Positive Atheism's Big List of Quotations
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Everywhere all who cherish religious liberty should break through every hindering barrier to unite in the support of this common cause. |
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Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. |
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Steven Weinberg Check our Big List of Steven Weinberg Quotations
If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers. Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not. Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things -- that takes religion. Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion. Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own. It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors? |
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Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
Moral indignation -- jealousy with a halo. I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion. I was indeed a prodigy of Early Impiety.... There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as there was a time when I believed there was a Devil.... Suddenly the broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie.... I sensed it was a silly story long before I dared to admit even to myself that it was a silly story. For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty.... Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity? I think that it stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly organized system of prejudices and antagonism in existence. Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It presents many faces to the world, but everywhere it is systematic in its fight against freedom. Indeed Christianity passes. Passes -- it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits. There's lots will take things as they are -- fat and stupid; and lots will be worried by a sort of feeling that it's all wrong, and that they ought to be doing something. Now whenever things are that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord. Very likely you've seen the same thing. It's energy in a gale of funk, and turned clean inside out. These cages will be full of psalms and hymns and piety. And those of a less simple sort will work in a bit of -- what is it? -- eroticism.
Wells probably didn't say this: "As with the Christian religion, the worst argument for socialism is its adherents." |
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Edward Alexander Westermarck (1862-1939) Increasing knowledge lessens the sphere of the supernatural. Could it be brought home to people that there is no absolute standard in morality, they would perhaps be somewhat more tolerant in their judgments, and more apt to listen to the voice of reason. |
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Allen Wheelis (b. 1915) Clearly it is not reason that has failed. What has failed -- as it has always failed -- is the attempt to achieve certainty, to reach an absolute, to find the course of human events to a final end.....It is not reason that has promised to eliminate risk in human undertakings; it is the emotional needs of men. The world is full of danger and opportunity. The strong adapt by changing the world, the weak by changing themselves. The weak look inward at desires, outward at possibilities of gratification, measure the danger, find the risk to be high, and try to bring things in line by reducing their needs. The unafraid leap into the fray, seize such power as they can, move things around, rearrange the world to fit their needs. One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles. |
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Christianity exceeds all other faiths in its power to deform and finally invert the mental process. |
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Ralph K White An ideology ... gives significance to the lives of individuals who might otherwise be overwhelmed by a sense of purposelessness and insignificance. Usually some kind of black-and-white picture is an inherent part of the ideology, and gives meaning to the struggle between the good guys and the bad guys. |
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William Allen White (1868-1944) Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others. |
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Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race.... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un-Christianlike than theology. As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death. The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature. |
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Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world -- a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious, surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity. There is no god more divine than yourself. And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is. I think I could turn and live with animals, This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God.
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The Subtle Fulmination of the Encircled Sea Please Feel Free Grab some quotes to embellish your web site, Use them to introduce the chapters of a book or Poster your wall! Graffiti your (own) fence. That's what this list is for! In using this resource, however, keep in mind that If you decide to build your own online
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