those for whom one feels concern, and hold authority to account. Democracy is impossible without it. It is the basis of a free press and an independent legal framework. Any diminution of free speech is a diminution of this entire interdependent apparatus of freedom. … The central fallacy in the proposed religious hatred law is its claim to capture a genuine parallel to racial hatred. It does not. Religion is a matter of choice, ethnicity is not. In practice the vast majority of people have the religion they do as an accident of birth and therefore as a result of indoctrination in childhood. People can choose to leave a religion, adopt another, or have none at all, whereas they cannot adopt or leave an ethnicity. That is why laws against racism make sense, whereas a law against anti-religious sentiment is in fact an absurdity. To see this, consider how absurd it would be to provide protections to people on the grounds of their self-selected membership of a group that, for example, claims to believe in fairies or to worship Martians. In principle there is no difference between such imaginary groups and the major religions, other than the fact that the latter are well-organised long-standing interest groups which, in the present circumstances of an upsurge in their assertiveness, have a grossly disproportionate access to the current government's ear. … One might ask why subscribers to one or another religious outlook are different from politicians, despite also in effect choosing to remain in that religion; why are they so thin-skinned that they cannot bear what others say about them? Why are they thought to be so insecure in their outlook that they must be protected from the disagreement, opposition or contempt of others? … there are already effective remedies against verbal and physical attack, provided by the common law offences of assault and battery. This makes the proposed measure incomprehensible; why does there have to be a special crime of 'religious hatred' to protect people from what they are already protected from? [Index On Censorship, 4/2005]

TheGreatRonRafferty

• In the very narrowest, tunnel vision sense, vetting might be a very, very tiny help in fighting easy access to children by paedophiles. But it is tiny for several reasons. Paedophiles have to start somewhere. The vetting does not, and never will find paedophiles before their first actions, obviously. A point missed by all pro-vetting campaigners. Then there's the rule of unintended consequences. These campaigners can give you the law as it is written (and it isn't written very well). Like all laws, the general public will take the headline broad brush view - and so will most organisations. Forget the "get out" clauses, most ordinary citizens, and most organisations will simply rely on the rule of thumb: If you have contact with children as a volunteer, or car driver, you have to be registered. Full stop. That means lots of clubs, volunteering, and helpful car sharing will disappear. And of course, if you have the opportunity to help a child and risk a massive fine for yourself and the organisation, you're not going to do the helping. Children won't get lifts, so they'll be left to walk home - perhaps on a dark night, when they could well die in a road accident, be struck by lightning, or - dare I say it - be attacked by one of the paedophiles that apparently hide behind every bush. Of course, there'll be no figures proving the "success" or otherwise of the scheme, though it will be announced as a great success in preventing access by 20,000 extra adults. The loss of positive interaction by several million in formal or informal settings will not be raised. Poor kids that they have to have a life ruined by these do-gooders. [Vetting Keeps Our Children Safe, The Guardian, 12 September 2009]
• What are we doing to children? In times gone by, not all that long ago, there used to be lots of interaction between adults and children. Adults would keep an eye on everyone's children and help them out where necessary, but it was more than that. I well remember sitting fascinated with painters as they showed me how they could swing a paint bucket round without spilling a drop; had the "highly responsible" job of lighting the paraffin warning lights for builders as they rebuilt a roadside wall; fetched shopping for old ladies who just intercepted me as I walked by, and I profited to the tune of sixpence or thereabouts; I was taken for rides all round the county by the local florist as he made deliveries in one of the few cars in the village; played football with loads of other children aged 4 to 16 whilst we waited hopefully for our friend - a steelworker - to return off the 10-6 shift because he joined in and settled all disputes. Then when I was a bit older, I did what most children did, and some still do … I latched on to an adult and learned much from him about cricket, football, housebuilding (or rather demolition as I helped him demolish part of his house. In other words, there was a NATURAL relationship between adults and children. But there's nothing at all natural about suggesting that every adult a child comes into contact with has some kind of sexual desire for them. The intention to stop all contact with adults unless it is officially sanctioned and approved harms ALL children in an effort to prevent a very, very few suffering at the hands of strangers, instead of their parents. In the UK, almost uniquely, we are raising generations of children in a way no other children in the country's history have been raised, and possibly like no other children in any other country are raised. Poor, poor, kids. What have we done? What is our government doing to them? And was this really all from the Soham Report which (it seems to me) completely missed the most significant point of all? [Should Vetting Be Barred?, The Guardian, 11 September 2009]

Green Party policy

• RR501 The age of consent should be the same for everyone irrespective of their sexual orientation. It should be 16 years of age.
• RR503 Sexual orientation shall not affect the decision whether or not to employ, promote or discharge any individual. When assessing a person's work, their sexual orientation is of no consequence in their ability to undertake the work required.
• RR550 The Green Party believes that the law should not seek to regulate consensual sexual activities between adults where those do not affect others. Where there are such effects, a balance must be reached. Adults should be free to do as they wish with their own bodies, and to practice whatever form of sexual activity they wish by themselves or with each other by mutual consent. This includes the freedom not only to engage in such sexual acts, but also to be photographed or filmed doing so, to make such images available to other adults with their consent, and to be able to view such images. That someone might receive payment for any of these activities should not affect this freedom.
• RR600 The legal offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel should be abolished.

Ruth Hurmence Green

• It is possible to pull out justification for imposing your will on others, simply by calling your will God's will. [What I Found When I 'Searched the Scriptures', The Book of Ruth, 1982]
• If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admiration, what types of human behaviour can be presented to them as reprehensible? [The Born-Again Skeptic's Guide To The Bible]
• Christians tell me that they have a higher destiny than the lower animals, because Homo Sapiens can reason. But the Bible tells me that this gift of reason, which they call god-given, may be the match that lights the fires of hell for all who dare to use it, since whatever is not of faith is sin. [What I Found When I 'Searched the Scriptures', The Book of Ruth, 1982]
• To preserve a guess born of imagination and fantasy in the Holy Book of Christianity, presenting it as the revealed Word of God, all to be taken on faith, is an insult to the intelligence and reasoning ability of members of societies which might be expected to have undergone some scientific advancement over a period of several thousand years, and comprises just one of the many absurd impositions of the Bible. [The Born Again Skeptic's Guide To The Bible]
• The plan was for Jesus to come to Earth two thousand years ago with a pocketful of miracles and souls for the people who were then alive. After his return to heaven from Earth (it is about twelve septillion miles from Earth to the edge of our galaxy with four hundred billion suns to dodge) he is going to build those mansions, come back before his generation dies out, finally put an end to the world which has been such a rotten disappointment, and deposit most of these souls in hell. No wonder heaven is only 12,000 furlongs wide, long, and high. [What I Found When I 'Searched the Scriptures', The Book of Ruth, 1982]
• Suppose you had never heard of Christianity, and that next Sunday morning a stranger standing in a pulpit told you about a book whose authors could not be authenticated and whose contents, written hundreds of years ago, included blood-curdling legends of slaughter and intrigue and fables about unnatural happenings such as virgin births, devils that inhabit bodies and talk, people rising from the dead and ascending live into the clouds, and suns that stand still. Suppose he then asked you to believe that an uneducated man described in that book was a god who could get you into an eternal fantasy-place called heaven, when you die. Would you as an intelligent rational person even bother to read such nonsense, let alone pattern your entire life upon it? [A Born Again Skeptics Guide to the Bible]

Kate Greenaway

• It is strange beyond anything I can think to be able to believe in any of the known religions.

Graham Greene

• Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought. [1981]

Edward J. Greenfield, Supreme Court Justice, New York

• Faith is the antithesis of proof. [1995]

A. Whitney Griswold

• Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. [Essays On Education]
• In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education. [Essays On Education]

Nigel de Gruchy, General Secretary, National Association Of Schoolmasters Union Of Women Teachers

• The only justification Blair gave when challenged was that they got good academic results – but what's the point of having better educated bigots? [speaking of the state-funded Emmanuel College in Gateshead which promotes creationism, 18 March 2002]

Nino Guerreiro, Portugese Workers' Association

• Look, never mind the questions of nationality and justice, let's say you don't care about social tension either, think about this at the most basic. selfish level. Treating people like this is not a good idea. We are forcing people to live in squalor, in bad housing with wages so low that cannot live. They are bound to be ill. Bad housing and bad diets – these are the sort of conditions that before the war sustained TB. These are the people who are cleaning your salad. [Not On The Label, Felicity Lawrence, 2004]

D. Dale Gulledge

• I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do.

Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama

• We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected. [Time, 11 April 1988]

Larry Haftl

• Disbelief in religions does not constitute a religion any more than disbelief in UFOs constitutes a space program.

Edward Everett Hale

• I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.

J. B. S. Haldane

• Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. [Possible Worlds, 1927]

E. Haldeman-Julius

• The fear of gods and devils is never anything but a pitiable degradation of the human mind. [The Meaning Of Atheism]
• Commonly, those who have professed the strongest motives of love of a God have demonstrated the deepest hatred toward human joy and liberty. [The Meaning Of Atheism]
• Don't take our word for it. Read the Bible itself. Read the statements of preachers. And you will understand that God is the most desperate character, the worst villain in all fiction. [The Meaning Of Atheism]
• Christian theology has taught men that they should submit with unintelligent resignation to the worst real evils of life and waste their time in consideration of imaginary evils in "the life to come". [The Meaning Of Atheism]
• A sober, devout man will interpret "God's will" soberly and devoutly. A fanatic, with bloodshot mind, will interpret "God's will" fanatically. Men of extreme, illogical views will interpret "God's will" in eccentric fashion. Kindly, charitable, generous men will interpret "God's will" according to their character. [The Meaning Of Atheism]
• The influences that have lifted the race to a higher moral level are education, freedom, leisure, the humanizing tendency of a better-supplied and more interesting life. In a word, science and liberalism – the two forces, fundamentally skeptical, that we have seen continuously at work in human progress – have accomplished the very things for which religion claims the credit. [The Outline Of Bunk]
• The fact that millions of people still believe in a hell of eternal punishment for sinners and unbelievers is a drastic reminder of the need for persistent, progressive education of the masses. We have as yet only begun to realise the possibilities of progress. But science, rationalism and humanism have pointed the way, they have taken the first great steps, and we must keep right ahead on the highway of modernism. [The Meaning Of Atheism]

Garrett Hardin

• Why don't we teach astrology in the schools? Astrology holds that the course of each human life is determined to a considerable degree by the position of the stars in the sky at the exact moment of the individual's birth. Belief in it, in one variant or another, has probably been held by most of the people on earth. Even today, some universities in India offer degrees in the subject. Yet American believers do not pressure boards of education to add their subject to the curriculum. If believers in astrology became as well organised as the creationists, it is hard to see how their demands could be withstood. [Science And Creationism, 1984]

Dr Taj Hargey

• I will give £5 to anyone in Britain who wants to live under Sharia law. It will help pay for their ticket to Sudan, Yemen, Pakistan, or wherever it is customary to live under Sharia law. Please, please go and leave us alone. This is Britain, not 10th century Arabia! … 'I know I am a Muslim in my heart and my actions, not in my beard or the niqab face mask. The niqab only comes from a hadith and even that only refers to the Prophet's wives. This is a big fight for the hearts and minds of Islam. There is nothing in the Koran that is incompatible with (living in) British society. … But we do need a reformation in Islam. We have to go back to the pristine principles in our faith. We need a British Islam and by that I do not mean a compromise. Christianity was once an alien faith. We have to integrate in a matter of decades rather than centuries. I have called for Bush and Blair to be indicted at the international criminal court for their wars. What kind of stooge does that make me? We have a multicultural community of men and women, including converts. We are not fanatics and appeal to a very broad constituency. We do not appeal to those who have been brainwashed by the mullahs. [Daily Mail, 30 April 2009]

Johann Hari

• All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him. I don't respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of "prejudice" or "ignorance", but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal. … But when the religious are challenged, there is no evidence for them to consult. By definition, if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in the absence of evidence. Nobody has "faith" that fire hurts, or Australia exists; they know it, based on proof. But it is psychologically painful to be confronted with the fact that your core beliefs are based on thin air, or on the empty shells of revelation or contorted parodies of reason. It's easier to demand the source of the pesky doubt be silenced. But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence. [Why should I respect these oppressive religions?, The Indepentent, 28 January 2009]
• The central insight of the Enlightenment is that there are two fundamentally different ways to understand the world. One is divine revelation, where a being contacts you from another realm and discloses some truth. (Another word for this is 'hallucination'). The second method is reason – observing the world empirically, and drawing conclusions from the things we observe. The ultimate expression of reason is the scientific method. These approaches are fundamentally contrasting, and you cannot simply weld them together with contorted theological trickery. By claiming that divine revelation leads to reason – indeed, is its central underpinning – Ratzinger is subtly attacking the core principles of the Enlightenment. There is nothing we can observe in the world that leads us rationally to conclude a magical creature created it. But Ratzinger wants to be able to claim the fruits of the Enlightenment, like science, without following its basic principles. … Of course, none of Ratzinger's lies justify threats of violence against him. For decades now, he has been saying atheists have "no morality" and are "depraved", and that homosexuality is "an objective disorder" and "evil" – far worse insults than last week's cagey, quickly-retracted half-slur on Muslims – and it never occurred to us to respond by attacking Catholic children or nuns working with the starving. We mocked the sex advice of an elderly virgin, gave money to aid agencies trying to correct his poisonous lies, and got on with our lives. The cool balm of reason is the way to put down God's most rabid Rottweiler – not the furious fire of a parallel fundamentalism. [The Independent, 21 September 2006]

Rt. Rev. Richard Harries

• Historians of science note how quickly the late Victorian Christian public accepted evolution. It is therefore quite extraordinary that 140 years later, after so much evidence has accumulated, that a school in Gateshead is opposing evolutionary theory on alleged biblical grounds. Do some people really think that the worldwide scientific community is engaged in a massive conspiracy to hoodwink the rest of us? … This attempt to see the Book of Genesis as a rival to scientific truth [also] stops people taking the Bible seriously. Biblical literalism brings not only the Bible but Christianity itself into disrepute. [speaking of the state funded Emmanuel College in Gateshead which promotes creationism, March 2002]

Lee Harris

• We were all brought up in a world in which it was safe to speak our minds – safe both for us, and for the other members of our community. There was a tacit compact by which we all agreed to play by the same set of rules. I could say pretty much whatever I wanted to say, provided I allowed you the same liberty. Furthermore, I agreed that I would not become too upset if you offended me, provided you agreed that you would not become too upset if I offended you. Of course, most of us would watch what we said, in the interest of not causing others too much offense, but we would not fly off the handle if now and then someone went too far over the line. We might grumble and complain; we might even decide not to speak with the person who offended us, but we would not stab the offender to death, or behead him, or riot in the streets in protest against him, or burn down buildings to indicate to the world the fury of our resentment. [The Weekly Standard, 02/11/2008]

Paul Harris

• The US comprises a small fraction of the world but it sees all the rest of the world – and, for emphasis, ALL the rest of the world – as its servant, its supplier of cheap goods and labour, its warehouse, its flea market, the place to play with its guns. Both Canada and Mexico can reasonably think of the United States as our best friend. But it is also our worst enemy. Indeed, I will argue here that the United States is the enemy of ALL nations. It may be a little tougher for Canada and Mexico because the Beast lives next door, but also a little easier because at least they haven't sent in the troops. Yet. Now, we've all heard the rebuttal that 'not all Americans are like that', and that is certainly true. The US has at least as many decent humans as any other nation, more than many. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]
• Many outside the US have waited patiently for them to outgrow their juvenile delinquency, but they show no sign of maturing. We have waited patiently for the good citizens of the US to corral the bad, but they persist in failing to do so. And now that they are acting out again and threatening the peace and security of the entire planet, it is high time that the rest of us took matters into our own hands. The rest of the world should join hands and shun the United States. America, the country, really does believe it is better than anyone else. That America is entitled to as much of the resources and riches of the planet as it wants and it doesn't matter whomever else might have to suffer or go short. That all other nations are enemies if they don't march to the American drum in virtually any arena you might mention. That it has the right, indeed the obligation, to enforce its will wherever it sees fit, and by whatever means it wants. That it has the right to invade sovereign nations as a way of deflecting attention from domestic political scandals or if there is some new weapon that needs a good field testing. That killing of foreign civilians doesn't really count because they're always in season and there's no quota. That a bullet-ridden and trigger-happy American society is in every way superior to any other place on earth. Astonishingly, Americans as a group have a hard time grasping that other folks might be a little annoyed about all that. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]
• Where the US is unable to win agreement from other countries, it threatens. It starts with gentle remonstrance but the stakes very quickly rise to trade and even military threats: it takes guts to stand up to the US and only a few countries have the clout or temerity to do so (China and Cuba, respectively, come easily to mind). But the reason these difficulties arise in the first place is there is no room in the eyes of the United States for compromise. President Bush again: "Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists." This narrow black-versus-white approach (an appropriate metaphor for the US) allows for no compromise, it permits no neutrality. It is the classic schoolyard bully approach to problem solving. As a further example, consider the American attitude to such concepts as the International Court of Justice. The US refuses to be a part of it because they will not put themselves in the position where someone else has the power to judge them or the activities of their citizens. They believe that international law governs everyone but them: they were quite prepared to judge the Third Reich at Nuremburg and Manuel Noriega (after he finished being useful to them) and Saddam Hussein, and so on, but they refuse to accept that anyone, anywhere, has the right to judge them or one of their citizens. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]
• The US was founded on the principle of democracy, the republican form of democracy, but it has been many years since it practised democracy or even believed that it should. We all know its elections are unfair contests of rich against rich, often with unscrupulous polling practices to ensure the right person wins. And we all know that once elected, the winners are ensconced for the sole purpose of lining their own pockets and those of their backers. Yet the United States strides around the world with the alleged aim of installing 'democracy', by force if necessary, even if the people affected would rather not have it. There is a proselytizing fervour and a missionary zeal with which the US pledges to 'free' the rest of the world. It cannot be stated more clearly that the US interest in other nations is solely as providers of cheap raw materials and labour, and as market places. They are quite content to accept the rule of dictators in those nations who are willingly serving US interests (Saudi Arabia, for instance). The US notion of 'democracy', at least within the current administration, is surely Orwellian, avoiding anything that would allow for a genuine rule of the people. In nominal democracies today there is a huge gap between the ruling elites and the general populace. In this neo-con world, leaders regularly betray campaign promises and the public interest in order to serve the needs of the corporations who ensured their election victories. Nowhere has this reached such a high art form as in the United States. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]
• Today, the US is the most powerful nation on earth in every sense of the word, except moral. The moral authority of the United States comes from the barrel of a gun. It is feared worldwide, even by its friends, and dismayed that others don't unconditionally love it. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]
• The world no longer needs the United States. It is time the world ignored the United States and went about its business without this bully. For much of its history the US has practised a form of isolationism (note its very late entry into World Wars I & II). It is time the rest of the world practised reverse isolationism and locked the US out of the world community so it can do harm only to itself. The US is in serious danger of collapsing on itself; moving it outside the realm of relations with other nations is the only way to ensure that other nations come to no harm when the US finally implodes. And like a miscreant child sent to its room to think about what it has done, there is the possibility that the US will realize it has misbehaved and pledge itself anew to being a better person. But until it does, it should be shunned. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]

Richard Harris

• Jesus is just a word I use to swear with.

Sam Harris

• In the year 2002 the GDP in all Arab countries combined did not equal that of Spain. Even more troubling, Spain translates as many books into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic since the ninth century. [The End Of Faith] It doesn't trouble them, of course, for they have a 'perfect' book, so just like William Jennings Bryan all the rest are irrelevant. By the way, if you think Harris' numbers are wrong or he's being disingenuous, then consider this quote from the Arab Human Development Report 2003: "The aggregate total of translated books from the Al-Ma'moon era to the present day amounts to 10,000 books [an average of 10 per year!] – equivalent to what Spain translates in a single year … the average number of books translated per 1 million people in the Arab world during the 5-year period was 4.4 (less than one book for every million Arabs), while in Hungary it was 519, and in Spain 920."
• We've elected a president who can't speak, who is animated by his own religious dogmas, who is beholden to genuine religious lunatics in our own culture, and who has been almost perfectly designed to alienate our allies and enrage our enemies. [Rochester City News, 18 October 2006]
• At this point in their history, give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedom by the root. We should not for a moment lose sight of the possibility that they would curtail our freedoms as well, if they only had the power to do so. [The End Of Faith]
• The irony here is almost a miracle in its own right: the most sexually repressive people found in the world today – people who are stirred to a killing rage by reruns of Baywatch – are lured to martyrdom by a conception of paradise that resembles nothing so much as an al fresco bordello. [The End Of Faith]
• The Saudi Prince Abdullah, for instance – a man who has by no means distinguished himself as a liberal – recently proposed that women should be permitted to drive automobiles in his country. As it turns out, his greatly oppressed people would not stand for this degree of spiritual oppression, and the prince was forced to back down. [The End Of Faith]
• If God sees and knows all things, and remains so provincial a creature as to be scandalised by certain sexual behaviours or states of the brain, then what people do in the privacy of their own homes, though it may not have the slightest implication for their behaviour in public, will still be a matter of public concern for people of faith. [The End Of Faith]
• Notice that no one is ever faulted in our culture for not "respecting" another person's beliefs about mathematics or history. When people have reasons for what they believe, we consider those reasons, and when they are good, we find ourselves believing likewise. When they have no reasons, or bad ones, we dismiss their beliefs as a symptom of ignorance, delusion, or stupidity. Except on matters of religion.
• Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever. [The End Of Faith, 2004]
• Christians think there's something about the Christian tradition and the contents of the Bible that puts the God of Abraham on a completely different footing epistemologically [than Poseidon]. It's a sign that it's very difficult to see your circumstance with fresh eyes when you've been taught from the moment you acquired language that the word "god" means something robust, intelligible, and beyond criticism and these other words are names of mythical figures. [Rochester City News, 18 October 2006]
• We live in a world of unimaginable surprises – from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light's dancing for eons upon the earth – and yet paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn't know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.
• If you truly believe that your neighbour is going to hell for his unbelief, and you believe that his ideas about the world are putting the souls of your children in peril, it is quite sensible to drive him from your community, or kill him. Religion, by promising an eternity of supernatural rewards and punishments, raises the stakes enormously. Which is worse, a child molester or a heretic? If you really believe that the heretic can endanger your child for all time, there's simply no contest.
• We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words – "Jesus", "Allah", "Ram" – can mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting. Considering the stakes here, it is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necessary to murder other human beings for using the wrong magic words, or the right ones for the wrong reasons. How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world. [The End Of Faith, 2004]
• Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences – and hence our religious beliefs – antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbouring believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia – because our neighbours are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal," or they will unmake our world.
• Well, it has suffered some important moments of derision, especially in Europe (think Voltaire or Hume), which may account for why modern Europeans are not content to wander quite so far down the path of biblically inspired irrationality as we are. More importantly, Christianity has suffered a relentless and uncelebrated winnowing as a result of the progress of science and secular culture in the West. Priests would still be diagnosing demonic possession if it were not for the advances made in the last 200 years by medical science. The situations in which prayer now seems an adequate (or even sane) first response to human suffering have been gradually (but radically) diminished.
• The Israeli settlers are themselves religious extremists who are putting us all in danger. Their notion of God as some omniscient real-estate broker is one of the principal sources of conflict between the West and Islam. But anyone who thinks western or Israeli imperialism solves the riddle of Muslim violence must explain why we don't see Tibetan suicide bombers killing Chinese children. The Tibetans have suffered every bit as much as the Palestinians. Over a million of them died as a direct result of the Chinese occupation of their country. Where are the Tibetan suicide bombers? Where is their cult of martyrdom? Where are the throngs of Tibetans seething with hatred, calling for the deaths of the Chinese? They are not likely to exist. What is the difference that makes the difference? Religion.
• The kind of intolerance of faith that I am advocating in my book [The End Of Faith] is not the intolerance that gave us the gulag. It is conversational intolerance. When people make outlandish claims, without evidence, we stop listening to them – except on matters of faith. I am arguing that we can no longer afford to give faith a pass in this way. Bad beliefs should be criticized wherever they appear in our discourse – in physics, in medicine, and on matters of ethics and spirituality as well. The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. Now, if he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive.
• We'll know there are Muslim moderates in this world when they get on television and say things like: "There is much in the doctrine of Islam that should not be taken literally. It is, for instance, unacceptable to believe that people can get into Paradise by killing infidels and dying in the process. In fact, we're not even sure Paradise exists. Nor are we sure that the Koran was written by the Creator of the universe. The Koran is an ancient book of religious wisdom, some of it applies to our modern circumstance and some of it does not." Find a Muslim who can talk this way, and you will have found a Muslim moderate. You will also have found someone who is guilty of blasphemy and liable to be killed in almost any Muslim community on this earth.
• Jesus Christ – who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens – can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favourite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that he would be mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilisation is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?
• There is a pervasive piece of wishful thinking circulating among religious moderates, and it could get a lot of us killed. The idea is that all religions, at their core, teach the same thing. This is myth. The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviourally. Read the Koran. Osama bin Laden is playing it more or less by the book. Anyone who says that there is no basis for his worldview in the doctrine of Islam is either dangerously ignorant or just dangerous. We must hope that the Muslim world is full of moderates who abhor the worldview of Osama bin Laden. But where are they? We cannot just assume that they exist. And the horrible truth is that if they do exist, they will be easily marginalised by their coreligionists.
• Religious moderates may ignore or overlook the more barbaric passages in their religious books, but by venerating the books in general, they leave us powerless to really oppose the belief systems of fundamentalists. And because moderates tend to ignore the most lunatic parts of scripture, they lose touch with how dangerous these books are when taken literally. In fact, they have trouble believing that anyone does still take these books literally, and so they tend not to recognize the role that faith plays in inspiring human violence. Religious moderates are blinded by their own moderation. When college-educated jihadists stare into a video camera and declare that "we love death more than the infidels love life," and then blow themselves up along with dozens of innocent bystanders, religious moderates rack their brains wondering what motivated these killers to do what they did.
• What if a religion said: "Treat everyone well, don't lie, raise your children to excel in science and mathematics and if you don't do that, you're going to be tortured for eternity by a green-headed demon"? This would be a benign religion to spread when you compare it to the jihadist lunacy that goes on under the name of Islam or many of these end-time beliefs that animate Christianity at the moment. This would be a good religion, yet it wouldn't lend the slightest bit of credence to the claim that there's a demon who's going to enforce its precepts. People would recognize that immediately. It's based on this false notion that you can believe things simply because they're useful. You should only be able to believe things because you have reason to believe that they're true. Usefulness and truth are quite distinct. We can get our useful structures without deluding ourselves about the nature of the universe. [Rochester City News, 18 October 2006]
• The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence. There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia." [The Huffington Post, 05 May 2008]
• Religious moderates insist that we respect people's religious beliefs no matter how unreasonable and divisive they are. We respect this basic claim that it's legitimate to organize your life around the contents of a single book. This mode of discourse gives immense cover to fundamentalists. We really can't call a spade a spade when it's religious dogma getting people killed, because moderates want their faith claims off the table of criticism. And they also want raising their children to believe they are Christians, Muslims, or Jews to remain off the table. The other problem is, by virtue of being moderates, they don't understand the degree to which fundamentalists and extremists are moved by their theology. They don't take their theology seriously; therefore they're rather perversely the least able to understand that people really do fly planes into buildings because they think they're going to paradise. People really do live in the Christian West with this expectation that Jesus is going to come down and Rapture them and their families into the sky in a few years. [Rochester City News, 18 October 2006]
• We have been lulled into ignoring just how strange and insupportable many of our religious beliefs are. How comforting would it be to hear the President of the United States assure us that almighty Zeus is on our side in our war on terrorism? The mere change of a single word in his speech – from God to Zeus – would precipitate a national emergency. If I believe that Christ was born of a virgin, resurrected bodily after death, and is now literally transformed into a wafer at the Mass, I can still function as a respected member of society. I can believe these propositions because millions of others believe them, and we have all been taught to overlook how irrational this picture of reality is. If, on the other hand, I wake up tomorrow morning believing that God is communicating with me through my hairdryer, I'll be considered a nut, even in church. The beliefs themselves are more or less on a par – in so far as they are in flagrant violation of the most basic principles of reason. The perversity of religion is that it allows sane people to believe the unbelievable en masse.
• According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution. … More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy. Unreason is now ascendant in the United States – in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world. [alternet.org, 10 August 2005]
• The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary. We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them. [Newsweek, 20 September 2008]
• We live in a world in which women and girls are regularly murdered by their male relatives for perceived sexual indiscretions – ranging from merely speaking to a man without permission to falling victim of rape. … the problem is clearly a product of what men in these societies believe about shame and honour, about the role of women, and about female sexuality. … Given the requisite beliefs about "honour", a man will be desperate to kill his daughter upon learning that she was raped. The same angel of compassion can be expected to visit her brothers as well. … Luckily, this shame is not indelible and can be readily expunged with her blood. … Can we say that Middle Eastern men who are murderously obsessed with female sexual purity actually love their wives, daughters, and sisters less than American or European men do? Of course, we can. And what is truly incredible about the state of our discourse is that such a claim is not only controversial but actually unutterable in most contexts. Where's the proof that these men are less capable of love than the rest of us? Well, where would the proof be if a person behaved that way in our society? … There is no doubt that certain beliefs are incompatible with love, and this notion of "honour" is among them. … Most of us will find that cutting a little girl's head off after she has been raped just doesn't capture these sentiments very well. [The End Of Faith]

Rex Harrison

• Charlton Heston is good at portraying arrogance and ambition. But in the same way that a dwarf is good at being short.

Deborah Harry

• Ah, George [W. Bush]. Anyone who can say 'nookula' instead of 'nuclear' is living in another world. [Diva, June 2004]

Ian Hart

• We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could eventually reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. Speaking of If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel. [A. S. Eddington, The Nature Of The Physical World, 1927]

James L. Hartley

• The problem is that Americans don't recognise there are other moral forces outside the world of immaterial gods. Morality can be derived from reason and rational thought. It can be based on our relationship to each other, instead of our relationship to a god no one can see. Religion isn't morality. A lack of faith isn't immorality. When Americans can recognise that, when we recognise our human power to solve our human problems instead of counting on a god to fix it, maybe we will gain a better understanding of just what it means to be moral.

John Hattan

• I understand prayer quite well. It's a masturbatory exercise that gives catharsis to the pray-er and a placebo effect to the pray-ee, but only if the pray-ee knows he's being prayed for.

James A. Haught

• The stronger the supernatural beliefs, the worse the inhumanity.

Stephen Hawking

• The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behaviour at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: "The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary." The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE. [A Brief History of Time, 1988]
• The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator? [A Brief History of Time, 1988]

Judith Hayes

• The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?
• If a plane crashes and 99 people die while 1 survives, it is called a miracle. Should the families of the 99 think so? [In God We Trust: But Which One?, 1997]
• 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. [In God We Trust: But Which One?, 1997]
• The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine? [In God We Trust: But Which One?, 1997]
• Why is every utterance of the Pope considered to be worthy of worldwide attention and respect? It's like the fawning reverence that was accorded every banal platitude ever uttered by the late Mother Teresa. But the Pope is not exactly on the cutting edge of world events or anything else, for that matter. It was only a little over a year ago, in October 1996, that John Paul II announced that the scientific theory of evolution could be said to be valid. That message was received with enthusiastic approval in many circles throughout the world. Warm congratulations were offered to John Paul, just as they had been in 1979. In that year he declared that the Roman Catholic Church had been mistaken when it sentenced a 70-year-old Galileo to house arrest (with threats of the tortures of The Inquisition) for insisting that the Earth orbits the Sun, not vice versa. Mistaken?! No, not mistaken. A mistake is when you slip the wrong key into your front door. The Church's treatment of Galileo, one of the world's few geniuses, was viciously cruel and betrays the unenlightened, progress-impeding attitude that has dominated the Church since its inception. And they were as wrong as it is possible to be. [The Happy Heretic, February 1998]

Rutherford Hayes

• This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations. [1876]

Brian Hayward

• There is no sin. It is an invention to shame people into believing fantasies. We are the only animals known to desire to act differently (often better) than we do. This is a glorious quality, and provides optimism that we will will eventually improve ourselves. We should be proud of it, not ashamed.

Chris Hedges

• We have lost touch with the essence of war. Following our defeat in Vietnam we became a better nation. We were humbled, even humiliated. We asked questions about ourselves we had not asked before. We were forced to see ourselves as others saw us and the sight was not always a pretty one. We were forced to confront our own capacity for a atrocity – for evil – and in this we understood not only war but more about ourselves. But that humility is gone. War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press – remember in wartime the press is always part of the problem – have turned war into a vast video arcade came. Its very essence – death – is hidden from public view. There was no more candour in the Persian Gulf War or the War in Afghanistan or the War in Iraq than there was in Vietnam. But in the age of live feeds and satellite television, the state and the military have perfected the appearance of candour. Because we no longer understand war, we no longer understand that it can all go horribly wrong. We no longer understand that war begins by calling for the annihilation of others but ends if we do not know when to make or maintain peace with self-annihilation. We flirt, given the potency of modern weapons, with our own destruction. The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true – it does create a feeling of comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong. War allows us to rise above our small stations in life; we find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion. War for those who enter into combat has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it the lust of the eye and warns believers against it. War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning. [17 May 2003]

Ernest Hemingway

• All thinking men are atheists. [A Farewell To Arms]

Bobby Henderson

• I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design. … I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. … If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith. … Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. … I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence. [Open Letter To Kansas School Board, 23 August 2005]

Katharine Hepburn

• I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people. [Ladies' Home Journal, October 1991]
• We are taught you must blame your father, your sister, your brother, the school, the teachers – you can blame anyone but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault, because if you wanted to change, you're the one who has got to change. It's as simple as that., isn't it?

Heraclitus

• Those who worship images as gods are as foolish as men who talk to walls.
• A blow to the head will confuse a man's thinking, a blow to the foot has no such effect, this cannot be the result of an immaterial soul.

Edward Herman

• As human rights conditions deteriorate, factors affecting the "climate of investment," like the tax laws and labour repression, improve from the viewpoint of the multinational corporation. This suggests an important line of causation - military dictatorships tend to improve the investment climate … The multinational corporate community and the U.S. government are very sensitive to this factor. Military dictators enter into a tacit joint venture arrangement with Free World leaders: They will keep the masses quiet, maintain an open door to multinational investment, and provide bases and otherwise serve as loyal clients. In exchange, they will be aided and protected against their own people, and allowed to loot public property.

Alexander Herzen

• All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence. the former – of the corruption of the will. [From The Other Shore, 1855]

Liz Highleyman

• The basic tenet of anarchism is that hierarchical authority – be it state, church, patriarchy or economic elite – is not only unnecessary, but is inherently detrimental to the maximisation of human potential. Anarchists generally believe that human beings are capable of managing their own affairs on the basis of creativity, cooperation, and mutual respect. It is believed that power is inherently corrupting, and that authorities are inevitably more concerned with self-perpetuation and increasing their own power than they are with doing what is best for their constituents.

Joe Hill, Industrial Workers of the World

• Long-haired preachers come out every night,
  Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
  But when asked how 'bout something to eat
  They will answer with voices so sweet:
  
  You will eat, bye and bye,
  In that glorious land above the sky;
  Work and pray, live on hay,
  You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
  
  [1911]

Hippocrates

• Where prayer, amulets and incantations work it is only a manifestation of the patient's belief.
• Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency and lamentations.
• Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.

Don Hirschberg

• Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair colour. [letter to Ann Landers]

Christopher Hitchens

• The claim of Islam is that it is the last, and final, revelation from God to Humanity. It's quite a big claim to make, you don't need another book after the Qur'an. You don't need any more evidence, you don't ned any more argument, it's all done for you. Now, that's OK if you want to claim that, but now they want to say if you have any difficulty with this idea, if you have any doubts about it, you're not allowed to express them, because if you do, you are insulting us, you're making us feel hurt. Now, just imagine those two claims put together. One, fantastically, and the other, a fantatstic claim that you can't challenge. That is totalitarianism defined. [Lou Dobbs Show, 05 March 2009]
• I mentioned civilisation before – and people talk about the clash of civilisation – civilisation consists of the leaving behind of the religious mentality, of the mentality of faith, of the mentality of fanaticism, of the mentality of certainty, of the mentality of holy books and the word of God. Civilisation begins where that stops in all societies and all cultures in the Muslim world no less. For me its very interesting because the Christian fanatics in America began this confrontation by saying well, America deserved it. The sympathisers of Muslim extremism said the same. The sympathisers of Israeli Jewish extremism added their own words and said "yes, it also meant that you should support us." I feel certain as never before, this is a war between those who are for faith, those who are for holy books, for the word of God, for acts of faith – and those who believe in reason – and it's almost perfectly joined. I couldn't be more ready to spend the rest of my life fighting it – which I'm absolutely sure I'm going to have to do. [interview with Jennifer Byrne, 07 November 2001]
• … the cadres of the new jihad make it very apparent that their quarrel is with Judaism and secularism on principle, not with (or not just with) Zionism. They regard the Saudi regime not as the extreme authoritarian theocracy that it is, but as something too soft and lenient. The Taliban forces viciously persecute the Shi'a minority in Afghanistan. The Muslim fanatics in Indonesia try to extirpate the infidel minorities there; civil society in Algeria is barely breathing after the fundamentalist assault. Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition and Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the west", to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any observant follower of the prophet Mohammed could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings – yes, even in the Pentagon. The new talk is all of "human intelligence": the very faculty in which our ruling elite is most deficient. A few months ago, the Bush administration handed the Taliban a subsidy of $43m, in abject gratitude for the assistance of fundamentalism in "the war on drugs". Next up is the renewed "missile defence" fantasy, recently endorsed by even more craven Democrats who seek to occupy the void "behind the President". Idiocy can contribute no more. There is sure to be further opportunity to emphasise the failings of our supposed leaders, whose costly mantra is "national security" and who could not protect us. And yes, indeed, my guide in Peshawar was a shadow thrown by William Casey's CIA, which first connected the unstoppable Stinger missile to the infallible and inerrant Koran. But that's only one way among many of stating the obvious, which is that Islamic fascism is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life. [The Guardian, 21 September 2001]
• You can be sure that the relevant European newspapers have also printed their share of cartoons making fun of nuns and popes and messianic Israeli settlers, and taunting child-raping priests. There was a time when this would not have been possible. But those taboos have been broken. Which is what taboos are for. Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet – who was only another male mammal – is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. … I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a "holy" book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object. It is revolting to me to breathe the same air as wafts from the exhalations of the madrasahs, or the reeking fumes of the suicide-murderers, or the sermons of Billy Graham and Joseph Ratzinger. But these same principles of mine also prevent me from wreaking random violence on the nearest church, or kidnapping a Muslim at random and holding him hostage, or violating diplomatic immunity by attacking the embassy or the envoys of even the most despotic Islamic state, or making a moronic spectacle of myself threatening blood and fire to faraway individuals who may have hurt my feelings. The babyish rumour-fuelled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species. … But if Muslims do not want their alleged prophet identified with barbaric acts or adolescent fantasies, they should say publicly that random murder for virgins is not in their religion. And here one runs up against a curious reluctance. … Can the discussion be carried on without the threat of violence, or the automatic resort to it? … The same point holds for international relations: There can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination. And civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient. [Slate, 04 February 2006]

Eric Hoffer

• Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. [Reflections on the Human Condition]
• Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith. [The Passionate State of Mind]
• The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds. [The True Believer]
• To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance. [The Passionate State of Mind]
• The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. [The True Believer]
• Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from. [New York Times, 21 July 1969]
• A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. [The True Believer]
• When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom – freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement. [The True Believer]
• They want freedom from "the fearful burden of free choice," freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product. They do not want freedom of conscience, but faith – blind, authoritarian faith. [The True Believer]
• People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief of the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility. [The True Believer]

Nocholas von Hoffman

• In peacetime the functions of mass media are advertising, entertainment and inculcating the norms and opinions that a nation, terrified of disunity, wants in its people. … In wartime such institutions have no capacity to be other than the means by which the central government instructs the populace. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]
• All but a couple of hundred of the nation's thousands of radio stations broadcast no news at all, literally not a word. In peacetime, television stations and newspapers, with perhaps 25 exceptions, skip coverage of events abroad. … the home truth is that the vast majority of Americans will not watch or read news, unless it's local news, sports, or gossip. … Those who doubt this observation might want to compare and contrast the international news service offered by CNN with the entirely different service presented to its American audience. American CNN is bubble-headed news. It is an unwatchable gallimaufry of crime, scandal, tear-jerker reunions and the like. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]
• For the past ten or 15 years, movies, theatrical and made for TV, have presented a diet of shows glorifying American military might and how that might was used by the United States to save weak, incompetent, inferior democracies such as Great Britain. Ham-handed propaganda movies like the odious Saving Private Ryan are taken to be historical truth by the great unwashed and by the editorial writers. The country is soaked in false, inaccurate, distorted and self-adulatory histories. Thanks to these media, America is coming to see itself as the dissed democracy of generosity, goodness and valour which is met by ingratitude, spite and envious hatred, the natural consequence of being better than everyone else. The secondary message is that America is alone in a hostile world in which friends are few and unreliable. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]
• Islam and Christianity both have a sex fixation: Practitioners can't get enough of it, even as they despise the thought of it. Their self-inflicted contradictions drive them crazy, and so they drive us non-believers nuts trying to take away our dirty pictures and our evil Web sites. They make their sex problems worse for themselves by immuring themselves in exclusive communities in which their ceaseless animadversions on the subject set them off into paroxysms of clandestine lust. … And the stuff they believe makes your ordinary witch doctor look like Louis Pasteur or Jonas Salk. Submicroscopic homunculi running around inside a single cell, dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, the virginity cult, hairy palms in Hell for masturbators. American Calvinists and their Jansenist Roman Catholic counterparts count it a sin to wrap an engorged male organ with a three-millimeter-thick latex film. [New York Observer, 23 March 2005]
• American flag idolatry is practised all over; the flag lapel button or brooch for women is nigh on mandatory in certain occupations; the yellow ribbon is universally hung from trees, mailboxes, porches and all manner of public places. … The pledge of allegiance has become a tool of social intimidation. One is pressured to recite it in the classroom, on the athletic field, at theatrical events and at the commencement of every kind of meeting. The singing of the national anthem is incessant. Athletic events begin with an "Oh, say can you see" and are interrupted midway for a rousing chorus of "God Bless America". The country is taking on a hue and tone reminiscent of the authoritarian state. As it does so, the distinction between patriotism and militarism is getting blurred. Even before 11 September the public was being schooled to believe in a version of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori which to a non-American might sound not unlike the creed of the suicide bomber. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]

Baron d'Holbach (Paul Henri Thiry)

• All children are atheists – they have no idea of God. [Good Sense, 1772]
• Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system.
• If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them. [The System Of Nature, 1770]
• All religions are ancient monuments to superstitions, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies rejuvenated.
• If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests. [The System Of Nature]

Oliver Wendell Holmes

• Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While the experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country. [Abrams v. United States, 1919]
• Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words. [The Poet At The Breakfast Table, 1872]

Elmer Homrighausen

• Few intelligent Christians can still hold to the idea that the Bible is an infallible Book, that it contains no linguistic errors, no historical discrepancies, no antiquated scientific assumptions, not even bad ethical standards. Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages. The existence of thousands of variations of texts makes it impossible to hold the doctrine of a book verbally infallible. Some might claim for the original copies of the Bible an infallible character, but this view only begs the question and makes such Christian apologetics more ridiculous in the eyes of the sincere man. [Christianity In America]

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, Physics Chair, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad

• Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world's science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. [Physics Today Online, August 2007]
• No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific development is one important element – although by no means the only one – that contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a growing sense of injustice and victimhood. [Physics Today Online, August 2007]
• Muslims bristle at any hint that Islam and science may be at odds, or that some underlying conflict between Islam and science may account for the slowness of progress. The Qur'an, being the unaltered word of God, cannot be at fault: Muslims believe that if there is a problem, it must come from their inability to properly interpret and implement the Qur'an's divine instructions. [Physics Today Online, August 2007] A book "cannot be at fault"? That mindset is precisely the problem! If it isn't in the Qur'an, then it isn't valid. Close your eyes, let your brain rot, and blame everyone else because you're a 'victim'.
• When the 2005 earthquake struck Pakistan, killing more than 90,000 people, no major scientist in the country publicly challenged the belief, freely propagated through the mass media, that the quake was God's punishment for sinful behavior . Mullahs ridiculed the notion that science could provide an explanation; they incited their followers into smashing television sets[ just as they did in 2001], which had provoked Allah's anger and hence the earthquake. As several class discussions showed, an overwhelming majority of my university's science students accepted various divine-wrath explanations. [Physics Today Online, August 2007] It happened, therefore god-did-it. And that's all they need to know for an obedient life.
• Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame – the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered. Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. [Physics Today Online, August 2007]
• Academic and cultural freedoms on campuses are highly restricted in most Muslim countries. At Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, where I teach, the constraints are similar to those existing in most other Pakistani public-sector institutions. This university serves the typical middle-class Pakistani student and, according to the survey referred to earlier, ranks number two among OIC universities. Here, as in other Pakistani public universities, films, drama, and music are frowned on, and sometimes even physical attacks by student vigilantes who believe that such pursuits violate Islamic norms take place. The campus has three mosques with a fourth one planned, but no bookstore. No Pakistani university, including QAU, allowed Abdus Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his role in formulating the standard model of particle physics. The Ahmedi sect to which he belonged, and which had earlier been considered to be Muslim, was officially declared heretical in 1974 by the Pakistani government. As intolerance and militancy sweep across the Muslim world, personal and academic freedoms diminish with the rising pressure to conform. In Pakistani universities, the veil is now ubiquitous, and the last few unveiled women students are under intense pressure to cover up. The head of the government-funded mosque-cum-seminary in the heart of Islamabad, the nation's capital, issued the following chilling warning to my university's female students and faculty on his FM radio channel on 12 April 2007: The government should abolish co-education. Quaid-i-Azam University has become a brothel. Its female professors and students roam in objectionable dresses. … Sportswomen are spreading nudity. I warn the sportswomen of Islamabad to stop participating in sports. … Our female students have not issued the threat of throwing acid on the uncovered faces of women. However, such a threat could be used for creating the fear of Islam among sinful women. There is no harm in it. There are far more horrible punishments in the hereafter for such women. The imposition of the veil makes a difference. My colleagues and I share a common observation that over time most students – particularly veiled females – have largely lapsed into becoming silent note-takers, are increasingly timid, and are less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions. [Physics Today Online, August 2007]

Jon Honeyball

• A few years ago, I was taking a week's holiday driving around California. One of those "point at the map and stay there tonight" sort of trips. By either luck, or lack of it, I ended up in a run-down ex-mining town in south-east California. I pulled up at lunchtime outside the family diner on the main street. One of those emporia that has a bar, lots of chrome and barstools. I settled myself down and perused the menu. Mama, for I shall call her that, sidled down the bar armed with a large pot of hot coffee in one hand and an even bigger mug in the other. The sort of mug that lets you get all four fingers through the handle. Just as she was about to start pouring the thick black rocket fuel, I asked, in my most polite and crystal-clear English voice: "You wouldn't happen to have any tea?" She froze, put the mug down and wandered away with the coffee pot. A few moments later she reappeared with a box; a deep hunt into its deepest corner found an English Breakfast teabag. This would have to do, I decided. Mama took my order, and then, as she was about to turn away, said: "You're not from around here, are you?" I replied that indeed so, I was from near Cambridge, the original one. "Huh," she said, as she ambled off to get my plate of heart attack. When she reappeared she looked me up and down and told me, in a firm but curious voice, that she had a friend called Mary. Apparently, Mary used to live down the street, just past the gun shop, but she had met an Englishman and moved to English. I tried hard to keep a straight face. "Ah," I replied, before she trundled off to serve some other locals who had just appeared in the diner. I ate my heart attack slowly, pondering that she really did have a good excuse for such a narrow worldview. We were, after all, in Armpit California, and Tewksbury seemed a very long way away. The only time people speak French here is when they get drunk. My plate emptied, she reappeared again and I confess I couldn't help but ask: "Where does Mary live in England?" "Liverpool," came the reply, followed by the priceless comment of "Maybe you know her?" At this point, I nearly slid off the barstool. But I managed to keep a stern and interested expression. "No, I'm sorry, I don't know a Mary from Liverpool. I do know a Mary from Sheffield, though?" I added in an ever-so-helpful way. Her eyes narrowed, and you could see the cogs turning in her head. What happened next was a complete surprise. She replied, saying "Hmm," and had a long pause. "She didn't tell me she'd moved." As she trundled off to the kitchen, I did my best not to giggle out loud. [PC Pro, #172, February 2009] It would have been even funnier if you'd quietly sung the chorus to Chumbawamba's "Mary Mary" :)

Fred Hoyle

• Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this is illusory. [The Nature Of The Universe, 1950]

Elbert Hubbard

• Theology is Classified Superstition.
• Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
• What we call God's justice is only man's idea of what he would do if he were God.
• A miracle is an event described by those to whom it was told by people who did not see it. [The Philistine, 1909]
• A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious, but who understands the nonexistent.
• Dogma is a lie reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more persons who believe that they believe what someone else believes. [The Note Book, 1927]
• Organised religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific – that is, truthful – must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organised religion going hand in hand.
• Theology, by diverting the attention of men from this life to another, and by endeavouring to coerce all men into one religion, constantly preaching that this world is full of misery, but the next world would be beautiful – or not, as the case may be – has forced on men the thought of fear where otherwise there might have been the happy abandon of nature.

Charles Evans Hughes

• When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

Robert Hughes

• No decent person pretends that abortion does not present a grave moral choice, but the whole point is that this choice must be made by the mother, not denied her by the state. Nobody – except those who believe, on no evidence at all, that an immortal soul really is implanted in the embryo at the moment of conception, thus endowing it with complete humanity – can say at what point an embryo turns into a human being. The innocence of foetuses is not in doubt. But it is irrelevant.: lettuces are innocent too. [Culture Of Complaint, 1993]
• Every time you wanked, it was a slaughter of future Catholics so small that a hundred of them could dance, or at least wiggle, on the head of a pin. The real trouble with masturbation was that it represented an inversion of the cosmic order – and contraception, even worse. The notion that some small part of the cosmic order hung on our teenage willies was a heavy load for us young soldiers in St. Ignatius' army of Christ. In some of us, including Private Hughes, it induced the kind of suffocating guilt that led to scepticism: if God was so busy counting sperm, and so apparently unconcerned with preventing the world's famines, epidemics and slaughters, was He worth worshipping? Was He there at all? No answer from the altar. [Culture Of Complaint, 1993]
• To divide a polity you must have scapegoats and hate-objects – human caricatures that dramatise the difference between Them and Us. If some part of a political strategy can turn, as it does now, on the act of inflaming prejudice against homosexuals and denying them certain rights as a class or group, then so be it; and so much the worse for the people whom in the past Buchanan had called promoters of "Satanism and suicide", "perverted", "destructive", a "pederast proletariat" – all those lisping armies of the night out there, sneaking up on your children, not just on consenting adults" God's little ally, the AIDS virus, was "divine retribution" against such people, just as, to the fundamentalist preacher of the 1920s, the spirochete and the gonococcus had been launched against the rake and the seducer by an offended God. Nothing had changed. [Culture Of Complaint, 1993]
• For when the 1960s' animus against elitism entered American education, it brought in its train an enormous and cynical tolerance of student ignorance, rationalised as a regard for "personal expression" and "self esteem". Rather than "stress" the kids by asking them to read too much or think too closely, which might cause their fragile personalities to implode on contact with college-level demands, schools reduced their reading assignments, thus automatically reducing their command of language. Untrained in logical analysis, ill-equipped to develop and construct formal arguments about issues, unused to mining texts for deposits of factual material, the students fell back to the only position they could truly call their own: what they felt about things. When feelings and attitudes are the main referents of argument, to attack any position is automatically to insult its holder, or even to assail his or her perceived "rights"; every argumentum becomes ad hominem, approaching the condition of harassment, if not quite rape. "I feel very threatened by your rejection of my views on [check one] pallocentricity / the Mother Goddess / the Treaty of Vienna / Young's Modulus of Elasticity." Cycle this subjectivisation of discourse through two or three generations of students turning into teachers, with the sixties' dioxins accumulating more each time, and you have the entropic background to our culture of complaint. [Culture Of Complaint, 1993]
• We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism. Does the cripple rise from his wheelchair, or feel better about being stuck in it, because someone back in the days of the Carter administration decided that, for official purposes, he was "physically challenged"? Does the homosexual suppose others love him more or hate him less because he is called a "gay" – that term revived from eighteenth-century English criminal slang, which implied prostitution and living on one's wits? The net gain is that thugs who used to go faggot-bashing now go gay-bashing. … We do not fail, we underachieve. We are not junkies, but substance abusers; not handicapped, but differently abled. And we are mealy-mouthed unto death: a corpse, the New England Journal Of Medicine urged in 1988, should be referred to as a "nonliving person". By extension, a fat corpse is a differently sized nonliving person. … Seventy years ago, in polite white usage, blacks were called "coloured people". Then they became "negroes." Then, "blacks". Now, "African-Americans" or "persons of colour" again. … Just as managerial lingo gave us "equity retreat" for the 1987 stock market crash and "corporate rightsizing" for firing large numbers of workers, so the Gulf War taught us that bombing a place flat was "servicing a target" or "visiting a site", that bombing it again to make quite sure that not even a snake or a thornbush survived was "revisiting a site". [Culture Of Complaint, 1993]

Rupert Hughes

• According to the Bible, God was ignorant, a ruthless liar and cheat; he broke his pledges, changed his mind so often that he grew weary of repenting. He was a murderer of children, ordered his people to slay, rape, steal, and lie and commit every foul and filthy abomination in human power. In fact, the more I read the Bible the less I find in it that is either credible or admirable. [Why I Quit Going To Church, 1924]

Victor Hugo

• There is in every village a torch: the schoolmaster – and an extinguisher: the parson.

Samuel P. Huntington

• Many more people in the world are concerned about sports than human rights.

David Hume

• A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]
• 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. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]
• No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]
• If there is a designer he must take credit for the flaws in his creation. Flaws in the creation directly reflect flaws in the creator. If there is a flaw in the creator then he cannot be all powerful.
• When any one tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]
• There is not to be found, in all history any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned goodness, education, and learning as to secure us against all delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood; and at the same time attesting facts, performed in such a public manner, and in so celebrated a part of the world, as to render the detection unavoidable. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]

Aldous Huxley

• Maybe this world is just another planet's hell.
• Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. [Proper Studies]
• Ye shall know the Truth, And the Truth shall make you angry!
• That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
• If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make believe. [Time Must Have A Stop]
• Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
• The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
• You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. … Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. [Amor Fati, Texts And Pretexts]

Julian Huxley

• Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct.
• Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.

Thomas Huxley

• Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
• Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
• Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
• The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.
• The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best – that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. [Evolution And Ethics]
• The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of those of Greece and Rome-not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world, were alike despicable. [Agnosticism and Christianity]

Hypatia

• To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.

Nicholas Hytner, Director, National Theatre

• My basic proposition is that nobody has the right not to be offended. [No Limits: The Business Of Theatre, Free Expression Is No Offence, 2005]
• I claim the right to be as offensive as I choose about what other people think, and to tell any story that I choose. No one has the right not to be offended. [Critics' Circle Theatre Awards, 01 February 2005]

Robert Green Ingersoll

• A crime against god is a demonstrated impossibility.
• We are not accountable for the sins of "Adam". [Myth And Miracle]
• The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray. [The Devil]
• Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense. [Second Interview On Rev. Talmadge]
• Salvation through slavery is worthless. Salvation from slavery is inestimable. [The Gods]
• The inspiration of the Bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it. [The Ingersoll-Black Debate, 25 April 1881]
• God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of the human race. [Why I Am An Agnostic]
• We are satisfied that there can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven. [The Gods, 1872]
• As long as every question is answered by the word "God," scientific inquiry is simply impossible. [The Gods, 1872]
• The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men. [The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child]
• My objection to Christianity is that it is infinitely cruel, infinitely selfish, and, I might add, infinitely absurd.
• The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth. [The Gods]
• Ministers say that they teach charity. This is natural. They live on alms. All beggars teach that others should give. [The Truth, 1897]
• This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves. [An Interview On Chief Justice Comegys]
• Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilise mankind? [Some Mistakes Of Moses]
• Nothing is so pleasing to these gods as the butchery of unbelievers. Nothing so enrages them, even now, as to have someone deny their existence. [The Gods]
• If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would strictly follow the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
• Every fact is an enemy of the church. Every fact is a heretic. Every demonstration is an infidel. Everything that ever really happened testifies against the supernatural. [Orthodoxy, 1884]
• As long as man believes the Bible to be infallible, that book is his master. The civilisation of this century is not the child of faith, but of unbelief – the result of free thought. [The Gods]
• Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. [The Ghosts]
• Give me the storm and stress of thought and action rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will but first let me eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
• Is there an intelligent man or woman now in the world who believes in the Garden of Eden story? If you find any man who believes it, strike his forehead and you will hear an echo. Something is for rent. [Orthodoxy, 1884]
• Christianity has such a contemptible opinion of human nature that it does not believe a man can tell the truth unless frightened by a belief in God. No lower opinion of the human race has ever been expressed.
• There are some truths, however, that we should never forget: Superstition has always been the relentless enemy of science; faith has been a hater of demonstration; hypocrisy has been sincere only in its dread of truth, and all religions are inconsistent with mental freedom. [(Humboldt, 1869]
• The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called "faith."
• The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever. [Crumbling Creeds]
• The real oppressor, enslaver, and corrupter of the people is the Bible. That book is the chain that binds, the dungeon that holds the clergy. That book spreads the pall of superstition over the colleges and schools. That book puts out the eyes of science, and makes honest investigation a crime. That book fills the world with bigotry, hypocrisy and fear. [Some Mistakes Of Moses]
• When I became convinced that the Universe is natural – that all the ghosts and gods are myth, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bards, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave.
• Tell me there is a God in the serene heavens that will damn his children for the expression of an honest belief! More men have died in their sins, judged by your orthodox creeds, than there are leaves on all the forests in the wide world ten thousand times over. Tell me these men are in hell; that these men are in torment; that these children are in eternal pain, and that they are to be punished forever and forever! I denounce this doctrine as the most infamous of lies. [The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child, 1877]
• Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of "inspiration." It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge – that is to say, of science. When man becomes great and grand enough to admit that all have equal rights; when thought is untrammelled; when worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilised. [Reply To The Indianapolis Clergy, The Iconoclast, 1882]
• For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honour, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said, "Think!" The many have said, "Believe!" [The Gods, 1872]
• We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want a this year's fact. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years. [The Gods, 1872]
• The religion of Jesus Christ, as preached by his church, causes war, bloodshed, hatred, and all uncharitableness; and why? Because, they say, a certain belief is necessary to salvation. They do not say, if you behave yourself you will get there; they do not say, if you pay your debts and love your wife and love your children, and are good to your friends, and your neighbours, and your country, you will get there; that will do you no good; you have got to believe a certain thing. No matter how bad you are, you can instantly be forgiven; and no matter how good you are, if you fail to believe that which you cannot understand, the moment you get to the day of judgment nothing is left but to damn you, and all the angels will shout "hallelujah." [Orthodoxy, 1884]

Greg Irwin

• I tell Christians, If you had two children and one had to be bribed (heaven) and threatened (hell) to do what he was supposed to do, and the other one just did it because that's what he knew was the right thing to do, which would you consider the better person?

Eddie Izzard

• In the beginning? Well… in the beginning was the word and the word was fish… Every religion looks bonkers compared with another religion. What do you believe? Well, we believe that all soup is special and that every third Sunday after the fourth Sunday after the 12th, we get together and sing 'Hallo, halla' and we bang on the ground, put soup in a bowl and all these endless things. Then we throw sandwiches at the walls and pray for more sandwiches. [The Times, 23 August 2009]

William James

• Philosophy is like a blind man searching in a dark room for a black cat that isn't there. The difference between philosophy and theology is that theology finds the cat.

Thomas Jefferson

• I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
• A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. [letter to James Madison]
• History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. [letter to Alexander von Humboldt, 06 December 1813]
• If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. [letter to Charles Yancey, 1816]
• Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
• We may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. [letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, 10 February 1814]
• 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. [letter to Peter Carr, 10 August 1787]
• 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. [letter to Horatio Spafford, 17 March 1814]
• The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. [letter to John Adams]
• To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. [letter to John Adams, 15 August 1820]
• The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury to my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. [Notes On The State Of Virginia, 1782]
• 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. [letter to Baron von Humboldt, 1813]
• The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. [his last letter, 1826]
• In every country and 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. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them. [letter to Horatio Spofford, 17 March 1814]
• The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere. [letter to Abigail Adams, 1787]
• I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies. The Christian God is a being of terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust. [letter to Dr. Woods]
• [I do not believe in] the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of the Hierarchy, etc. [letter to William Short, 31 October 1819 ]
• On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. [letter to Archibald Carey, 1816]
• 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. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. [Notes On The State Of Virginia, 1782]
• 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, evil and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed, beast-like god, one only needs to look at the calibre of the people who say they serve him. The are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites. [letter to Peter Carr]
• They [priests] have tried upon me all their various batteries of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering. I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance on whom their interested duperies were to be played off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develop itself. [letter to Horatio Spofford, 1816]
• Because religious belief or non-belief is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society. [letter to Virginia Baptists, 1808]

Stephen Jeffrey

• If as most religions seem to suggest, the conditions here on earth and our short lives have been set up by some god or other as a cruel and risky training camp for our souls, then I reject my ultimate salvation if it means the suffering of one single child or one grieving parent. Let us all stay unholy if it means no more suffering. [commenting on the Indonesian tsunami, BBC News Magazine, 03 January 2005]

Penn Jillette

• When people over 7 years old have imaginary friends, there's going to be trouble. It doesn't matter who their imaginary friend is, if they go to prison or they follow the Abrahamic religions, they're going to be killing somebody. It's just a really dangerous thing to have people believe in things that they can't prove. … People that say, "I am doing this on faith," whether that faith is, no matter what that faith is, when it's not based on love of people and humanity, there's gonna be trouble. [Politically Incorrect, 06 June 2002]
• No one has an idea really of where we should draw the line. What about the Bible? Every nut who kills people has a Bible lying around. If you're looking for violent rape imagery, the Bible's right there in your hotel room. If you just want to look up ways to screw people up, there it is, and you're justified because God told you to. You have Shakespeare and you have Sophocles – what are we going to do, lose Oedipus Rex if someone pokes an eye out? [Reason magazine, on censorship of television violence]

Cyril Joad

• There are those who feel an imperative need to believe, for whom the values of a belief are proportionate not to its truth, but to its definiteness. Incapable of either admitting the existence of contrary judgments or of suspending their own, they supply the place of knowledge by turning other men's conjectures into dogmas. [The Recovery Of Belief, 1952]

Jeffrey John, Dean, St Albans

• The ability of the church to ignore the deeper implications of its own scriptures is horribly plain throughout history. Remember it took 18 centuries for Christians to realise that slavery is against the Gospel. Remember that those who supported slavery claimed to do so on biblical grounds. [26 April 2004]
• By definition, a church which lives in the spirit of Jesus will be genuinely, not just theoretically or conditionally, open and welcoming to everyone. Building and defending that kind of church is the most truly biblical thing any Christian can do. We need to say so now, loud and clear. [26 April 2004]
• Remember too that Jesus was condemned to death for his own inclusive attitudes by fundamentalist zealots who believed that they were obeying scripture. In all these cases those who opposed change could quote the Bible in their defence. With hindsight the church sees that they were wrong; they were killing the spirit with the letter. [26 April 2004]
• What sort of God was this, getting so angry with the world and the people he created and then, to calm himself down, demanding the blood of his own son. And anyway, why should God forgive us through punishing somebody else? It was worse than illogical, it was insane. It made God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this, we would say they were a monster.
• In the same way the church will one day look back on the issues that divide us today and find it incredible that it once thought it right and 'scriptural' to treat women and other minorities as it does now. The struggle to make the church inclusive is not based on some secular, woolly 'liberal agenda' (the charge endlessly parroted against us) but on a scriptural imperative to do what Jesus did. It is the same struggle to oppose prejudice, bigotry and oppression and open the kingdom to everyone, especially the most marginalised. Inclusivity is not a soft option. It is harder to live in a truly diverse and welcoming community than it is to live in a community of the respectably like-minded, just as it is harder to be an intelligent student of scripture than it is to be a fundamentalist. … All of us must be challenged and changed in every department of our life, by the Gospel and by one another, whether we are male or female, black or white, gay or straight, rich or poor. [26 April 2004]

Ellen Johnson

• We are intellectually free because we doubt, we question, and we have the courage to disagree. We are free of the strictures of blind faith. We realize that it is reason, not uncritical adherence to unquestioned dogmas that is the basis of human freedom and progress. [02 November 2002]

Samuel Johnson

• Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
• All argument is against it [the afterlife]; but all belief is for it.

Sonia Johnson

• One of my favourite fantasies is that next Sunday not one woman, in any country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they cease to be.

Angelina Jolie

• You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens.
• I could really imagine Lara not having a lot of time for men. Can you imagine that, Lara Croft as a lesbian? That would be a shock for the boys playing with their joysticks in their bedrooms around the world. At the end of the day I really like women. I'd love it if the girls in the cinema watching Lara Croft find me just as hot as their boyfriends do. [Amica, June 2001]

James Joyce

• There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

Heshu Jones

• Bye dad, sorry I was so much trouble. Me and you will probably never understand each other but I'm sorry I wasn't what you wanted but there's some thing you can't change. Hey, for an older man you have a good strong punch and kick. I hope you enjoyed testing your strengths on me, it was fun being on the receiving end. WELL DONE. I will be OK, don't look for me because I don't know where I'm going yet, I just want to be alone. [letter to her father, Abdulla, who later murdered her for being 'too Western' even though he and his family had left Iraq and sought refuge in the UK, 2003]

S. T. Joshi

• The atheist, agnostic, or secularist … should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, immorality, impoliteness, or any of the other smokescreens used by the pious to deflect attention from the central issues at hand. [Atheism: A Reader, 2000]
• The atheist, agnostic, or secularist … should not be cowed by exaggerated sensitivity to people's religious beliefs and fail to speak vigorously and pointedly when the devout put forth arguments manifestly contrary to all the acquired knowledge of the past two or three millennia. Those who advocate a piece of folly like the theory of an "intelligent creator" should be held accountable for their folly; they have no right to be offended for being called fools until they establish that they are not in fact fools. Religiously inclined writers like Stephen L. Carter may plead that "respect" should be accorded to religious views in public discourse, but he neglects to demonstrate that those views are worthy of respect. All secularists – scientists, literary figures, even politicians (if there are any such with the requisite courage) – should speak out on the issue when the opportunity presents itself. [Atheism: A Reader, 2000]

Juvenal

• Who watches the watchmen? [Satires, VI : 347]

Mohsen Kadivar

• Velayat has no credible foundation in Islamic jurisprudence and its rejection does not in any way undermine any Islamic teachings, requirements or obligations. The choice between velayat and democracy is devoid of any religious connotation and should be made solely on the basis of reason: which system will be of greatest benefit to society? … The fact it [democracy] was first practised in the West does not preclude its adoption in other cultures: reason extends beyond geographical boundaries. [Index On Censorship, 4/2004]

Azam Kamguian

• When I came to the West in the early 1990s, I was faced with the fact that the majority of intellectuals, mainstream media, academics, and feminists, in the name of respecting 'other cultures,' were trying to justify Islam by dividing it into fundamentalist and moderate, progressive and reactionary, Medina's and Mecca's, Muhammad's and Kholafa's, folksy and nonfolksy. For people like me, the victims of Islam in power, it was suffocating to listen to and to have to refute endless tales to justify the terror and bloodshed committed by Islamic movements and Islamic governments in Iran and in the region. [Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, 2003]
• According to cultural relativism, human rights are a Western concept and not applicable to people living in non-Western parts of the world. Cultural relativism is a racist idea because its essence is difference. The idea of difference always serves racism. According to cultural relativism we must respect people's culture and religion, however despicable. This is absurd and amounts to a call in many cases for the respect of brutality. Human beings are worthy of respect, but not all beliefs must be respected. If a culture allows women to be mutilated and killed to save the family's 'honour', it cannot be excused. [Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, 2003]

Wendy Kaminer

• People who believe that god exists and heeds their prayers have probably waived the right to mock people who talk to trees or claim to channel the spirits of Native Americans.
• If I were to mock religious belief as childish, if I were to suggest that worshipping a supernatural deity, convinced that it cares about your welfare, is like worrying about monsters in the closet who find you tasty enough to eat, if I were to describe God as our creation, likening him to a mechanical gorilla, I'd violate the norms of civility and religious correctness. I'd be excoriated as an example of the cynical, liberal elite responsible for America's moral decline. I'd be pitied for my spiritual blindness; some people would try to enlighten and convert me. I'd receive hate mail. Atheists generate about as much sympathy as paedophiles. But, while paedophilia may at least be characterised as a disease, atheism is a choice, a wilful rejection of beliefs to which vast majorities of people cling. [The Last Taboo, 1996]

Oliver Kamm

• To see how mired in confusion – to put it no higher – is the political culture of even this most tolerant of European states [Holland], you need only consider that the court 'considers appropriate criminal prosecution for insulting Muslim worshippers because of comparisons between Islam and Nazism made by Wilders'. So criminal law is being invoked against insults to a system of belief. I have no reason to doubt the offence caused to Muslims by Wilders's campaigns. Mockery and denunciation of what others hold literally sacred will inevitably cause anguish and outrage. And faced with mental suffering on the part of some of its citizens, a free society must do nothing at all. No one is entitled to restitution for hurt feelings: not now; not ever. The most – and not the least – that religious believers might be entitled to is human sympathy. They won't get it from me; they might get it from you; but they must not get it as a matter of public policy, because a state has no business concerning itself with how its citizens feel. Insisting on the right to offend religious believers may seem an unfeeling and uncaring doctrine. (The non sequitur that many Muslims in western societies are poor is often brought into the discussion at this point.) But the case for liberty has never been that it protects sensibilities. It is rather that by allowing people's beliefs to be scrutinised, criticised and – yes – insulted, bad ideas are more likely to be superseded by better ones. Allowing ideas to die in place of their adherents is a mark of a civilised society. It is not hyperbole to say that in the defence of the unlikely figure of Geert Wilders lies also the defence of western civilisation. [Index On Censorship], 22 January 2009

Immanuel Kant

• The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
• The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend – and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective. [lecture at Konigsberg, 1775]

Esther Kaplan

• Unlike modern-day social reformers, who want Nike to let inspectors into their factories or the World Bank to forgive some debt, anarchists explicitly oppose capitalism itself. They don't attack the International Monetary Fund or the WEF just because their policies exploit the poor, but because their power is illegitimate. They envision an egalitarian society without nation states, where wealth and power have been redistributed, and they take great pains to model their institutions in this vein, with autonomous, interconnected structures and consensus-based decision making. UC Santa Cruz professor Barbara Epstein, an expert on direct action, senses that anarchism has now become "the pole that everyone revolves around," much as Marxism was in the '60s. In other words, even young activists who don't identify as anarchists have to position themselves in relation to its values. [The Village Voice, 29 January 2002]

Abul Kasem

• So here is how Islam is oppressed by the unbelievers:
  • The infidels do not submit to Allah despite repeated warnings to them. This is the highest form rebellion by the Kafirs and undoubtedly, is an extreme form of oppression to Islam.
  • The infidel women go to swim in the beaches wearing bikini. Allah is greatly offended by such outrageous conduct of Islamically impure infidel women.
  • The Kafir nations vehemently condemn Islamic stoning in Islamic Paradises. Islamic penal code is written by Allah, how could the infidels condemn such a divine, merciful penal system? Allah is surely angry with the infidels.
  • The Kafirs' law court incarcerates Islamic rapists, but, who, according to Islam, has the inalienable right to have unlimited sex with infidel women, no question asked. As per Islam, these infidel women (Islamically, all western women, who do not dress/conduct themselves as per Islamic/Bedouin custom are harlots, sluts and prostitutes and all infidels are incestuous, believe it or not) are Islamic captives.
  • To protect its innocent citizens from the genocide of the Islamist terrorists, the Kafirs pass anti-terror laws, but the Islamists believe it is their basic Islamic right to terrorize the infidels. The anti-terror law is oppression to Islam, as this law violates the Qur'anic injunction of casting terror in the hearts of the unbelievers.
  • An infidel woman gives birth out-of-wedlock and she is treated fairly by the social security system of the harami (repugnant) Kafir. This oppresses Islam, as this woman must be stoned to death, as per pure, unadulterated Islam. The infidels are not respecting the sanctity of Islam.
  • An infidel woman goes out of her house without hijab. This is oppression to Islam, as this violates the Qur'nic injunction that women must stay at home at all time and serve their husbands. In case she has to be out, she must seek her husband's permission and must be 'covered', from head to toe.'
  • Violating the Qur'an and Hadis, Kafir men and women patronize pubs and drink wine and liqueur. Islamic punishment of forty lashes is not meted out for such naked un-Islamic indulgence. To further anger the Muslims, during Ramadan, the Kafirs heartily eat and jubilantly drink publicly, in open view of the Muslims. This, of course is an unpardonable Islamic offence, as the infidels show no sensitivity/respect for the best religion on earth.
  • An unmarried Kafir woman engages in de-facto relationship with a man. This offends the migrant Muslims, but despite much harangue from the Islamist moralists, the Kafirs refuse to change their law of personal freedom. This (the unbridled mixing of opposite sexes), is certainly a gross oppression to Islamic faith.
  • The infidel's local council prohibits the use of loud speakers to broadcast the melodious tune of Azan (the Islamic prayer call). This is the violation of Islamic right of noise pollution, and, therefore is a gross tyranny upon Islam.
  • Harami Kafirs enact law banning hijab in public schools. This angers the Islamists, as it amounts to flagrantly violating the Qur'an, and hence is oppressive to Islam.
  • The Kafirs refuse to pay jizyah (special privileges to the Arab Bedouins/Muslims). In modern times, this jizya is in the form of special privileges to the Muslims (for example, Bumiputra/Malay/Muslim policy in Malaysia, reservation of places for the Muslims in Kafirs' Universities, special concession on employment policies, affirmative policies exclusively designed for the incompetent Muslims…and so on). Non-payment of jizya tax is a gross violation of the holy Qur'an and is oppression to Islam.
  • When, for security reasons and to apprehend the suspected terrorists of peaceful Islam, America, the Great Satan, requires all visitors to the United States to be photographed, fingerprinted and biometrically registered, it offends real Islam.
  • When the infidels and in-name-only Muslims patronize a theatre to enjoy a stage drama, Islam is gravely hurt, as this vilely violates the basic tenets of the Qur'an—no idol worshipping. Ditto for patronizing cinema houses. Acting in a drama/and or watching this performance is abhorrently un-Islamic. In Bangladesh, bombs are thrown in such premises, as visiting stage drama and enjoying a movie is oppressive to Islam.
  • When you quote those murderous verses from the Holy Qur'an it oppresses Islam. Embarrassing Allah /Islamists is a great offence.
  • When you quote those anti-feminist and misogynist hadis from Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim and Sunaan Abu Dawud, Allah gets slighted.
  • When you expose that Islam allows unlimited sex with maid-servants (sex-slaves) and infidel women. These provisions are Qur'anic, so they are above any discussion.
  • When the police embarks on a clean-up operation in an Islamic enclave in a Kafirland. This action violates the incontrovertible rights of the Islamist terrorists to frighten the infidels—an absolute Islamic right enshrined by Allah in the Qur'an.
  • When the Kafir government disallows Sharia law to be enforced for the Muslims living in a Kafirland. Allah's law supercedes all man-made laws, how could the abhorrent infidels annoy Allah?
  • When, through earthquake and Tsunami, Allah tests His believers in Islamic Paradises and the Kafir's aid is delayed due to the poor/non-existence of logistical supports in those Islamic Paradises. Infidels must attend immediately to the Muslims' plight—this is also a form of jizya on the unbelievers.
  • When you disclose that the prophet of Islam, Muhammad (pbuh), had between nine to twenty official wives and at least one sex-slave. Allah is angry when you discuss Muhammad's intimate private life—a violation of Islamic privacy.
  • When the harami freethinkers disclose that the 52-year-old Prophet (pbuh) of mercy married a six-year-old girl and had sex with her when she turned nine. See above for the reason.
  • When the 'Islam bashers' reveal that Hazrat Omar (Allah's mercy be upon him) married a four-year-old baby-girl when he was around 54-55 years old. See above for reason.
  • When the devilish Islamphobes divulge that Hazrat Ali (Allah's mercy be upon him) used to have sex with captive women, routinely, even when he was married to Fatima, Muhammad's dearest daughter. Those who embarrass the Khulafa Rashedin (the rightly guided caliphs) embarrass Allah. Allah will not forgive them.
  • When the infidels learn from the writing of the Muslim apostates that Muslims must not be friendly with the Jews and the Christians and the unbelievers. When the Qur'an has decreed certain matters, it is a great offence to discuss about them.
  • The Kafirs in Kafirland, instead of adopting the Islamic values of the myopic Muslim community in their midst, urge the Islamists to respect multiculturalism. This is an affront to Islam. According to Islam, these Kafirs (read animals) must adopt pristine Islamic values, and not the other way round.
  • The Kafirs do not learn Arabic, the language of Allah/Islam, but instead, urge the Islamist immigrants to learn the language of their adopted country and try to integrate. Allah is offended when the Kafirs do not learn the language (Arabic) of His Scripture.
  • The western/infidel civilization refuses to adopt Bedouin/Arab culture. Instead, sticks to their own decadent, petrified, immoral, corrupt, lascivious way of life. Islam is oppressed when the Muslims, the best creation of Allah have to witness, with their open eyes, such blatant depravity and transgression. After all, Islam came to purify the world, but the infidels steadfastly refuse to comply. This is oppression to Islam.
  • Peaceful Islam is not allowed to preach hateful sermons by the clerics living in infidel territories. This is a gross of violation Islamic human rights, of freedom to preach hatred for the infidels, since this right has been fully enshrined in the Qur'an, the constitution of Allah.
  • Kafirs deport/cancel visa of firebrand clerics who exhort, in Friday congregations, jihad and murder of the infidels. Read above why Islam is oppressed for such an action of the Kafir.
  • Billboards near Allah's house (mosques) in Kafirlands brazenly display women's underwear, bras and lingerie in provocative manner, arousing the sexual passion in the devotees of Allah. This is oppressive to Islam, as Allah does not like to have a look at women's undergarments and their half-clad body. Allah only looks at hijabi/Burka-clad Muslimahs.
  • Islamists living in Haram land pass by a fitness centre and observe infidel women (and men) performing physical exercise wearing sportswear. Offended, the Islamists complain to the local council and advise the authority that during physical fitness chore the women must wear Burka and jilbab, their shiny and sexy thighs and polished legs must be covered inside baggy Islamic trousers, otherwise, the doors and windows of the gym must be covered with black 'hijab.' The local council turns down the Muslim request. This is oppressive to Islam.
  • The Islamists in Kfirlands go to the local swimming pool and observe men and women practicing swimming together. This is grossly un-Islamic and is oppressive to the Muslims. They ask the local council to open separate swimming pools exclusively for Muslim women and having no access to male visitors. The council turns down their request, which offends the Islamists.
  • In Olympic events, women are allowed to compete, in the presence of mixed spectators, in gymnastics, track and field, swimming, beach volleyball, high jump (despicable, because of the possibility of viewing the women's pudenda), long jump, pole vault…etc., Allah is offended with such display of female flesh in such provocative/erotic manner. The Islamists write lengthy articles and lobby their politicians to ban women from participating in such events. In Islamic Paradises they successfully force the government to ban the telecasting of such 'pornographic' events of the International Olympic.
  • The infidels enact laws to prevent polygamy; Muslims could no longer acquire four wives at any time. This surely is a gross violation of Islamic rights of Muslim men to acquire four wives at any time, guaranteed by the Qur'an.
  • Imams extolling the goodness in beating wives to discipline them are deported from infidel lands. This is a great torment to Islam, as it openly violates the Qur'anic verse which calls to beat women to control them.
  • During Christmas gala, party, the Kafir invites his Muslim neighbor and unwittingly serves haram food and wine. The display of haram food and alcoholic drinks to the Muslims is, of course, very offensive. The infidels must not eat and drink haram stuff in the presence of Muslims—it is very odious, Allah becomes angry.
  [26 June 2008]

Walter Kaufmann

• Few Christians would be in doubt what to think of a father tortured his children for forty-eight hours because they did not agree with him or did not obey him; and if he had a great many children and had given only a few of them a single chance while offering the vast majority no opportunity at all to know his will, most people would consider this the epitome of an inhuman lack of love and justice. The God of traditional Christianity, however, outdoes even this analogy by relegating the mass of mankind to eternal torment. [Critique Of Religion And Philosophy]

Donald Kaul

• We are looking at an era of religious intolerance that we have not seen since the Salem witch trials. And people like me – the majority, as it turns out – are the witches. … I do not feel threatened by gay marriage and I don't see how it threatens the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. You would think that the divorce rate would be a pretty good indicator of the sanctity of marriage, wouldn't you? Well, the lowest divorce rate in the country is that of Massachusetts, home of legalized, gay marriage. Such bastions of religiosity as Kentucky, Arkansas and Mississippi have a divorce rate twice as high. The region of the country with the lowest divorce rate? The Northeast – the blue states. In other words, the people who talk most about sanctity of marriage are the ones who do the least about it. Evangelical Christians are fond of espousing an apocalyptic view of history. On that great gettin' up mornin' the Lord will sweep all Born Again Christians to his bosom and condemn the rest of us – atheists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, all – to eternal damnation. … But you know, the more I think of it, the less I object to the "Left Behind" scenario. Do I really want to spend eternity with people who walk around with a Bible in one hand and a lynch-rope in the other? [Tri-state media, Warricknews Editorial, 08 December 2004]

John Keane

• Market competition produces market censorship. Private ownership of the media produces private caprice. Those who control the market sphere of producing and distributing information determine, prior to publication, what products (such as books, magazines, newspapers, television programmes, computer software) will be mass produced and, thus, which opinions gain entry into the 'marketplace of opinions'.[The Media And Democracy]

Garrison Keillor

• My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in hopes of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

Helen Keller

• Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. [letter to a suffragette in England, 1911]
• You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 people and only one-eleventh of the land belongs to the other 40,000,000 people? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from injustice? [letter to a suffragette in England, 1911]

Al Kennedy

• Why this sudden rush of representative enthusiasm? Because of everyone's constant companion: The Terror. Those on the right who aren't simply voting for Bush because of a psychological loop which runs "Bush he Christian he God-fearing more wrong he seem do more faith we must have Bush he Christian …" have been filled with righteous horror that Democrat rule would lead mothers to earn their own money, gay people to imagine they have souls, coloured folks to get uppity and the poor to drag themselves out of the storm drains and even as far as, say, the sidewalks. Of course, the right has also managed, with very little Democrat help, to scare the bejeesus out of everybody else with their satanic reinterpretations of scripture and their gleeful interest in imminent Armageddon with wholesale privatisations along the way. Faced with living under an almost tangible Pall of Doom, or submitting to a ballot-spoiling joke which transformed Kerry wins in Ohio and New Mexico into more madness with King George, voters took the only option open to them outside of civil war – they voted anyway and hoped. And having been scammed out of a presidency last time, the Democrats bent over and took it again. But that's enough dwelling on the past. Given that where the pointyhead werewolves lead, Mr Blair will always follow, we proud British voters can look forward to an electoral process transformed into an adrenaline-drenched rollercoaster ride of fun. More ricin alerts, more random arrests of Muslims and people standing next to Muslims, more tanks at Heathrow, Liverpool sealed in plastic for undisclosed reasons, total surveillance of book purchases, email traffic, phone lines, video rentals and underwear preferences. There shouldn't be a shop or building we can enter that isn't full of mounted policemen or uniformed teenagers with guns. We should also be able to witness more UK troop fatalities, more maimings, more fountains of Iraqi blood and more global instability and moronic cruelty. And the fears this naturally engenders will be balanced by the kind of harmless family entertainment we all enjoyed in It's A Knockout and The Generation Game when the new voting regulations are unveiled. How terrific it will be when Bradford voters have to recite Leviticus backwards before they can cross their box. (Of course, if they can recite it backwards they can also be burned as witches.) Those suspected of harbouring anti-Blairite tendencies may be asked to walk across hot coals on the way to polling booths in Preston. And if this seems a little disturbing, remember – how could we dare export democracy across the globe, if we didn't defend it at home with every lie, threat and dirty trick available? [The Guardian, 10 November 2004]

John F. Kennedy

• Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. [1962]

Ludovic Kennedy

• In the spring and with the coming of Easter, an old man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of gods. I am now 83 pushing 84 and the closer I come to shuffling off this mortal coil, the more mystified I am by Christian belief in the deity they call by the not very original name of God (as if there had never been others). Not all Christians of course, for the exodus from their churches these past few decades has only been paralleled by the numbers of the children of Israel as they traipsed across the wilderness in search of the promised land. … Do the brothers and sisters really believe they are being listened to, and have they ever paused to consider how silly to outsiders they sound and look? (Though no sillier than Jews nodding at the Wailing Wall or Muslims prostrating themselves in the direction of Mecca – an attitude described by Rowan Atkinson as the hunt for Khomeini's contact lenses.). It is a mistake to consider gods as unconnected, existing in a vacuum. The ones we are saddled with are heirs to a long line of former idols like Bunjil and Pulga, Baal and Mithras, Ra and Osiris, Thor and Odin, and before them literally thousands of others, gods of the sea and sky, of rivers and mountains, stones and bushes, all of which originated when primitive man sought comfort and reassurance in the things that scared him: thunder and lightning, droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, fearsome beasts and poisonous fruits and berries. All gods from time immemorial are fantasies, created by humans for the welfare of humans and to attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable. But do we, in the third year of the 21st century of the Common Era and on the springboard of colonising the universe, need such palliatives? There have been periods in history when men and women found spiritual fulfilment, as I and increasing numbers do today, in nature, art; long periods too when they lived without religious beliefs. The Ancients, wrote the philosopher John Locke in 1689, had no beliefs in a personal god, and about the same time French missionaries seeking converts were finding godless societies living contentedly all over the world. [The Guardian, 17 April 2003]

Johannes Kepler

• When miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.
• The universe is stamped with the adornment of harmonic proportions, but harmonies must accommodate experience. [upon calculating that the planets orbited in ellipses rather than the perfect circles he had believed]

'Kimpatsu'

• Why should the Bible need interpreting? Is god such a rubbish author he can't make his opinions clear? [Face To Faith, The Guardian, 05 September 2009]
• Not a bad article, but would you please stop calling Muhammed a prophet? He was no more a prophet than my pet cat. [The Right To Offend, The Guardian, 30 September 2008]
• What protections do the religious need in the workplace? Surely not the right to skive off while they go and pray, leaving everyone else to take up the slack?! [Will We Establish A Green Religion?, The Guardian, 08 September 2009]
• Surely the essential point of the Koran, like with the Bible, is whether or not it really is the word of god? And on that point, all holy books are just so much crap. [Sebastian Faulks And The Quran, The Guardian, 26 August 2009]
• Lobbyists don't represent the public, they represent special interest groups to the detriment of the public. They shouldn't be allowed within 100 miles of the Beltway. [In Defence Of Lobbyists, The Guardian, 28 January 2009]
• So, you're admitting that religion has nothing to do with the truth, but is a useful fiction for controlling the masses? At least you're starting to be honest, at last! [If God Does Not Exist, We Must Urgently Invent One, The Guardian, 27 March 2009]
• The Qur'an itself says he is entitled to his opinion. The Qur'an also says he should be killed for that opinion. Sounds like the rantings of a schizophrenic to me. [Reading The Qur'an In The Dark, The Guardian, 28 August 2009]
• Why do you think "The West" (sic) is particularly hostile to Islam? What about to fascism, slavery, and other unacceptable practices? Oh, and what's the penalty for apostacy? [Western Hostility To Islam Is Stoked By Double Standards And Distortion, The Guardian, 21 July 2009]
• @Islamophobiasucks: "Belief in superstitions is Haraam and yet they are still widely believed in the Muslim world." This sentence makes no sense. Superstition is forbidden by a superstition? What a tautology! [Attack Of The Killer Texts, The Guardian, 28 March 2009]
• Respect cannot be mandated; it must be earned. If religious people don't want their beliefs made fun of, they shouldn't have funny beliefs. Blasphemy is a non-crime, and the notion is an offence against the human right of free speech. [An Offensive Law, The Guardian, 10 January 2008]
• The secular state is the best option for everyone, because it guarantees equality in the shared space of society without privileging one superstition over another. Now go and explain that to all those Muslims who want to live under sharia. [Representing Ourselves Better, The Guardian, 02 May 2008]
• There is zero evidence for the existence of any gods, but mounds of evidence that evolution is a purely natural phenomenon. Superstition has no place in the classroom. And what the hell is random about natural selection, anyway? Can you answer that one, Axandar? [Our Scientists Must Nail The Creationists, The Guardian, 14 September 2008]
• "I don't care if people want to retain a sense of being religious, as long as what they believe stands up to intellectual scrutiny." But nothing religious ever stands up to intellectual scrutiny. That's because religious claims are untrue. And the truth should count, don't you think? [Loud But Not Clear, The Guardian, 13 April 2009]
• This must be banned by law. We must turn back the tide, and return Britain from being a police state to being a democracy. And the police officers who suggested and who back this idea should be fired, as they are clearly authoritarians with no grasp of what their job really entails. Welcome to Big Brother. [CCTV In The Sky: Police Plan To Use Military-style Spy Drones, The Guardian], 23 January 2010
• Look, Henry, the real reason the police delete and destroy photos taken by law-abiding citizens, and the same reason they delight in harassing amateur photographers, is because they can. It's all about showing us who's boss. And until this thuggish psychology is tackled, the harassment and intimidation will continue. [The War On Street Photography, The Guardian, 17 July 2009]
• Ethos is NOT the issue behind faith schools; indoctrination is. Do you really want Vardy schools run by Xian fundies teaching that the Earth is only 6,000 years old?! Stop selection by stealth, separate religion from the state, and enable admissions through fairness. Oh, and keep your superstitions to yourself. Nothing else is fair or just. [Faith Schools Can Best Generate The Common Purpose That Pupils Need, The Guardian, 08 September 2008]
• ID IS religious belief. There is no avoiding that reality. To deny the fact is disingenuous. Further, what are the testable predictions of ID? Name them, please. We're waiting… This article reveals no more than a complete lack of understanding of what science is, and of what evolution is. And you were a science teacher?! Where? Toytown? [Intelligent Design Should Not Excluded From The Study Of Origins, The Guardian, 01 December 2009]
• No, Thomas, that would be evidence (not "proof", which is for maths and whisky) that universes can exist – which we already know empirically from the existence of our own. It would not demonstrate in any way the existence of a higher power that consciously willed our universe – or any other universe, for that matter – into existence. [Making The Connection, The Guardian, 19 September 2008]
• Atheism is not a movement, it is merely the absence of belief in gods. As such, everyone is an atheist – Xians are atheists about Baal, Thor, Zeus, Quetzlcotl, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for example – but some of us go one god further, for the very good reason that there is no evidence for the supernatural. [Face To Faith, The Guardian, 23 August 2008]
• Why don't you just get your god to fix everything with a wave of her magic wand? Perhaps because she doesn't exist? Nice conflation of secularism (which includes many religious people, by the way) with "greedy lifestyles". Care to be explicit? How about some facts – which are notoriously lacking. BTW, you did know that secularism is NOT the same as atheism, didn't you…? [It's Creation, Stupid! A Coalition Of The Faiths Could Save The Planet, The Guardian, 06 August 2008]
• What on earth does remembrance of the Holocaust and compassion for its victims have to do with superstitions like the Big Sky Fairy? To conflate the two is dishonest, as it falsely implies that only the superstitious can have empathy. I note ,also, that whilst you mentioned the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, you haven't mentioned the gay, disabled, or Roma victims. Why is that, I wonder? [Face To Faith, The Guardian, 26 January 2008]
• There aren't "two kinds of religion"; the imputing of divine agency to natural phenomena and calling it Zeus is called "promiscuous teleology"… and is exactly the same as calling it "Jesus". The belief in divine agency is the sine qua non of religion, and although no one believes in the existence of Zeus or Ra any more, there is no difference in believing in the monstrous Abrahamic myths either. And you can pray to have your god smite me dead if you disagree. I'll be back to post again tomorrow… [In Search Of The Historical Zeus, The Guardian, 24 June 2009]
• Psychological testing by the American criminologist L. Craig Parker Jr., and to a lesser extent by Canadian activist Naomi Klein, has revealed that the psychology among police is such that they cannot distinguish between genuine protest and violence; in their minds, ALL protest is violent and unlawful, because it is treason against the state (which they represent). Hence, police (who are normally woefully ignorant of what the law actually says) wrongly assume that the law shares their prejudices. [Criminal Policing, The Guardian, 04 February 2009]
• WTF are the "new athesist"? The only question is whether any gods have ever existed (you know, Baal, Queztlcotl, Mithras, Yahweh, or the FSM). As there is absolutely no evidence for any supernatural men in the sky (although Amaterasu is a woman), the logical conclusion is that none of them exist. Everything else you say is just smoke and mirrors. Or are you comfortable with such obvious lies…? [Could God Die Again?, The Guardian, 04 October 2009]
• The headline should read "Science has not explained the Big bang YET". This article is really just a rehashing of the "god of the gaps" argument, and fails to address two key points: who created god, and which god do you mean? Zeus? Astarte? Quetzlcotl? Or that Jewish bloke who is really just an amalgam of earlier saviour gods? The article is an embarrassing joke; whatever possessed the editor to run it? Or did the Devil make him do it? [Science Can't Explain The Big Bang - There Is Still Scope For A Creator, The Guardian, 08 January 2009]
• "Scientific knowledge is of course distinct from religious belief, but only to scientists, and the sufficiently scientifically educated. The rest of us must take it on faith." No, the rest of you should bloody well stop watching reality TV and study more science. The great thing about science is that it is accessible to everyone. Of course, to understand science a little effort is required, which seems to be anathema these days… [Particularly Divine?, The Guardian, 10 April 2008]
• This government deserves to be kicked out of office because of SOCPA, their assaults on free speech, the right of peaceful assembly, racist 42-day detention without charge, ID cards, ANPR tracking your journey, surveillance cameras everywhere, and snooping on our phone calls and e-mails. Saying that other parties would be just as bad misses the point, because what others would do is hypothetical; what this authoritarian government is real, and here and now. [Labour Can Win. Here's How, The Guardian, 19 September 2008]
• Religion IS superstition. It's merely one manifestation thereof. Both religion and superstition eschew evidence in favour of visceral feelings of what is "true". Both have rituals that attempt to influence the real world by paranormal means; religionists pray, and new agers throw salt over their shoulder, but the purpose is the same: to magically interfere with the workings of the universe. Neither has any merit. The only difference is the length of time that one has been around longer than the other. [Science vs Superstition, Not Science vs Religion, The Guardian, 14 February 2009]
• You are telling me that I'm a second-class citizen because I don't subscribe to your particular set of superstitions. This is arrogant and dangerous nonsense. Keep breeding such disaffection, and you WILL reap the consequences. Secularism – the complete separation of religion and state – is the only viable starting point for the equality of all before the law, and within society. Religion, like sex, is a private matter – you can practice it in the privacy of your own home, but not in public. And please keep it away from the children. [We Need The Church Of England, The Guardian, 22 February 2008]
• This article spectacularly misses the point of the writing of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al.: Namely that they are right. Claims made by witches, warlocks, imams, muftis, and priests are so much unsubstantiated hogwash. The truth is superior to all other claims, so these rationalist writers are doing the world a favour by calling attention to it. Oh, and Western civilisation IS superior to Islam. Unless you geniuinely do believe that amputating the hands of thieves is acceptable justice? Or that the word of a man is truly worth twice that of a woman? Well, do you? [The Liberal Supremacists, The Guardian, 25 April 2009]
• The fact remains that even if Muslims are in a minority in Britain, they still do not have any rights to religious privilege, so mocking Islam is perfectly acceptable. (You seem to be confusing mocking Islam with mocking Muslims, a blurring that the faithheads enjoy because it enables them to claim martyrdom.) It matters not one whit whether Xians are offended by the statue. I don't find the statue particularly funny or clever, either… but no one has the right to demand its destruction. Free speech trumps all other considerations. All else is smoke and mirrors. [Cock And Bull, The Guardian, 04 September 2008]
• As to why faithheads grow stronger in their delusions through suffering is actually rather easy to explain: solipsism. They believe everything revolves around them, and so the suffering that they experience is designed to spur them to greater efforts at witnessing. Such is the self-centred nature of their thought processes. BTW, when you were a paediatrician, did you ever withhold medicine and just pray for a child's recovery? If not, you clearly don't have as much faith in your god as you profess, and if yes, then you committed child abuse. Puts you in kind of a bind, doesn't it…? [God On Trial, The Guardian, 08 September 2008]
• A better question to ask, Giles is why you present the bifurcation fallacy of atheism or the Abrah