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Lyman Tower Sargent
American sociologist; educator, University of Missouri, Saint Louis

The distinction should be made between a simple belief in something and an ideology.... An ideology or a belief system can be clearly distinguished from an individual’s belief in something. An ideology must be a more or less interrelated collection of beliefs that provide the believer with a fairly thorough picture of the entire world.
-- Lyman Sargent, Contemporary World Ideologies (1969), thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"

The history of American education would have been much different without New Harmony and other secular communities that emphasized education. Many of the people who joined these communities wanted to better educate themselves and their children, and they wanted to educate the outside world by their example.
     At the base of these communitarian ideals was a form of environmental determinism combined with the belief that people would choose to change -- to improve -- themselves, their children, and their environment. Members believed that intentional communities could provide a better life than could be achieved through private ownership and competition. Even with the high failure rate and the personal struggles involved, many communitarians continued to believe in cooperative lifestyles.
     Most of the early secular communities were democratic although not consensual; they aimed at equality and generally practiced it. Economically, most groups were communal, holding all property in common and distributing goods on the basis of need.
-- Lyman Sargent, "Dreams and Other Products of Nineteenth-Century Communities"

George Sarton (1884-1955)
Harvard historian of science

The most malicious kind of hatred is that which is built upon a theological foundation.
-- George Sarton, History of Science, from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

It will suffice here to evoke a few glorious names without contemporary equivalents in the West: Jabir ibn Haiyan, al-Kindi, al-Khwarizmi, al-Fargani, al-Razi, Thabit ibn Qurra, al-Battani, Hunain ibn Ishaq, al-Farabi, Ibrahim ibn Sinan, al-Masudi, al-Tabari, Abul Wafa, 'Ali ibn Abbas, Abul Qasim, Ibn al-Jazzar, al-Biruni, Ibn Sina, Ibn Yunus, al-Kashi, Ibn al-Haitham, 'Ali Ibn 'Isa al-Ghazali, al-zarqab, Omar Khayyam. A magnificent array of names which it would not be difficult to extend. If anyone tells you that the Middle Ages were scientifically sterile, just quote these men to him, all of whom flourished within a short period, 750 to 1100 AD
-- George Sarton, History of Science, vol. i

Philip Schaff (1819-1893)
Swiss-American historian, theologian

In our country we ask no toleration for religion and its free exercise, but we claim it as an inalienable right.
-- Philip Schaff, Church and State in the United States, 1888, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

The United States furnishes the first example in history of a government deliberately depriving itself of all legislative control of religion.
-- Philip Schaff, Church and State in the United States, 1888, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

The relationship of church and state in the United States secures full liberty of religious thought, speech, and action, within the limits of the public peace and order. It makes persecution impossible.
     Religion and liberty are inseparable. Religion is voluntary, and cannot, and ought not to be forced. This is a fundamental article of the American creed, without distinction of sect or party. Liberty, both civil and religious, is an American instinct.
     Such liberty is impossible on the basis of a union of church and state, where the one of necessity restricts or controls the other. It requires a friendly separation, where each power is entirely independent in its own sphere.
-- Philip Schaff, Church and State in the United States, 1888, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

Edgar W Schein
American psychologist, sociologist

Activity proneness in the service of an ideology ... leads the individual into an irreversible series of commitments from which is forged an identity to which the individual inevitably becomes strongly attached psychologically.
-- Ed Schein, Coercive Persuasion (1961), thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854)
German philosopher

Has creation a final purpose at all, and if so why is it not attained immediately, why does perfection not exist from the very beginning?
-- Friedrich Schelling (attributed: source unknown)

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (b. 1917)
American historian

As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our present-day concern for human rights.... In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights ... not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression, but also for enthusiastic justifications for slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, and genocide. Religion during most of the history of the West saw the trials visited on mankind in this world as ordained by the Almighty to test and purify sinful mortals.... Moreover, religion enshrined hierarchy, authority, and inequality; hated blasphemy; and feared heresy.... It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake.
-- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., speech at the inauguration of Vartan Gregorian as president of Brown University, 1989, from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Science and Technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.
-- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "The Challenge of Change," in New York Times Magazine (27 July 1986), from The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931)
Austrian physician who eventually became a full-time playwright

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.
-- Arthur Schnitzler, Buch der Sprüche und Bedenken (1927), quoted from James A Haught, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Helmut Schoeck, Ph.D
German sociologist

To claim "humanitarian motives" when the motive is envy and its supposed appeasement, is a favorite rhetorical device of politicians today, and has been for at least a hundred and fifty years.
-- Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory Of Social Behavior (1966, tr. 1970), thanks to Laird Wilcox, ed, "The Degeneration of Belief"

[Christianity] provided man for the first time with supernatural beings who, he knew, could neither envy nor ridicule him.
-- Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory Of Social Behavior (1966, tr. 1970)

We envy those whose possessions or achievements are a reflection on our own. They are our neighbors and equals. It is they, above all, who make plain the nature of our failure.
-- Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory Of Social Behavior (1966, tr. 1970)

The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself.
-- Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory Of Social Behavior (1966, tr. 1970)

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
German philosopher

Monotheistic religions alone furnish the spectacle of religious wars, religious persecutions, heretical tribunals, that breaking of idols and destruction of images of the gods, that razing of Indian temples and Egyptian colossi, which had looked on the sun 3,000 years: just because a jealous god had said, "Thou shalt make no graven image."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: a Dialogue (1851), quoted from Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena (1851)

Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (attributed: source unknown)

To free a man from error is to give, not take away.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (attributed: source unknown)

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920)
South African writer, feminist, Marxist

Now we have no God. We have had two: the old God that our fathers handed down to us, that we hated, and never liked; the new one that we made for ourselves, that we loved; but now he has flitted away from us, and we see what he was made of -- the shadow of our highest ideal, crowned and throned. Now we have no God.
-- Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, pt. 2, ch. 1 (1883)

Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act.
-- Olive Schreiner (attributed: source unknown)

Theodore Schroeder (1864-1953)
American lawyer and founder of the Free Speech League, forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union; anti-Mormon pamphleteer ('Lucifer's Lantern')

Religion is ... the most pernicious single influence in human society, without one redeeming feature.
-- Theodore Schroeder, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Charles Schulz (1922-2000)
American comic artist: creator of "Peanuts"

I despise those shallow religious comics. Dennis the Menace, for instance, is the most shallow. When they show him praying -- I just can't stand that sort of thing, talking to God about some cutesy thing that he'd done during the day. I don't think Hank Ketcham has any deep knowledge of things like that.
-- Charles Schulz, to David Templeton in 1999, quoted from Templeton, "My Lunch with Sparky" (2000)

The term that best describes me now is "secular humanist."
-- Charles Schulz, to David Templeton in 1999, quoted from Templeton, "My Lunch with Sparky" (2000)

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.
-- Charles Schulz, Peanuts

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
French philosopher, physician, and musician who founded (1913) and spent much of his life at a missionary hospital in present-day Gabon

There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.
-- Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1968), p. 19

But the others, those who tried to bring Jesus to life at the call of love, found it a cruel task to be honest. The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record.
-- Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1968)

The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. ... But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own.... He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.
-- Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1968)

I am certain and have always stressed that the destination of mankind is to become more and more humane. The ideal of humanity has to be revived.
-- Albert Schweitzer, motto of the Albert Schweitzer Institute

Eugenie Scott
Scientist-turned-activist: foe of Christian Creationism

You can't really be scientifically literate if you don't understand evolution, and you can't be an educated member of society if you don't understand science.
-- Eugenie Scott, quoted from, Monica Lam, "'Profile" Eugene Scott: Berkeley Scientist Leads Fight to Stop Teaching Of Creationism" (San Francisco Chronicle, February 7, 2003)

Science is a limited way of knowing, looking at just the natural world and natural causes. There are a lot of ways human beings understand the universe -- through literature, theology, aesthetics, art or music.
-- Eugenie Scott, quoted from, Monica Lam, "'Profile" Eugene Scott: Berkeley Scientist Leads Fight to Stop Teaching Of Creationism" (San Francisco Chronicle, February 7, 2003)

I think what bothers me so much of the time, "is they take the data and theory and distort it. They must know they're distorting.
-- Eugenie Scott, quoted from, Monica Lam, "'Profile" Eugene Scott: Berkeley Scientist Leads Fight to Stop Teaching Of Creationism" (San Francisco Chronicle, February 7, 2003)

There's a bait and switch going on here because the critics want the textbooks to question whether evolution occurred. And of course they don't because scientists don't question whether evolution occurred.
-- Eugenie Scott, testifying against publisher's changes proposed for Texas Biology textbooks, in "Textbooks at center of evolution debate" (Houston Chronicle: October 31, 2003), quoted from Texas Freedom Network Daily Clips (November 2, 2003)

I learned very early on that it's necessary but not sufficient for scientists to go to school board meetings and say, "We shouldn't be teaching creationism." Being right doesn't mean it'll pass.
-- Eugenie Scott, quoted from, Monica Lam, "'Profile" Eugene Scott: Berkeley Scientist Leads Fight to Stop Teaching Of Creationism" (San Francisco Chronicle, February 7, 2003)

Public schools are where the next generation of leaders are educated and where cultural exchange will take place.
-- Eugenie Scott, quoted from, Monica Lam, "'Profile" Eugene Scott: Berkeley Scientist Leads Fight to Stop Teaching Of Creationism" (San Francisco Chronicle, February 7, 2003)

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