Caninist* meditations on Dogs, Gods and Inhumanities from philosophers, scientists, poets, writers, artists, athletes, entertainers, political figures and other intelligent people ~ even clerics

* Caninism - The belief in the superiority of Canines to humans; given to the veneration of Canines

"On the sixth day, god created man.
On the seventh day man returned the favor."

~ ANNONYMOUS

God Is a Sock

"I've never felt more generous, nor more selfish; rarely more creative, rarely more indifferent."

~ DENIS ACHACOSO
(as the cancer was slowly killing him)
Polymath: Thinker, artist, wit, gourmand, clown
(1948 - 2005)

"Go to a house of worship. A good sermon helps everyone. At the very least, you can wake up from the thing refreshed."

• • •

"How god could create such a nice [Iguazú] falls and forget to stick in an escalator, I have no idea."

~ CINDY ADAMS
American gossip columnist
(b. ?)

“If atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!”

~ CLARK ADAMS
American freethought leader and activist
(1969 – 2007)

"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"

• • •

"I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself."

• • •

"Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it."

• • •

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing god's service when it is violating all his laws."

• • •

"The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation."

~ JOHN ADAMS
American politician and the second President of the United States
(1735 – 1826)

~ DON ADDIS
Editor, editorial cartoonist and columnist with the St. Petersburg Times
(1935-2009)

AJAMI

CALDWELL

“The new [Muslim] arrivals, timid at first, grew expansive in the claims they made. This was odd: they had fled the fire, and the failure, of their ancestral lands, but they brought the fire with them. Political Islam had risen on its home turf in the Middle East and North Africa, in South Asia, but a young generation in Europe gave its allegiance to the new Islamist radicalism. Emancipated women had shed the veil in Egypt and Turkey and Iran in the 1920s; there are Muslim women now asserting their right to wear the burqa in Paris.

“...The militants took the liberties of Europe as a sign of moral and political abdication. They included “activists” now dreaming of imposing the Shariah on Denmark and Britain. There were also warriors of the faith, in storefront mosques in Amsterdam and London, openly sympathizing with the enemies of the West. And there were second-generation immigrants who owed no allegiance to the societies of Europe.”

~ FOUAD AJAMI
MacArthur Fellowship winning, Lebanese-born American university professor
and writer on Middle Eastern issues
(b. 1945)
reviewing
REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE: Immigration, Islam, and the West
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
American journalist and senior editor at The Weekly Standard; contributor to the Financial Times, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post; contributing editor to the The New York Times Magazine.
(b. n/a)

"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."

~ ETHAN ALLEN
American revolutionary, leader of the "Green Mountain Boys"
Champion of statehood for Vermont
(1738 - 1789)

"It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty."

~ STEVE ALLEN
American television and radio personality, musician, actor, comedian and writer
(1921 – 2000)

"Believing would be easier if God would show himself by depositing a million dollars in a Swiss bank account in my name."

• • •

"Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday."

• • •

"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

~ WOODY ALLEN
American film director, screenwriter, actor, comedian, musician and playwright
(b. 1935)

"The world holds two classes of men - intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence."

~ ABU ALA AL-MA'ARRI
Blind Syrian Arab philosopher, poet and writer;
controversial rationalist of his time, attacking the dogmas of religion
and rejecting the claim that Islam possessed any monopoly on truth.
(? - 1059)

"Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. A religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful."

• • •

“There is a rage which has been building for the past century which is hoping to rebuild its ( Islam's ) superiority through violence.”

• • •

“There are great problems with Islam. The Koran recommends the beating of women. The anti-Semites, the psychotic misogynists and the homophobes are the Islamists.”

~ MARTIN AMIS
English novelist, short story writer and literary critic
(b. 1949)

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

~ SUSAN B. ANTHONY
American civil rights leader and women's suffragette
(1820 – 1906)

“Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.”

~ LOUIS ARAGON
French poet, novelist and editor;
long-time political supporter of the Communist Party
and member of the Académie Goncourt
(1897 – 1982)

"There is honor in being a Dog."

• • •

"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.”

~ ARISTOTLE
Greek philosopher
(384 - 324 BCE)

“A god who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a god who interfered with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If god is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect. he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all-knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a god is amply justified.”

• • •

"Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong."

~ KAREN ARMSTRONG
British author on comparative religion, former Catholic nun
(b. 1944)

“If there was a god, I’d still have both nuts.”

• • •

"I don’t have anything against organized religion per se. We all need something in our lives. I personally just have not accepted that belief.”

• • •

“At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I’d been baptized. If there was indeed a god at the end of my days, I hoped he didn’t say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you’re going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You’re right. Fine.'”

~ LANCE ARMSTRONG
American professional road racing cyclist,
winner of the Tour de France seven consecutive years, 1999 to 2005
(b. 1971)

"Americans as a whole may not be getting too much religion, but a significant constituency must be getting fed up with being routinely marginalized, ignored and insulted."

~ RONALD ARONSON
American author, editor, journalist
Professor of the History of Ideas, Wayne State University
(b. n/a)

“Emotionally I am an atheist. 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.”

• • •

"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."

• • •

"Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night"

• • •

"To surrender to ignorance and call it god has always been premature, and it remains premature today."

• • •

"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."

~ ISAAC ASIMOV
Russian born American author and professor of biochemistry
best known for works of science fiction and popular science
(1920 – 1992)

What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

• • •

“To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith.”

~ W.H. AUDEN
American poet born in England
(1907 – 1973)

“Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage.”

• • •

"Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of Nature's process".

~ SRI AUROBINDO
Indian nationalist and freedom fighter,
major Indian English poet, philosopher, and yogi
(1872-1950)

~ TONY AUTH
American editorial cartoonist for The Philadelphia Inquirer since 1971;
winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 and the Herblock Prize in 2005
(b. 1942)

"Truth is a good Dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out."

• • •

“By far the best proof is experience.”

• • •

“I have taken all knowledge to be my province."

• • •

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shal end in doubts; but, if he will be content to begin with doubts, he will end in certainties.”

• • •

"Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men."

• • •

“Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tqales, so is the other.”

• • •

”Knowledge is power.”

~ SIR FRANCIS BACON
(1561 - 1626)
English author, courtier and philosopher

"I believe in nothing. You are born, you die and that's it."

• • •

"People seem to be offended by facts, or what used to be called truth."

• • •

"I don't like to see people suffer but, then, they breed at such a rate that they're bound to suffer."

• • •

"The only world that won't disappoint me is the one I make up."

~ FRANCIS BACON
(1909 - 1992)
Irish born British artist

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion 1944	Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1953	Three Studies for a Crucifixion 1962

"If a dog doesn't put you first where are you both? In what relation? A dog needs God. It lives by your glances, your wishes. It even shares your humour. This happens about the fifth year. If it doesn't happen you are only keeping an animal."

~ ENID BAGNOLD
British novelist, playwright
(1889–1981)

"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 in practice."

• • •

"All religions, with their demigods and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had no t attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but the mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovered his own image, but enlarged and reversed -- that is, divinized."

• • •

"But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and 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."

~ MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism
(1814 - 1876)

“The real arbiter of whether or not a being deserves respect and compassion is sentience. Being sensate to pleasures and especially to pains is the true currency of ethics.”

~ JONATHAN BALCOMBE
Animal behaviorist born in England, raised in New Zeland and Canada, author,
Formerly Senior Research Scientist with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, he is currently Chair of the Animal Studies Department with the Humane Society University
(b. n/a)

"No one is more dangerous than one who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity. By definition is unassailable."

~ JAMES BALDWIN
American novelist, essayist, dramatist, poet and civil rights activist
(1924 - 19870)

"Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours."

~ JOHN BANVILLE
Irish novelist, playwright and journalist; Booker Prize in 2005
(b.1945)

"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?"

~ DAN BARKER
Prominent American Atheist activist who served as a Christian preacher
and musician for 19 years but left Christianity in 1984.
(b. 1949)

"The scriptures teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens move."

~ CESARE BARONIO
Italian Cardinal and ecclesiastical historian,
prominent member of the Order of the Oratory
(1538 – 1607)

"The absurd man is he who never changes."

~ AUGUSTE BARTHELEMY
French satirical poet
(1796 – 1867)

"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."

~ BRUCE BARTLETT
American historian, supply-side economics,
domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan
and treasury official under President George H.W. Bush
(b. 1951)

"So many get reformed through religion. I got reformed through Dogs."

~ LINA BASQUETTE
American slent screen actress, Zigfiled Follies dancer,
Great Dane breeder, pro handler, and AKC Judge
(1907-1994)

“Forget Memory. Try Imagination.”

~ ANNE BASTING
Director of the Center on Age and Community and an Associate Professor
in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the Peck School of the Arts,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
(b. n/a)

"No entiendo que quieran matarme por una exposición. No entiendo cómo se puede llegar a situaciones de amenaza de muerte por unas imágenes."

"I don't understand their wanting to kill me over an exhibit. I don't understand how a situation gets to the point of death threats over some images."

~ FERNANDO BAYONA
Spanish photographer and graphic designer
(b. 1980)

To view entire series, click on image above and then on extreme right in the resulting window.

“To drink without thirst and to make love all the time, madam, it is only these which distinguish us from the other beasts.”

~ BEAUMARCHAIS
French playwright, Financier and diploma. After beginning as a watchmaker, Beaumarchais rose in French society.
(1732 – 1799)

"Christianity is the enemy of liberty and of civilization. It has kept mankind in chains."

• • •

"When socialism comes into power, the Roman Church will advocate socialism with the same vigor it is now favoring feudalism and slavery."

~ AUGUST BEBEL
German social democrat;
one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany
(1840-1913)

"Try again, fail again, fail better."

• • •

“I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.”

• • •

“Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it”

• • •

"Habit is the ballast that chains the Dog to his vomit."

• • •

"How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones."

• • •

“God is a witness that cannot be sworn.”.

• • •

"Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle."

• • •

“We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.”

• • •

“Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.”

• • •

“In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.”

• • •

“Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.”

• • •

"The bastard! He doesn't exist!"

~ SAMUEL BECKETT
Irish playwright
(1906-1989)

“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.”

~ JOHN BEEVERS
English author, poet; biographer of Catholic saits
(1911-1975)

~ RICARDO BELLVER
Spanish sculptor
(1845 — 1924)
EL ÁNGEL CAÍDO
The Fallen Angel
1877
Only known monument to Lucifer
Parque del Buen Retiro, Madrid

Click √ on Image above to view color enlargement

“What happens as Israel continues to become more religious and conservative, more isolated internationally and less democratic domestically? What happens to the relationship between American Jews and Israel as the face of Israel shifts from that of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres to that of the national religious settlers and the ultra-Orthodox rabbis?”

~ JEREMY BEN-AMI
Executive director of J Street, a liberal advocacy organization in the United States whose stated aim is to promote American leadership to end the Arab-Israeli and Israel-Palestinian conflicts peacefully and diplomatically
(b. n/a)

"The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"

• • •

"The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny."

• • •

"Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse?  But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old.  But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail?  The question is not, 'Can [animals] reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' But, 'Can they suffer?'"

• • •

“No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion ”

• • •

"There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality."

• • •

"The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches."

~ JEREMY BENTHAM
English jurist, utilitarian philosopher and social reformer
(1748-1832)

"Me pray? Never! I'm an atheist."

~ SARAH BERNHARDT
French romantic and tragic actress
(1844-1923)

"No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism."

• • •

"Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought."

• • •

"The position of the atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about God and therefore I do not believe in Him or it. What you tell me about your God is self-contradictory and is therefore incredible. I do not deny "God," which is an unknown tongue to me. I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God."

• • •

"If my interlocutor desires to convince me that Jupiter has inhabitants, and that his description of them is accurate, it is for him to bring forward evidence in support of his contention. The burden of proof evidently lies on him; it is not for me to prove that no such beings exist before my non-belief is justified, but for him to prove that they do exist before my belief can be fairly claimed. Similarly, it is for the affirmer of god's existence to bring evidence in support of his affirmation; the burden of proof lies on him."

• • •

"For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most."

~ ANNIE WOOD BESANT
English philosopher and theosophist
(1847-1933)

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err.

For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

• • •

"Wolves are not our brothers; they are not our subordinates, either. They are another nation, caught up just like us in the complex web of time and life."

~ HENRY BESTON
American writer and naturalist
(1888 – 1968)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GOD TIES ONE ON

It's been a rough day. Ice Age in the morning, Vesuvius after lunch and the loss of God's favorite trattoria in Pompeii.

God rolls a joint, invents the match, and fires up around 5:00, though a fanatical cadre of historians would later insist it was 4:20, and took place in San Rafael California, not Eden, Garden of . Still, it's hard to leave work at the office. God internalizes naturally, obssesses about that pill Ghengis Khan and what went wrong. God creates the Cosmo, and the cocktail glass for good measure. After the second drink, God sees that it's all good. Very good. Very all good.

The world's a beautiful place. Even the cocktail glass is amazing. God's an overachiever, picked by no one to go this far, until others were created and jumped on the bandwagon and started singing the praises. Figures.

Then God gets the munchies. Invents M&M's, Newman's popcorn, and Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia. Having missed out on The Dead due to distractions like Bangladesh, the Beatles, and Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, God re-discovers Jerry Garcia. Becomes a deadhead for a day. Supposedly stays away from the Owsley acid, though skeptics in Quebec point to the '89 solar storm that sent compasses spinning as evidence God may have dropped a tab or two at the Montreal show.

The yellow moon rises in the purple sky above Eden, and God, longing for a best friend, creates the basset whose goofy looks bring on a grin.

"I'll call you Absurd," says God. " And I'll call you a turd," replies the bassett.

Awkward. They laugh and discover they're the mirror image of one another. God is dog spelled backwards, and dog is god. And God is good when you add an o. "Oh," says Absurd. " Good God, we're good . . . dog."

God dozes in the adirondak. A screeching owl sails low. Absurd knows his best friend is now dreaming. Lifting his head, the hound cuts loose a mournful howl that echoes off canyon walls, returns as a breeze - a wind - a tropical storm.

God awakes grumpy - rarely a good thing, and just like that, Monday is made.

~ GUY BIEDERMAN
American author, publisher and fiction writing teacher from California
(b. n/a)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

• • •

Christian, adj. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

• • •

Dog, n. A kind of additional or subsidiary deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.

• • •

Evangelist, n. A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbours.

• • •

Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

• • •

Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.

• • •

Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.

• • •

Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.

• • •

Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

• • •

Koran, n. A book which the Mahammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

• • •

Mayonnaise, n. One of the sauces that serve the French in place of a state religion.

• • •

Mythology, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

• • •

Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

• • •

Rack, n. An argumentatvie implement formerly much used in persuading devotees of a false failth to embrace the living truth.

• • •

Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

• • •

Reverence, n. the spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a Dog to a man.

• • •

Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.

• • •

Sabbath, n. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

• • •

Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

~ AMBROSE BIERCE
American Author and Humorist
(1842-1914)
From: The Devil's Dictionary

"No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion."

~ HUGO L. BLACK
American politician and jurist
U.S. Supreme Court Justice
(1886 – 1971)

"I have no religion because I was born and raised Jewish. And on the first night of Hanukkah, my parents, when I was very young, gave me a top to play with. They called it a dreidel. I knew it was a top. And as I looked at that top, I said, 'You know. I don't think I'm gonna be Jewish for very long.'"

• • •

"You know a religion has no sense of humor, when a guy can stand up and say, ‘you know, if you commit suicide for Allah, after you die you will be met in heaven by 70 virgins,' and nobody in the room just goes, 'AHAHAHA! Son of a bitch! That was great!'"

• • •

"They believe if they kill themselves that they will be met in Heaven by 70 some odd virgins. Imagine that kind of faith. To think that that would happen. When I haven't met one on Earth!"

~ LEWIS BLACK
American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor. He is known for his comedy style, which often includes an increasingly angry rant, ridiculing history, politics, religion, trends and cultural phenomena
(b. 1948)

“A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation.”

• • •

"The Vision of Christ that thou dost see,
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind,
Mine speaks in Parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy heaven-doors are my hell gates."

~ WILLIAM BLAKE
English poet, painter and printmaker
(1757 – 1827)

"To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever."

~ AMY BLOOM
American social worker who has practiced psychotherapy;
lecturer of Creative Writing in the department of English at Yale University
and Kim-Frank Family University Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University
(b. 1953)

"Don’t debate the Bible. You can’t win. Religious faith is not defined by logic, it defies it. Instead, decouple the legal right from the religious rite, and emphasize the idea of acceptance without endorsement."

~ CHARLES M. BLOW
American journalist, columnist
(b. n/a)

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

~ DEREK BOK
Former Harvard president; founder of the Curtis Publishing Company
(b. 1930)

“Here, Gentlemen, a Dog teaches us a lesson in humanity.”

• • •

"I cannot believe there is a god who punishes and rewards, for I see honest folk unlucky, and rogues unlucky."

• • •

"If I had to choose a religion, the Sun as the universal giver of life would be my god."

• • •

"There is no place in a fanatic’s head where reason can enter."

• • •

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.”

• • •

"I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get."

~ NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
Emperor Napoleon I
French military and political leader
(1769 – 1821)

“The Nazis, who had such conspicuous disregard for human rights, felt more strongly about the animals.”

~ DR. JAN BONDESON
Senior lecturer at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales
from Amazing Dogs

"The less you know, the more you believe."

• • •

“Lent I’ve always had issues with. I gave it up ... self-denial is where I come a cropper. My idea of discipline is simple — hard work — but of course that’s another indulgence.”

• • •

“I think of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose now combined fortune is dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty. Agnostics both, I believe. I think of Nelson Mandela, who has spent his life upholding the rights of others. A spiritual man — no doubt. Religious? I’m told he would not describe himself that way. Not all soul music comes from the church.”

~ BONO
Irish singer and musician, lead singer of the band U2;
a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE
(b. 1960)
From "It’s 2009. Do You Know Where Your Soul Is?"
New York Times, published April 18, 2009

“Obedience is a two-way street — it involves a great deal of trust, and the trust part is very, very low for me right now. You can’t promise obedience when you feel like you can’t trust the person you’re supposed to obey.”

~ REV. ROBERT J. BOWERS
American. Former diocesan parish priest.
Presently in the Paulist Center, Boston
(b. 1960)

"The atheist does not say 'there is no God,' but he says 'I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God'; the word 'God' is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. ... The Bible God I deny; the Christian God I disbelieve in; but I am not rash enough to say there is no God as long as you tell me you are unprepared to define God to me."

~CHARLES BRADLAUGH
Political activist and one of the most famous English atheists of the 19th century; founder of the National Secular Society in 1866.
(1833 – 1891)

"Interspecies bonding shows just how powerful love is and it opens our eyes to new possibilities. Often people are admonished to stop 'acting like an animal'. But experiences of interspecies love suggest that it may well be time to start acting like animals and for human culture to adopt some important animal ways of compassion and care. As human caregivers, we have the responsibility to live up to animal loyalty and trust and to honor this contract of the heart."

~ GAY ARNDT BRADSHAW
American ecologist, psychology, writer, tteacher and lecturer;
Executive Director & Founder, The Kerulos Center
Co-Founder, International Association for Animal Trauma and Recovery
(b. n/a)

"For me, the single word “God” suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque"

• • •

"So may night continue to fall upon the orchestra, and may I, who am still searching for something in this world, may I be left with open or closed eyes, in broad daylight, to my silent contemplation."

~ ANDRÉ BRETON
French writer, poet , and surrealist theorist;
principal founder of Surrealism
(1896 – 1966)

~ CHRIS BRITT
American editorial cartoonist for the State Journal-Register of Springfield, Illinois,
and the Copley News Service
(b. n/a)

[We would] "never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence."

~ VERA BRITTAIN
English writer, feminist and pacifist
(1893 – 1970)

"To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy."

• • •

"We’re all born late. We’re born into history that is well under way. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. On top of that, we’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re thrust into social conditions that we detest. Often, we react in ways we regret even while we’re doing them."

• • •

"We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty.

"Among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world. Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves."

• • •

"As you act to combat evil, you wouldn't want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting."

• • •

“If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors.”

• • •

"Often, as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance we lose in spontaneous sociability."

• • •

"Buy experiences instead of things; buy many small pleasures instead of a few big ones; pay now for things you can look forward to and enjoy later."

• • •

“Modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.”

• • •

"Last year [2009], the Pew Research Center surveyed the global middle class and found that middle-class people are more likely than their poorer countrymen to value democracy, free speech and an objective judiciary. They were more likely to embrace religious pluralism and say that you don’t have to believe in God to be good."

~ DAVID BROOKS
Canadian born American political
and cultural commentator and columnist
(b. August 11, 1961)

• • •

"I think most of life's problems are too complicated to be solved with a spiritual blotter!"

~ CHARLIE BROWN
Main character in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz;
loveable loser, a child possessed of endless determination and hope
but who is ultimately dominated by his insecurities and a "permanent case of bad luck"
(b. 1950)

"Who knows most, doubts most."

• • •

"The lie was dead, And damned, and truth stood up instead."

• • •

"Ignorance is not innocence, but sin."mm

• • •

"Less is more."

~ ROBERT BROWNING
Victorian English poet and playwright
(1812 – 1889)

"Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to god."

~LENNY BRUCE
American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist
(1925 – 1966)

“You pronounce sentence upon me with greater fear than I receive it.”

~ GIORDANO BRUNO
to his inquisitors
Italian philosopher, linguist and mathematician;
proponent of heliocentrism and the infinity of the universe;
wrote extensive works on the art of memory,
a loosely-organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles.
Burned at the stake as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition
(1548 – 1600)

"An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support."

~ JOHN BUCHAN
1st Baron Tweedsmui
British novelist and Unionist politician born in Scotland
Governor General of Canada 1935 to 1940
(1875 – 1940)

"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."

~ PEARL S. BUCK
(also known as Sai Zhen Zhu)
American sinologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer;
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938;
described in China as a Chinese writer
(1892 — 1973)

"Too bad ignorance isn't painful."

~ BUMPER STICKER

"I'm still an atheist, thank god."

~ LUIS BUÑUEL
Spanish filmmaker
(1900 – 1983)

Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night

~ CHARLES BURCHFIELD
American watercolorist and visionary artist
(1893 - 1967)

“'Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night,' a picture of a steeple looming like a great bug-eyed bird over a squat town as black rain pours down. To Burchfield, at that point simultaneously agnostic and terrified of damnation, the painting expressed the dread that religion instilled in him." - Holland Cotter on Charles Burchfield

“If you are a bad person, a whining enemy or a strong-arm occupier, you are not my brother, even if you are circumcised, observe the Sabbath, and do mitzvahs. If your scarf covers every hair on your head for modesty, you give alms and do charity, but what is under your scarf is dedicated to the sanctity of Jewish land, taking precedence over the sanctity of human life, whosever life that is, then your are not my sister. You might be my enemy. A good Arab or a righteous gentile will be a brother or sister to me. A wicked man, even of Jewish descent, is my adversary, and I would stand on the other side of the barricade and fight him to the end."

~ AVRAHAM BURG
Former Israeli Knesset Speaker and Jewish National Fund Chairman
(b. 1955)

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

• • •

"Falsehood has a perennial spring."

• • •

"The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own."

• • •

"Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." 

~ EDMUND BURKE
Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher
(1729 – 1797)

"God knows I'm not the thing I should be,
Nor am I even the thing I could be.
But twenty times I'd rather would be an atheist clean,
Than under gospel colours hid be,
Just for a screen."

~ ROBERT BURNES
Poet and lyricist regarded as the national poet of Scotland
(1759 – 1796)

“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.”

• • •

There is no Heaven, there is no Hell;
These are the dreams of baby minds;
Tools of the wily Fetisheer,
To fright the fools his cunning blinds.

~ SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON
English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist,
linguist, poet and diplomat
(1821 - 1890)

“To put one's trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.”

• • •

"Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.  They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously."

• • •

"All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it."

~ SAMUEL BUTLER
English Victorian novelist
(1612–1680)

"I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains."

~ GEORGE GORDON LORD BYRON
English Romantic poet
(1788-1824)

~ CAGANER OBAMA
(2008)
Caganer ("Shitter") - figurine traditionally placed in Christmas manger scenes in the region of
Cataluña in Spain meaning that, no matter the greatness of an event (i.e.: the birth of the son of god), Nature always must be tended to first.

“Pues el delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido.”

“For man’s greatest crime is to have been born.”

~PEDRO CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA
from La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream).
Dramatist, poet and writer of the Spanish Golden Age
(1600-1681)

“Perhaps this (the ordination of women) is not a human rights issue because women are not human or they do not have rights.”

• • •

“When people work on social justice issues, they don’t win much and wind up dropping out. To laugh at oneself from the beginning is essential.”

• • •

“He [Don Quixote] dreams, he has visions, but he’s basically a silly old man.”

~ WILLIAM R. CALLAHAN
American dissident Jesuit priest who challenged the Vatican and whose activism on behalf of changes in Vatican policy regarding the ordination of women, his ministry to gay Catholics and his activities on behalf of social justice led to his expulsion from the Society of Jesus in 1991, forbidding him to act as a priest.
(1931-2010)

“I don't have to have faith, I have experience.”

• • •

“God is a metaphor for that which trancends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.”

• • •

“What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?”

• • •

“Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message.”

• • •

“When we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament [we find] a single-minded single deity with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled...pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a ‘Thou’ but an ‘It.’”

• • •

“A one sentence definition of mythology? ‘Mythology’ is what we call someone else's religion ”.

• • •

“Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”

• • •

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.“

~ JOSEPH CAMPBELL
American anthropologist
(1904-1987)

"There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved--and not the reverse."

• • •

"Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool."

• • •

"Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil."

~ ALBERT CAMUS
Algerian-born French author, philosopher, and journalist
(1913 – 1960)

“Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.”

~ BENJAMIN CARDOZO
American lawyer and associate Supreme Court Justice
(1870 – 1938)

"Religion easily has the best bullshit story of all time. Think about it. Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money."

• • •

"The only good thing to come out of religion was the music."

• • •

"Something is wrong.  War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, crime, torture, corruption and the ice capades.  If this is the best god can do, I am not impressed.  This is not what you expect to find on the resume of a supreme being.  It's what you expect from an office temp with a bad attitude."

• • •

"I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death."

~ GEORGE CARLIN
American stand-up comedian, actor and author
(1937 – 2008)

"Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution."

• • •

"I give money for church organs in the hope the organ music will distract the congregation's attention from the rest of the service."

~ ANDREW CARNEGIE
Scottish born American industrialist, businessman and a major philanthropist
(1835-1919)

“When all has been considered, it seems to me to be the irresistible intuition that infinite punishment for finite sin would be unjust, and therefore wrong. We feel that even weak and erring Man would shrink from such an act. And we cannot conceive of god as acting on a lower standard of right and wrong.”

• • •

“If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much.”

• • •

“I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet ... you’re so exactly like other people.”

~ LEWIS CARROLL
English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer
(1832 – 1898)

“Now, my faith goes beyond theology and religion and requires considerable work and effort. My faith demands -- this is not optional -- my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.”

• • •

“We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”

• • •

"The truth is that male religious leaders have had -- and still have -- an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world."

~ JIMMY CARTER
39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981; recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize;
created two new cabinet-level departments: the Department of Energy and the Department of Education; founded The Carter Center, a nongovernmental organization to advance human rights;
key figure in the Habitat for Humanity project organization
(b. 1924)

~ CARTOON: DONALD RUMSFELD IN ABU GHRAIB
Unidentifiable artist

“Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence."

• • •

"The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so."

• • •

"We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it."

• • •

"With two thousand years of Christianity behind him... a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head."

~ LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE
(Louis-Ferdinand Destouches)
French writer and doctor; one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century,
developing a new style that modernized both French and world literature
(1894 – 1961)

"Danger, the spur of all great minds."

• • •

“Ignorance is the mother of admiration.”

~ GEORGE CHAPMAN
English dramatist, translator, and poet
(c. 1559–1634)

"Why is it acceptable that soldiers are unable to serve this nation without attending state-led religious practices they find offensive and false?"

~ SPECIALIST DUSTIN CHALKER
Foxhole Atheists
U. S. Army Medic, awarded Purple Heart, Iraq

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

• • •

"I am at peace with God. My conflict is with Man."

• • •

“In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.”

• • •

“I remember [Vladimir] Horowitz, the pianist... Just before the war [World War II] I dined at his house with his wife, the daughter of Toscanini. Rachmaninoff and Barbirolli were there... It was an intimate dinner, just five of us.

“It seems that each time art is discussed I have a different explanation of it. Why not? That evening I said that art was an additional emotion applied to skillful technique. Someone brought the topic round to religion and I confessed I was not a believer. Rachmaninoff quickly interposed: ‘But how can you have art without religion?’

“‘So is religion,’ he answered. After that I shut up.”

• • •

"Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference."

• • •

"I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ was President."

• • •

"Since the end of the last world war, I have been the object of lies and propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who, by their influence and by the aid of America's yellow press, have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal-minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted. Under these conditions I find it virtually impossible to continue my motion-picture work, and I have therefore given up my residence in the United States."

Speech from
'The Great Dictator'

I'm sorry but I don't want to be an Emperor, that's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We all want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate;
has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in:
machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.

Our knowledge has made us cynical,
our cleverness hard and unkind.
We think too much and feel too little:
More than machinery we need humanity;
More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.

Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say "Do not despair".

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed,
the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress: the hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people, will return to the people and so long as men die [now] liberty will never perish. . .

Soldiers: don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate, only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers: don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty.

In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written:
"The kingdom of God is within man"

Not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men; in you, the people.

You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let's use that power, let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfil their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfil that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.

Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!

• • •

Look up! Look up! The clouds are lifting, the sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world. A kind new world where men will rise above their hate and brutality.

The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow, into the light of hope, into the future, that glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us. Look up. Look up.

• • •

"Brunettes are troublemakers. They're worse than the Jews."

~CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin
English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I. Although baptised in the Church of England, Chaplin was thought to be an agnostic for most of his life
(1889 – 1977)

“I always like a Dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.”

~ G.K. CHESTERTON
English writer whose prolific and diverse output included journalism, philosophy, poetry,
biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy and detective fiction
(1874 – 1936)

“I consider him a victim. He should have been in the jungle where he’s supposed to be. Not in a house drinking wine and taking Xanax.”

~ FRANK CHIAFARI
Police Officer , Stamford, Connecticut
Shot Travis, the Chimp
(b. n/a)

“I'm what's called here a ‘secular atheist,’ except that I can't even call myself an ‘atheist’ because it is not at all clear what I'm being asked to deny.”

• • •

"[T]he Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon."

• • •

“Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population."

~ NOAM CHOMSKY
American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist,
political activist, author and lecturer
(b. 1928)

"My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?"

~ JESUS CHRIST
(Jesus of Nazareth)
Jewish philosopher, political thinker and social activist
(c.7–2 - 26–36 BCE)

"The human race had yet to render itself extinct; perhaps the animals were just a dry run. Once you believed animals were insensate things, disposable, of utilitarian value only, it wasn't hard to move on to people."

• • •

"Billions, trillions, of animals had come and gone on this earth, she liked to say, so how could it be otherwise. Their bodies turned to dust, buttheir energy must remain behind, vinding new vessels, new outlets."

• • •

"[The Panther]...said before men started their killing ways, they spoke the same language as all the other animals. There was no boundaries between them. Then the worm of cruelty burrowed into man's heart. The animals needed to protect themselves, so they made up their own languages that only their own kind could understand. The same thing happened when men started killing other men. Everyone felt safer talking their own language. They still do."

• • •

"He was apolitical and unsentimantal, as indifferent to flag-waving as to religious piety."

• • •

"He was a devout Catholic -- a zealot, as it turned out. I left the Church too get divorced. That was the one good thing that came of my marriage."

• • •

"Maybe we need another flood. When life began, the earth was entirely ocean, bombarded with ultraviolet light. Shift a few molecules and everything could evolve differently. Maybe you end up with a planet of insects, or worms. Maybe that's an improvement."

• • •

"When I walked into a forest, I felt that the world of men, of everyone and everything I knew, was falling away from Me."

• • •

"You once told me the book you're researching for is all about the psyche."

"What else could it be about? All our imaginings about animals, the mythmaking, our intense pojections into their world. First, we set them up as our gods; then we made ourselves into their gods and began treating them badly. Many of the animals I've studied were driven into extinction before entering our imagination."

from THE BESTIARY

~ NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER
American novelist and poet
(b. n/a)

"You have enemies?  Good.  That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."

~ WINSTON CHURCHILL
British Conservative politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War; served as Prime Minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55). A noted statesman and orator, an officer in the British Army, historian, and writer; received the Nobel Prize in Literature
(1874 – 1965)

2007

 

2011

“When the music stops — when I can’t tie my bow tie, tell a funny story, walk my dog, talk with Whitney, kiss someone special, or tap out lines like this — I’ll know that Life is over. It’s time to be gone.”

• • •

“We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative — not governing — in order to be free.”

~ DUDLEY CLENDINEN
from
“The Good Short Life”
Author and journalist; former reporter and editorial writer for The New York Times, suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease
(b. 1944)

 

"Free your mind and your ass will follow."

~ GEORGE CLINTON
FUNKADELIC
American funk band
1970

“While horrific, widespread reports of abuse and cover-up are sadly quite common, the significance here is that a government panel is conclusively saying that the finger-pointing and blame-shifting and excuse-making of the church hierarchy is bogus.”

~ DAVID CLOHESSY
Roman Catholic American activist;
National director and spokesman for the Survivor's Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP)
(b. n/a)

"In Holland, they have come to precisely the same conclusion. There they have adopted a system of secular education, because they have found it impracticable to unite the religious bodies in any system of combined religious instruction."

~ RICHARD COBDEN
British manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman
(1804-1865)

~ SUE COE English artist and illustrator working primarily in drawing and printmaking; Her work is highly political, often directed against capitalism and cruelty to animals (b.1951)

“I know that the Roman Catholic Church repudiates violent forms of homophobia. But to deplore the violence while continuing to proclaim the ideas that undergird it strikes thoughtful people as hypocritical. The teaching of the Church sanctifies the denigration of gays and lesbians.”

~ WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN
American liberal Christian clergyman and peace activist
(1924 – 2006)

"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense."

~ CHAPMAN COHEN
English freethinker, atheist and secularist essayist and lecturer
(1868 – 1954)

“Although I am nonobservant [Jew] and not particularly stylish or athletic, it is curiously liberating to learn that I would violate no religious strictures if I were to wear mascara while playing football.”

• • •

“Some people might relish a lively discourse on creationism and heart disease: surely that, too, is God’s handiwork, or does he just get credit for the design successes?”

• • •

“Neither on nor off duty did I seek moral guidance from a spiritual leader of any faith. I did consult members of the clergy for their technical expertise when a question impinged on religious doctrine.”

~ RANDY COHEN
American writer and humorist
(b. n/a)

Click √ HERE for “A Conversation with RANDY COHEN upon His Departure from THE NEW YORK TIMES”

“We’ve tried invasions of Muslim lands. We’ve tried imposing new systems of government on them. We’ve tried wars on terror. We’ve tried spending billions of dollars. What we haven’t tried is tackling what’s been rotten in the Arab world by helping a homegrown, bottom-up movement for change turn a U.S.-backed police state into a stable democracy.”

• • •

“It’s precisely the vesting of morality in a nonhuman source that’s dangerous because how then can you apply reason to temper the God-given absolutes that may lead to fanaticism? Ultimately I believe religion stems from humanity’s fear of death, an understandable man-made reaction to the mystery of life and its ending, but no more plausible for being near-universal.”

~ ROGER COHEN
British-born journalist and author, columnist for
The New York Times and International Herald Tribune
(b. 1955)

"Remember, Jesus would rather constantly shame gays than let orphans have a family."

~ STEPHEN COLBERT
American political satirist and television host
(b. 1964)

"One by one, his Schnauzers died of liver disease,except the one that guarded his corpse holding a tumbler of Bushmills."

~ HENRI COLE
American poet
(b. 1956)

“If you complain about Christmas overkill because you are, say, a Muslim or a Jew, the general response is a quick hug and a nervous affirmation that all faiths deserve respect. But atheists do not get that many hugs, and perhaps it is beginning to tell on them.”

• • •

"There are tens of millions Americans who oppose abortion because of deeply held moral principles. But they’re attached to a political movement that sometimes seems to have come unmoored from any concern for life after birth."

• • •

"Then [South Carolina governor Mark] Sanford apologized to his wife, his sons, his friends, his staff, his in-laws, 'anybody who lives in South Carolina' and people of faith 'across the nation.' At this point, I had the terrible feeling that I was the only person in the entire country to whom Sanford was not conveying his personal regrets."

• • •

“What is it with Republicans lately? Is there something about being a leader of the family-values party that makes you want to go out and commit adultery?”

~ GAIL COLLINS
American journalist and editorial columnist
(b. 1945)

“Your life is not lying in wait in the future like a wild animal or some ominous destiny. Nor is it hidden in the heavens, like a paradise or promise. Nor is it shut up in the cave or the prison of your past. It is here and now; it is what you live and what you do. At the heart of being; at the heart of the present; at the heart of everything – in the great current of life, of reality.”

~ ANDRÉ COMTE-SPONVILLE
French atheist existentialist philosopher
(b. 1952)

"The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotion and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatu8ral, which (take it anyway you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intricate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity."

~ JOSEPH CONRAD
Polish-born British novelist
(1857 – 1924)

‘There are people who believe in heaven after they die. I believe in heaven on earth.”

~ CORNEILLE
Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo
Belgian-born Dutch painter, printmaker, ceramicist and writer,
co-founder of Cobra WITH Karel Appel and Constant Nieuwenhuys
(1922-2010)

"The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it."

• • •

"Well, it [religion] has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion."

~ QUENTIN CRISP
English writer and raconteur
(1908 – 1999)

“The fact that people can persist in the information age to take [the Bible] as a fundamental word of God, words to live by, rules to live by, that's really crazy to me.”

• • •

“In the Bible after the flood Noah is in gratitude with God and gives him a burnt sacrifice. God is so touched for some reason by the smell of the meat that he decides that he will never again bring a flood to destroy the human race. It doesn’t quite add up somehow.”

• • •

“In other comic book versions of the Bible they show the people of Sodom and Gomorrah basically having a good time being drunk and carousing in the streets and gambling. These are considered bad things, but to me this isn't bad enough. I was interested in some kind of real cruelty that God had to be truly horrified of, massive amounts of genuine cruelty and inhuman behavior.”

~ ROBERT CRUMB
American artist and illustrator recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings
and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream;
a founder of the underground comix movement
(b. 1943)

“As a kid, I went to church and all I did was look at women’s hats.”

• • •

“You see, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid. ... Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty, freedom is the most expensive.”

~ BILL CUNNINGHAM
Fashion photographer for The New York Times
(b. 1928/9)

“I have never been in anything like that in my life, period. Not when I worked with Clinton. Not with my father. In my 30 years in government, I never felt what I felt in that [Gay Pride] parade. Just the difference we made in people’s lives, how we touched people and made them feel good about society. It was really magic.

“A father, maybe 60 years old, came up to me and said, ‘You know, I have a gay son, and I never really accepted him and I shouldn’t have needed you to tell me that it was O.K. to accept my own boy. But I did.’ ”

~ ANDREW CUOMO
56th and current Governor of New York, was the 64th New York State Attorney General
(b. 1957)

"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."

~ DALAI LAMA
(Tenzin Gyatso)
The 14th Dalai Lama, head of state and spiritual leader of Tibet
(b. 1935)

"Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt!"

• • •

"I feel as I always have, that the earth is the home and the only home of man, and I am convinced that whatever he is to get out of his existence he must get while he is here."

• • •

"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."

• • •

"When every event was a miracle, when there was no order or system or law, there was no occasion for studying any subject, or being interested in anything excepting a religion which took care of the soul. As man doubted the primitive conceptions about religion, and no longer accepted the literal, miraculous teachings of ancient books, he set himself to understand nature."

• • •

"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."

• • •

"I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of."

• • •

“I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.”

~ CLARENCE DARROW
American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union
Best known for defending teenage thrill killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 and defending John T. Scopes in the so-called "Monkey" Trial in 1925.
(1857 – 1938)

“A good Dog never dies, he always stays. He walks besides you on crisp autumn days when frost is on the fields and winter's drawing near. His head is within our hand in his old way.”

~ MARY CAROLYN DAVIES
American poet
(18?? - 19??)

“Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but his memory.”

~ LEONARDO Da VINCI
The archetypal Renaissance man
Italian polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist,
painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer
(1452 – 1519)

"Our history is littered with bleak tableaus that show what happens when righteous certitude is mixed with fearful ignorance."

~ KENNETH C. DAVIS
American popular historian
(b. n/a)

“The problem isn’t the girls in the streets; it’s the men in the pews.”

~ STEPHANIE DAVIS
Policy Advisor on Women's Issues to Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta
(b. n/a)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

• • •

"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

• • •

“The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.”

• • •

"If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't' have to bother saying so."

• • •

“Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.”

• • •

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."

• • •

“Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers, It’s a sort of crime against childhood.”

• • •

“Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?”

• • •

"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."

• • •

“I’ve had perfectly wonderful conversations with Anglican bishops, and I rather suspect if you asked in a candid moment, they’d say they don’t believe in the virgin birth. But for every one of them, four others would tell a child she’ll rot in hell for doubting.”

.• • •

“One [young woman in a Muslim school that receives state funds] said her ambition was to be a doctor. But she explicitly said if there is a contradiction between science and the Koran, then the Koran was righ. They were lovely girls, but utterly brainwashed.”

• • •

"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."

• • •

“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.”

• • •

“If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it’s not supernatural.”

• • •

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."

• • •

“My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up.”

~ RICHARD DAWKINS
British ethologist, zoologist, Neo-Darwinian evolutionary biologist
and theorist and popular science author;
prominent critic of religion ,creationism and a wide variety of pseudoscience;
co-founder of the Out Campaign , as a means of advancing atheism and freethought.
(b. 1941)

“I cannot be angry at god, in whom I do not believe.”

~ SIMONE De BEAUVIOUR
French writer and political activist
(1908-1986)

“And of all the plagues with which mankind is cursed, Ecclesiastic tyranny is the worst.”

~ DANIEL DEFOE

“I feel myself to be an old tree from which every day someone cuts off a branch.”

• ••

“There are things in life that one should neither analyze nor go on and on about. Absence is one of these.”

~ LUCIE DE LA TOUR DU PIN
French memoirist
(1770 - 1853)

~ SEAN DELONAS
American political cartoonist and author
(b. n/a)

DEL TORO

HOGAN

 

 

 

 

“In a society that moves as fast as ours, where every week a new ‘blockbuster’ must be enthroned at the box office, or where idols are fabricated by consensus every new television season, the promise of something everlasting, something truly eternal, holds a special allure. As a seductive figure, the vampire is as flexible and polyvalent as ever. Witness its slow mutation from the pansexual, decadent Anne Rice creatures to the current permutations — promising anything from chaste eternal love to wild nocturnal escapades — and there you will find the true essence of immortality: adaptability.

“...Despite our obsessive harnessing of information, we are still ultimately vulnerable to our fates and our nightmares. We enthrone the deadly virus in the very same way that ‘Dracula’ allowed the British public to believe in monsters: through science. Science becomes the modern man’s superstition. It allows him to experience fear and awe again, and to believe in the things he cannot see.

“And through awe, we once again regain spiritual humility. The current vampire pandemic serves to remind us that we have no true jurisdiction over our bodies, our climate or our very souls. Monsters will always provide the possibility of mystery in our mundane ‘reality show’ lives, hinting at a larger spiritual world; for if there are demons in our midst, there surely must be angels lurking nearby as well. In the vampire we find Eros and Thanatos fused together in archetypal embrace, spiraling through the ages, undying.

“Forever.”

~ GUILLERMO DEL TORO
Mexican author and Academy Award-nominated director, producer and designer
(b. 1964)
&
~ CHUCK HOGAN
American novelist
(b. n/a)

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

~ DEMOCRITUS
Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera in the north of Greece;
the most prolific and most influential of the pre-Socratic philosophers;
his atomic theory may be regarded as the culmination of early Greek thought
(460 - 370 B.C.)

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.”

~ MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
French Renaissance writer and essayist
(1533 – 1592)

"I confess that I could not pray (sincerely) for my friends and family in time of need, so I appreciate the urge, however clearly I recognize its futility."

• • •

"The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight -- that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether."

• • •

"Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side."

• • •

"I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.

~ DANIEL C. DENNETT
Author, Philosopher; Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University
(b. 1942)

"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind."

• • •

“To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.”

• • •

“The entirety of human morals is contained in this one phrase: Render others as happy as one desires oneself to be, and never inflict more pain upon them than one would like to receive at their hands. There you are, my friend, those are the only principles we should observe, and you need neither god nor religion to appreciate and subscribe to them, you need only a good heart.”

• • •

“When one is afraid one ceases to reason…when the brain is disturbed, one believes anything and examines nothing. Ignorance and fear, you will repeat to them, ignorance and fear—those are the twin bases of every religion.”

DONATIEN ALPHONSE FRANÇOIS MARQUIS DE SADE
French aristocrat, revolutionary and novelist
(1740 – 1814)

“I think, therefore I am.”

~ RENÉ DESCARTES

"Let us hope, that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring."

• • •

"Life is a zoo in a jungle."

• • •

"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."

• • •

"Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy."

~ PETER De VRIES

Interior of the Old Church in Delft
(Detail)

~ EMANUEL DE WITTE
Dutch painter of church interiors
(1617 - 1692)

Click √ on Images to enlarge

RELIGIOUS MELANCHOLY
(Scrupulosity*)

~ DR. HUGH DIAMOND
Early British psychiatrist and photographer
(1809 – June 21, 1886)

* Scrupulosity is a psychological disorder characterized by pathological guilt about moral or religious issues. It is personally distressing, objectively dysfunctional, and often accompanied by significant impairment in social functioning.[1] It is typically conceptualized as a moral or religious form of obsessive–compulsive disorder

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.“

~ PHILIP K. DICK
American novelist, short story writer and essayist
(1928 – 1982)

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

• • •

“I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degredation left in the world.”

~ CHARLES DICKENS
British author
(1812-1870)

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”

• • •

“The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.”

• • •

“There is only one step from fanaticism to barbarism.”

• • •

“To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature."

~ DENIS DIDEROT
French philosopher and writer of the Enlightenment
(1713 – 1784)

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"

Priest: "No, not if you did not know."

Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"

~ ANNIE DILLARD
From 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'
Pulitzer Prize-winning American author
(b. 1945)

Dedicated to Sadists

~ OTTO DIX
German painter and printmaker noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and of the brutality of war, widely considered one of the most important artists of the
Neue Sachlichkeit.
1891-1969

“Yup, we need a Nope. A nun who is Pope.”

• • •

"We’re trading a dogmatic president [Bush] for one who’s shopping for a Dog [Obama]. It feels good."

• • •

"The president's certitude - the idea that he can see into people's souls and that god tells him what is right, then W. tells us if he feels like it - is disturbing. It equates disagreeing with him to disagreeing with Him.... America is awash in selective piety, situational moralists and cherry-picking absolutists."

• • •

"As international lunacy goes, itwas hard to beat the pope saying that condoms spread AIDS."

• • •

“Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) devoted his Vatican career to rooting out any hint of what he considered deviance. The problem is, he was obsessed with enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy and somehow missed the graver danger to the most vulnerable members of the flock.

“The sin-crazed “Rottweiler” was so consumed with sexual mores — issuing constant instructions on chastity, contraception, abortion — that he didn’t make time for curbing sexual abuse by priests who were supposed to pray with, not prey on, their young charges.

“American bishops have gotten politically militant in recent years, opposing the health care bill because its language on abortion wasn’t vehement enough, and punishing Catholic politicians who favor abortion rights and stem cell research. They should spend as much time guarding the kids already under their care as they do championing the rights of those who aren’t yet born.”

~ MAUREEN DOWD
Washington DC-based columnist for The New York Times and best-selling author
awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1999
(b. 1952)

"War is the trade of kings."

~ JOHN DRYDEN
English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright
(1631-1700)

"If god were suddenly condemned to live the life which he has inflicted upon men, He would kill himself."

~ ALEXANDRE DUMAS
(père)
French novelist
(1802 – 1870)

"My mother used to say that in our land there were enough gods for women to have at least one on their side, while your religion has three in one and they are all men. Even the bird."

• • •

"I grew up in another language, under another sun. I believe what I need to believe to get by."

• • •

"Rome was the natural home of courtesans. Indeed, it had been their birthplace. A city full of sophisticated clerics, too secular to be saints, especially when it came to matters of the flesh, had soon created its own court, with women as refined out of bed as they were wayward in it."

• • •

"I...am not much of a praying man -- I have never quite understood if I am talking to god or to myself."

• • •

"Imagine it. How would it be if the end was not Heaven or Hell but just the absence of life? I swear that would be Heaven enough for most of us."

• • •

“’Over the years I have come to realize that we nuns are wonderfully adept at seeing what we believe.’ She hesitates. ‘Or rather believing what we want to see, perhaps even when it is not there.’”

~ SARAH DUNANT
English novelist
(b. 1950)

"The trouble with theocracy is that everyone wants to be Theo."

~ JAMES DUNN
For many years the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham. Since his retirement he has been made Emeritus Lightfoot Professor. He is a leading British New Testament scholar.
(b. 1939)

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

~ CLARENCE W. DUPNlK
Pima County Arizona Sheriff
(b. 1936)

"No man, and least of all myself, could ever disentangle the feelings that animated him."

~ THOMAS EAKINS
American realist painter, photographer[2], sculptor, and fine arts educator.
(1844 – 1916)

"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."

~ UMBERTO ECO
Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist
(b. 1932)

"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal god. So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake… Religion is all bunk."

• • •

"So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake. Religion is all bunk."

• • •

“My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it."

~ THOMAS EDISON
American inventor: the phonograph and long-lasting, practical electric light bulb
(1847 – 1931)

“Gray wolves were exterminated long ago in most Western states, a campaign of blood lust, terror and bounty kills.”

• • •

“In ... the man some call crazy, they hear a voice of sanity.”

~ TIMOTHY EGAN
American writer and journalist;
2006 winner of the National Book Award; 2001 Pulitzer Prize
(b. n/a)

"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

• • •

"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of 'humility.' This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism."

• • •

"It seems to me that the idea of a personal god is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. … Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior 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."

• • •

"A man's ethical behavior 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."

• • •

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

• • •

"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, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

~ ALBERT EINSTEIN
German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history
(1879 – 1955)

”Every gun that is made, 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.”

• • •

“What counts is not necessarily the size of the Dog in the fight – but it’s the size of the fight in the Dog.”

~ DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

"Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error."

• • •

“Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.”

~ GEORGE ELIOT
English novelist
(1819-1880)

“The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.”

• • •

“I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.”

• • •

“That which we call sin in others, is only experiment for us.”

• • •

“The faith that stands on authority is not faith.”

 

"Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind."

• • •

"Where there is a wall, there's a door."

~ RALPH WALDO EMERSON
American essayist, philosopher and poet ,,
leader of the transcendentalist movement of the early 19th century
(1803 – 1882)

"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 cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

~ EPICURUS

“Unfortunately, I think that selective use of killing civilians has been very much on the agenda for fighting terror. The army believes that a weak spot of Israeli deterrence is its strong commitment not to kill civilians, and there has grown the sense that it might have to temporarily overcome that weakness in order to restore deterrence.”

~ YARON EZRAHI
Political Scientist at Hebrew University
(b. 1940)

“The only real nation is humanity.”

~ PAUL FARMER
American anthropologist and physician; Professor of Medical
Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard University
(b. 1959)

"The larger problem is the inability of the church leadership to come to terms with the modern world."

~ HUBERT FEICHTLBAUER
Austrian journalist; Catholic activist and reformer
(b. 1932)

"Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide."

• • •

"Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement."

~ FEDERICO FELLINI
Italian movie director
(1920-1993)

"Religious systems are inherently conservative, science inherently progressive,”

~ TIMOTHY FERRIS
American science writer
(b. 1944)

“You can talk about the finesse of diplomatic ties and maneuverings, but what Kenny was actually saying was that you have to prioritize the victims of abuse, and you have to assert very loudly that this is a republic and civil law has to take precedence over canon law,”

~ DIARMAID FERRITER
Professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin.
(b. 1972)

“It is not as in the Bible, that god created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.”

~ LUDWIG FEUERBACH
German philosopher and anthropologist
(1804–1872)

“If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”

• • •

"How well I remember my first encounter with The Devil's Brew. I happened to stumble across a case of bourbon--and went right on stumbling for several days thereafter."

• • •

"I exercise extreme self control. I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast."

• • •

"I certainly do not drink all the time. I have to sleep you know."

• • •

"More people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol."

• • •

"To me, these biblical stories are just so many fish stories, and I'm not specifically referring to Jonah and the whale. I need indisputable proof of anything I'm asked to believe."

• • •

"If I ever found a church that didn't believe in knocking all the other churches, I might consider joining it."

~ W.C. FIELDS
American comedian, actor, juggler and writer. Fields was known for his comic persona as a misanthropic and hard-drinking egotist who remained a sympathetic character despite his snarling contempt for dogs, children and women.
(1880– 1946)

"Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion. "

 

“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

~ GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists.
Known especially for the novel, Madame Bovary
(1821 – 1880)

"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine  and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny  imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells."

~ JOHN FLYNN

"I can’t understand the word 'war' anyhow. I can’t understand people killing each other for a piece of land. Can you understand that?"

~ ARI FOLMAN

"I'm an atheist. But I absolutely love religions and the rituals. Even though I don't believe in God."

• • •

"I absolutely believe what Ellie [her character in Carl Sagan's Contact] 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 don't know any better."

~ JODIE FOSTER
American actress, film director, and producer.
(b. 1962)

“I’m a polyatheist - there are many gods I don’t believe in.”

~ DAN FOUTS
Former American football quarterback for the San Diego Chargers
(b. 1951)

"The role of the international Christian community in this cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, the fact remains that this belief system is being spread by so-called Christians... Children accused of witchcraft are often incarcerated in churches for weeks on end and beaten, starved and tortured in order to extract a confession,."

~ GARY FOXCROFT
British program director of Stepping Stones Nigeria
(b. 1979)

Click √ on image above right for more information about
Child Witches of Nigeria and Stepping Stones Nigeria

"The truth is, no miracle can, from the nature of things, be stated as an established fact; to do so will always involve drawing a premature conclusion."

• • •

"There will always be a fungus, a star, or a disease that human science does not know of, and for this reason it must always behoove the philosopher, in the name of the undying ignorance of man, to deny every miracle."

• • •

"Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened."

~ ANATOLE FRANCE

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."

• • •

"The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance."

• • •

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."

• • •

"In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the want of it."

• • •

"Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."

~ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“In every case where people use animals to make money and when there are financial difficulties the animals’ lives are put at risk.”

~ PETER FRICKER
Canadian journalist Projects and Communications Director of
the Vancouver Humane Society
(b. n/a)

“I turned to speak to God, About the world’s despair; But to make bad matters worse, I found God wasn’t there.”

• • •

“Forgive, O Lord, my little joke on Thee and I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.”

• • •

“I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.”

~ ROBERT FROST

“Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.”

~ JAMES A. FROUDE
English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine
(1818-1894)

“Hunting Jews has always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians, who never played it, are paying the bill.”

~ EDUARDO GALEANO
Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist
(b. 1940)

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

~ GALILEO
Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher
who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution
(1564– 1642)

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."

• • •

"God has no religion."

• • •

"The most henious and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives."

~ MOHANDAS GANDHI

"La incredulidad es mas resistente que la fé porque la sostienen los sentidos."*

“Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.”

• • •

"No creo en dios pero le temo."*

“I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.”

~ GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

* Translated from English

“Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”

• • •

“The specific elements of Christianity are not something I’m a huge believer in.”

~ BILL GATES

"Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created."

~ PAUL GAUGUIN

“We feel the only way to fight the stigma toward atheists and agnostics is for people to feel like they know them, and they’re your neighbors and your friends. It’s the same idea as the out-of-the-closet campaign for gay rights.”

• • •

“Nothing fails like prayer.”

~ ANNIE LAURIE GAYLOR
American; co-founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation;
editor of Freethought Today; author
(b. 1955)

“Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.”

• • •

 “Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.”

~ JEAN GENET

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE WISE DOG

One day there passed by a company of cats a wise dog.

And as he came near and saw that they were very intent and heeded him not, he stopped.

Then there arose in the midst of the company a large, grave cat
looked upon them and said, "Brethren, pray ye; and when ye have prayed again and yet again, nothing doubting, verily then it shall rain mice."

And when the dog heard this he laughed in his heart and turned from them saying, "O blind and foolish cats, has it not been written and have I not known and my fathers before me, that that which raineth for prayer and faith and supplication is not mice but bones."

• • •

THE WISE KING

Once there ruled in the distant city of Wirani a king who was both mighty and wise. And he was feared for his might and loved for his wisdom.

Now, in the heart of that city was a well, whose water was cool and crystalline, from which all the inhabitants drank, even the king and his courtiers; for there was no other well.

One night when all were asleep, a witch entered the city, and poured seven drops of strange liquid into the well, and said, "From this hour he who drinks this water shall become mad."

Next morning all the inhabitants, save the king and his lord chamberlain, drank from the well and became mad, even as the witch had foretold.

And during that day the people in the narrow streets and in the market places did naught but whisper to one another, "The king is mad. Our king and his lord chamberlain have lost their reason. Surely we cannot be ruled by a mad king. We must dethrone him."

That evening the king ordered a golden goblet to be filled from the well. And when it was brought to him he drank deeply, and gave it to his lord chamberlain to drink.

And there was great rejoicing in that distant city of Wirani, because its king and its lord chamberlain had regained their reason.

~ KHALIL GIBRAN
Lebanese artist, poet and writer
(1883 – 1931)

“Historically, there was a view within the Catholic Church that there was a parallel law, that they had their own system of law, and that was the law to which they were accountable, At a minimum, that blurred the understanding of the necessity for full compliance with the law of the state.

“The Catholic Church is perfectly entitled to have its own view and its own rule and to view matters according to its own light. But this is a republic. And there is one law. Everybody in the state — irrespective of whether they’re ordinary citizens doing everyday work, or a priest or a bishop — has to comply with the law.”

~ EAMON GILMORE
Irish Labour Party politician and the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade in the Government of the 31st Dáil; leader of the Labour Party
(b. 1955)

“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."

• • •

"Atheism,in its negation of gods, is, at the same time, the strongest affirmation of man and, through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose and beauty."

• • •

"Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man's lot since gods began."

• • •

"A glance at life today, at its disintegrating character, its conflicting interests with their hatreds, crimes and greed, suffices to prove the sterility of theistic morality."

• • •

"Prometheus chained to the Rock of Ages is doomed to remain the prey of the vultures of darkness. Unbind Prometheus, and you dispel the night and its horrors."

~ EMMA GOLDMAN
American anarchist born in Russia known for her political activism,
writing and speeches
(1869 – 1940)

"It helps if the woman looks like a boy.”

~ JON- JON GOULIAN

Gatesca pantomima

Murió la verdad

Farándula de charlatanes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Meaning of life is to make life meaningful.”

• • •

"Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance"

• • •

“Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.”

• • •

“It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.”

• • •

"To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason - to believe something by faith - is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect."

• • •

“The notion that evil is non-rational is a more significant claim for [Terry] Eagleton* than at first appears, because he is (in this book [On Evil] as in others of his recent 'late period' prolific burst) anxious to rewrite theology: God (whom he elsewhere tells us is nonexistent, but this is no barrier to his being lots of other things for Eagleton too, among them Important) is not to be regarded as rational: with reference to the Book of Job Eagleton says, 'To ask after God's reasons for allowing evil, so [some theologians] claim, is to imagine him as some kind of rational or moral being, which is the last thing he is.' This is priceless: with one bound God is free of responsibility for 'natural evil'—childhood cancers, tsunamis that kill tens of thousands—and for moral evil also even though 'he' is CEO of the company that purposely manufactured its perpetrators; and 'he' is incidentally exculpated from blame for the hideous treatment meted out to Job.

“Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic—that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them. Neither are ideologies that loosen their grip easily, and people who need the security of adherence to a big dominating ideology, however much they kick and scratch but without daring to leave go, hold on to it every bit as tightly as it holds onto them. The result is, of course, strangulation, but alas not mutual strangulation: the ideology always wins.”

~ A.C. GRAYLING
British philosopher. In 2011 he founded and became the first master of New College of the Humanities, a private undergraduate college in London. Until June 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
(b. 1949)

*TERRY EAGLETON - British literary theorist (b. 1943)

“Westerners eavesdropping on native myths are in fact stealing them, just as they have stolen the very land.”

~ PAUL GREENBERG
American author and essayist
focusing on fish, aquaculture and the future of the ocean
(b. 1967)

“There was no prayer circle before this show.”

~ KATHY GRIFFIN
American actress, model, stand-up comedian,
author and homosexoal rights advocate
(b. 1960)

“The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

• • •

“Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

~ JONATHAN HAIDT
Psychologist, University of Virginia;
Author, researcher specializing in the psychological bases of morality
across different cultures and political ideology
(b. n/a)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god."

• • •

"Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe."

• • •

"The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.

• • •

"Christianity has probably the most flexible morals of any religion, because Jesus left no code of law behind him like Moses or Muhammad, and his moral precepts are so different from those of ordinary life that no society has ever made any serious attempt to carry them out, such as was possible in the case of Israel and Islam. But every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions. This is no doubt an argument for Christianity as against other religions, but not as against none at all, or as against a religion which will frankly admit that its mythology and morals are provisional. That is the only sort of religion that would satisfy the scientific mind, and it is very doubtful whether it could properly be called a religion at all."

• • •

"The time has gone by when a Huxley could believe that while science might indeed remould traditional mythology, traditional morals were impregnable and sacrosanct to it. We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion."

• • •

"My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world."

~ J.B.S. HALDANE
British geneticist and evolutionary biologist
(1892 - 1964)

“So if Jesus is God, who does he pray to? [If you say] ‘God,’ doesn’t that make Jesus a narcissist?”

~ OMAR HAMMAMI
aka
ABU MANSOOR AL-AMRIKI
“the American”
American born al-Shabaab Jihadist commander in Somalia
(b. 1984)

“If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’  And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is, ‘Probably because of something you did.’"

~ JACK HANDEY
"Deep Thoughts"
American humorist
(b. 1949)

Click √ on Image to view other Muhammed cartoons

Published March 19, 2009

~ JENS JULIUS HANSEN
Danish political cartoonist
(b. 1971)

"To be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped."

• • •

That one true heart was left behind!
What feeling do we ever find
To equal among human kind
A dog's fidelity!

~ THOMAS HARDY
English poet and novelist of the naturalist movement
(1840 – 1928)

“The tendency to turn human judgments into divine commands makes religion one of the most dangerous forces in the world.”

~ GEORGIA HARKNESS
American theologian in the Methodist tradition
(1891 - 1974)

“The idea that somehow we are getting our morality out of the Judeo-Christian tradition is bad history and bad science.”

• • •

"Without death, the influence of faith-based religion would be unthinkable. Clearly, the fact of death is intolerable to us, and faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life beyond the grave."

• • •

“Any scientist must concede that we don't fully understand the universe. But neither the Bible nor the Qur'an represents our best understanding of the universe. That is exquisitely clear.”

• • •

“Every specific science from cosmology to psychology to economics has surpassed and superseded what the Bible tells us is true about our world.“

• • •

"It can be difficult to think like a scientist. But few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion."

~ SAM HARRIS
American non-fiction writer and proponent of scientific skepticism
(b. 1967)

“A civilized society looks with horror upon the abuse and torture of children or adults. Even where capital punishment is practiced, the aim is to implement it as mercifully as possible. Are we to believe then that a holy god - our heavenly father - is less just than the courts of men?”

~ SIDNEY HATCH
American Olympic athlete, marathon runner;
awarded the Purple Heart and Distinguished Service Cross
as well as the French Croix de Guerre for "extraordinary heroism" during WWI
(1883 – 1966)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"There is no heaven; it's a fairy story."

• • •

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

• • •

"I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first."

• • •

"Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."

• • •

"What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary."

• • •

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to ... set the Universe going."

• • •

"Our experience has been that when we open up a new range of observations, we often find what we had not expected. That is when physics becomes really exciting, because we are learning something new about the universe."

• • •

"I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease. But it taught me not to pity myself, because others were worse off and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition. I am lucky to be working in theoretical physics, one of the few areas in which disability is not a serious handicap."

• • •

"We should seek the greatest value of our action."

~ STEPHEN HAWKING
British theoretical physicist;
professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge
(b. 1942)

“The real obscenities on this planet have very little to do with sex.”

~ HUGH HEFFNER
American magazine publisher, founder and chief creative officer of Playboy Enterprises.
(b. 1926)