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Gypsy Rose Lee [Rose Louise Hovick] (1914-1970)
American stripper

Praying is like a rocking chair -- it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere.
-- Gypsy Rose Lee, as quoted by E Haldeman-Julius, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

God is love, but get it in writing.
-- Gypsy Rose Lee, quoted from Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations

She's descended from a long line her mother listened to.
-- Gypsy Rose Lee (attributed: source unknown)

Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870)
Brilliant Confederate general, whose military genius was probably the greatest single factor in keeping the Confederacy alive through the four years of the American Civil War (1861-1865)

Is it not strange that the descendants of those Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion have always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?
-- Robert E Lee, letter to his wife, December 27, 1856, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

Rev James Legge (1815-1897)
Oxford University, one of the highest European authorities on China and Confucius

Foremost among these we must rank his distinct enunciation of the Golden Rule, deduced by him from his study of man's mental condition. Several times he gave that rule in express words: "What you do not like when done to yourself do not to others."
-- Rev James Legge, quoted from John E Remsberg, The Christ, p. 375, on Confucius teaching the so-called Golden Rule long before Christ is alleged to have lived

It has been said that he only gave the rule in a negative form; but he understood it also in its positive and most comprehensive form, and deplored on one occasion at least, that he had not himself always attained to taking the initiative in doing to others as he would have them do to him.
-- Rev James Legge, quoted from John E Remsberg, The Christ, p. 376, responding to the claim that Christ originated the positive statement of the Golden Rule, "Do unto others..." -- the negative version sometimes being denigrated as the Silver Rule

This, too, is a prominent tenet of the Christian religion. As the result of this, Confucianism became and has remained the state religion of China, while Christianity became and has remained the state religion of Europe.
-- Rev James Legge, quoted from John E Remsberg, The Christ, p. 376, comparing Confusianism with Christianity in respect to both teaching absolute obedience to national authority

Tom Lehrer
American mathematician, songwriter

That fellow was no fool
Who taught our Sunday School,
And neither was our kindly Parson Brown.
(I'd better leave this line out just to be on the safe side!)
In my home town.
-- Tom Lehrer, "My Home Town"

'The Vatican Rag'
First you get down on your knees,
     Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect, and
               Genuflect!
               Genuflect!
               Genuflect!
Do whatever steps you want, if
     You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
          Everybody say his own
          Kyrie eleison,
          Doin' the Vatican Rag.

     Get in line in that processional,
          Step into that small confessional,
     There, the guy who's got religion'll
          Tell you if your sin's original.
               If it is, try playin' it safer,
               Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
     Two, four, six, eight,
     Time to transubstantiate!
 
So get down upon your knees,
     Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect, and
               Genuflect!
               Genuflect!
               Genuflect!
Make a cross on your abdomen,
     When in Rome do like a Roman,
          Ave Maria,
          (Gee it's good to see ya!)
               Gettin' ecstatic an'
               Sorta dramatic an'
          Doin' the Vatican Rag!
-- Tom Lehrer, "The Vatican Rag"

John Leland (1754-1841)
Baptist Minister in Massachusetts; Separationist

The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence; whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians. Test Oaths and established creeds should be avoided as the worst of evils.
-- John Leland, Short Essays on Government (1820), from Anson Phelps Stokes, Church and State in the United States Vol. I, p. 355, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

To say that religion cannot stand without a state establishment is not only contrary to fact (as has been proved already) but is a contradiction in phrase. Religion must have stood a time before any law could have been made about it; and if it did stand almost three hundred years without law it can still stand without it.
-- John Leland, The Connecticut Dissenters Strong Box, Number One, 1802, quoted from from Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805

If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgment, let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise let men be free.
-- John Leland, The Connecticut Dissenters Strong Box, Number One, 1802, quoted from from Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805

Let it suffice on this head to say, that it is not possible in the nature of things to establish religion by human laws without perverting the design of civil law and oppressing the people.
-- John Leland, The Yankee Spy (pen name: Jack Nipps), 1794, quoted from from Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805

Is it the duty of a deist to support that which he believes to be a cheat and imposition? Is it the duty of the Jew to support the religion of Jesus Christ, when he really believes that he was an imposter? Must the papist be forced to pay men for preaching down the supremacy of the pope, whom they are sure is the head of the church? Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics.
-- John Leland, The Yankee Spy (pen name: Jack Nipps), 1794, quoted from from Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805

To read in the New Testament, that the Lord has ordained that those that preach the gospel shall live by its institutions and precepts, sounds very harmonical; but to read in a state constitution, that the legislature shall require men to maintain teachers of piety, religion and morality, sounds very discordant.
-- John Leland, The Yankee Spy (pen name: Jack Nipps), 1794, quoted from from Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805

In the second article it is said, "is the right and duty of all men publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being." This article would read much better in a catechism than in a state constitution, and sound more concordant in a pulpit than in a statehouse.
-- John Leland, discussing the second article of the Massachusetts state constitution of 1780, The Yankee Spy (pen name: Jack Nipps), 1794, quoted from from Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805

And the reason why public worship is enjoined by authority, and private worship is omitted, is only to pave the way for some religious establishment by human law, and force taxes from the people to support avaricious priests.
-- John Leland, The Yankee Spy (pen name: Jack Nipps), 1794, quoted from from Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805

What leads legislators into this error, is confounding sins and crimes together -- making no difference between moral evil and state rebellion: not considering that a man may be infected with moral evil, and yet be guilty of no crime, punishable by law. If a man worships one God, three Gods, twenty Gods, or no God -- if he pays adoration one day in a week, seven days or no day -- wherein does he injure the life, liberty or property of another? Let any or all these actions be supposed to be religious evils of an enormous size, yet they are not crimes to be punished by laws of state, which extend no further, in justice, than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbor.
-- John Leland, The Yankee Spy (pen name: Jack Nipps), 1794, quoted from from Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805

In a well regulated state it will be the business of the legislature to prevent sectaries of different denominations from molesting and disturbing each other; to ordain that no part of the community shall be permitted to perplex and harass the other for any supposed heresy, but that each individual shall be allowed to have and enjoy, profess and maintain his own system of religion, provided it does not issue in overt acts of treason against the state undermining the peace and order of society.
-- John Leland, The Yankee Spy (pen name: Jack Nipps), 1794, quoted from from Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760-1805

John Lennon (1940-1980)
British composer, rock musician; leader of The Beatles

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first -- rock and roll or Christianity.
-- John Lennon, Evening Standard (London, 4 March 1966)

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
-- John Lennon, God, (1970)

As soon as you're born, they make you feel small...
-- John Lennon, Working Class Hero (1970)

There ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky
Now that I found out, I know I can cry!
-- John Lennon, I Found Out (1970)

Imagine there's no heaven; it's easy if you try
No hell below us, above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today ...

Imagine there's no countries; it isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace...
     -- John Lennon, Imagine

Max Lerner (b. 1902)
US author, columnist, who coined the term McCarthyism

But it remains true that one of the articles of the democratic belief in America is the disbelief in any state church or any equation between membership in a church and membership in the American commonwealth. This distinction is crucial to the idea of religious freedom as Americans have practiced it.
     The issue of religious freedom in America thus goes beyond discrimination and also beyond the pluralism of the sects, to the core principle of the separation of church and state, as embodied in the constitutional prohibition against any 'establishment of religion.' Given the experience of Europe as well as that of the early Puritan settlers, the generation of Madison's famous Remonstrance saw that an official recognition of a "religious establishment" would hamper religious freedom.
      -- Max Lerner, America as a Civilization (1957) p. 713, quoted from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

There is a hate layer of opinion and emotion in America. There will be other McCarthys to come who will be hailed as its heroes.
-- Max Lerner, "McCarthyism: The Smell of Decay," in New York Post (5 April 1950; repr. in The Unfinished Country, pt. 4, 1959). The word "McCarthyism" was first coined in this article, as Lerner affirmed in a later column, 3 Feb. 1954: "For my own part I doubt seriously whether the word will outlast the political power of the man from whom it derives." Quoted from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
-- Max Lerner, "The Vigilantes and the Chain of Fear" (first published in New York Post, 24 June 1953; repr. in The Unfinished Country, pt. 4, 1959), said of the McCarthy book burnings. Quoted from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations.

James Henry Leuba (1867-1946)
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, appointed in 1897; he made his most substantial contributions in the field of the psychology of religion; Leuba conducted a study of the religious beliefs of scientists for Harper's in 1934 (of which a much more recent study emerged at about the turn of the millennium: see the letter, "Leading scientists still reject God" that appeared in Nature for comparisons of percentages and other details)

It is, furthermore, essential to intellectual and moral advances that the beliefs that come into existence should have free play. Antagonistic beliefs must have the chance of proving their worth in open contest. It is this way scientific theories are tested, and in this way also, religious and ethical conceptions should be tried. But a fair struggle cannot take place when people are dissuaded from seeking knowledge, or when knowledge is hidden.
-- Professor James H Leuba, quoted in David Brooks, The Necessity of Atheism "Preface"

Leonard W Levy (b. 1923)
American historian

The wall of separation ensures the government's freedom from religion and the individual's freedom of religion.
-- Leonard W Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment, 1986, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

Clive Staples [C S 'Jack'] Lewis (1898-1963)
Irish novelist; writer of children's fantasy books; extraordinarily popular apologist for the Christian religion; and friend of J R R Tolkien, Warnie (Lewis's brother), Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, Dr. Robert Havard, Owen Barfield, Neville Coghill and others, known as the "Inklings," who met weekly in Lewis' quarters and various other places from 1933 through 1949 and at The Eagle and Child Pub (known to locals as The Bird and Baby) from 1939 through 1962 "to drink beer and discuss the books they were writing

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C S Lewis, in "God in the Dock"

Joseph Lewis (1889-1968)
American philanthropist and publisher, founder of Freethought Press Association, known for giving away many thousands of copies of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason to high-school students

[Atheism] believes that truth for truth's sake is the highest ideal and that virtue is its own reward.
-- Joseph Lewis, from The Philosophy of Atheism

A precept claiming infallibility should certainly possess the universality of the law of gravitation and the perfection of the arithmetical table. If it fails to possess these undeviating qualities, its imperfection is self-evident and its value either greatly diminished or useless.
-- Joseph Lewis, from The Ten Commandments ("The Seventh Commandment" -- page 457)

[Excerpt]:
Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter closed?
-- Joseph Lewis, from The Philosophy of Atheism

[Passage]:
If Atheism writes upon the blackboard of the Universe a question mark, it writes it for the purpose of stating that there is a question yet to be answered. Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter solved? Does not the word "God" only confuse and make more difficult the solution by assuming a conclusion that is utterly groundless and palpably absurd?
-- Joseph Lewis, from The Philosophy of Atheism

Facts and not merely opinions are what we want. Emotionalism is not a substitute for the truth.
-- Joseph Lewis, from The Philosophy of Atheism

Man's inhumanity to man will continue as long as man loves God more than he loves his fellow man.
-- Joseph Lewis, from An Atheist Manifesto

I do not believe that if there is a God of this vast universe that such a God would create a hell to torment to all eternity helpless and innocent human beings. I defend the God of the religionists against the libels of his own believers.
-- Joseph Lewis, answer to preacher Jack Coe

As superstition is the weed of the brain, it grows perfusely, once started.
-- Joseph Lewis, The Ten Commandments (page 202)

Praying as a public function, particularly when led by a clergyman, is a vulgar display of an exclusively personal matter.
-- Joseph Lewis, "Ingersoll the Magnificent" (Memorial Dedication Address, August 11, 1954)

Of the ten crimes which Biblical Hebrew law punished by stoning, nine have ceased to be offenses in modern society.
-- Joseph Lewis, from The Ten Commandments ("The Eighth Commandment")

Imagine using as an authority in the matter of marriage the opinion of a celibate priest!
-- Joseph Lewis, from The Philosophy of Atheism

When the tyranny of the state is combined with the hypocrisy of the church, you have a modern example of the twin vultures that have devoured man, and his rights, throughout the ages.
-- Joseph Lewis, "Ingersoll the Magnificent" (Memorial Dedication Address, August 11, 1954)

On too many occasions, especially in matters concerning purported conversations and messages from gods, mystery has been employed by charlatans to hoodwink the people.
-- Joseph Lewis, The Ten Commandments, p. 4

Changing a rod into a serpent and the serpent back into a rod may be clever magic, but how does such a demonstration prove that Moses spoke to God? If the only thing necessary to prove the truth of an extraordinary claim were to demonstrate an ability to bewilder, there would be no more mysteries to solve.
     If a person claims that he can bring the dead back to life, and in proof of that power pulls a rabbit out of a hat, that is hardly a demonstration of the truth of his claim; it is merely an example of his ability in the art of deception. If he claims that he can fly without wings and without the use of mechanical help of any kind, and in proof of his ability pulls another rabbit out of another hat, that is not proof of his ability to fly, but of his ability to lie, and he will without much hesitation be condemned as a faker. The demonstration of one thing has absolutely no bearing in proving the truth of the other, when there is no relationship between them.
-- Joseph Lewis, The Ten Commandments, pp. 66-7

Religion is all profit. They have no merchandise to buy, no commissions to pay, and no refunds to make for unsatisfactory service and results....
     Their commodity is fear. They blackmail their parishioners with threats of hell and damnation. These poor deluded people give them their hard earned money to save them from a hell that does not exist, and from eternal torment that was invented by the perverted minds of priests to rob the living and in addition, they are exempt from taxation! Insult to injury!
     Let me tell you that religion is the cruelest fraud ever perpetrated upon the human race. It is the last of the great scheme of thievery that man must legally prohibit so as to protect himself from the charlatans who prey upon the ignorance and fears of the people.
     The penalty for this type of extortion should be as severe as it is of other forms of dishonesty.
-- Joseph Lewis, "Ingersoll the Magnificent" (Memorial Dedication Address, August 11, 1954)

The news of Mr. Edison's death fell upon me like a pall. I felt as if a great void had been left in the world. What a pity that he could not have stayed the hand of death so that he could continue to unravel the secrets of Nature. What sort of "design" can there be in life when this grandest of all men is cut down unceremoniously by the Grim Reaper's scythe while idiots and imbeciles live on? This great genius is irreparably lost to the world.
     -- Joseph Lewis, "A Visit With Thomas Alva Edison"

With this recognition of the finality of death, no one should willingly withhold acts that would bring benefits, joy or happiness to others.
-- Joseph Lewis, from An Atheist Manifesto

Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
American novelist, Nobel Prize winner

It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
-- Sinclair Lewis, in Will Durant, On the Meaning of Life, quoted from James A Haught, 2000 Years of Disbelief

When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
-- Sinclair Lewis, quoted from ThinkExist.com

God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished. God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise until my observed results equal my calculated results, or, in pious glee, I discover and assault my error. God give me strength not to trust God.
-- Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (scientist's creed)

I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity.
-- Sinclair Lewis, quoted from ThinkExist.com

Tom Leykis
Radio Talk-Show Host

Have you ever heard a radio talk-show host call himself an agnostic? Do you know what an agnostic is, in the radio talk-show business? An agnostic is someone who just got out of a meeting in the general manager's office.
-- Tom Leykis, October 25, 1999; 3 O'Clock hour, quoted by Cliff Walker

The Subtle Fulmination of the Encircled Sea

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