“Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich...All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.”
Tom Paine
“Absolute morality leads logically to absolute intolerance. Once you believe that you have the absolute and final answers to moral questions, why be tolerant of those who refuse to accept your Truth? Religiously based moral systems apply this principle in spades.”
Michael Shermer
Antony Flew:
“Do I sincerely want to be right?”
“No man who is indifferent to argument and to evidence can claim to be concerned for truth. Abriham Lincoln was profoundly right when he wrote, chiding the editor of a Springfield newspaper: ‘It is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.’”
“To the extent that I make claims to knowledge without ensuring that I am indeed in a position to know, I must prejudice my claims both to sincerity and to ingenuousness.”
Antony Flew
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.”
James Madison “The Father of the United States Constitution”
“But so long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans.” [Like Trump]
Bertrand Russell
“We need to stop pretending we'll never understand why the Trump mob believes in him...It's because they're religious -- they've already made space in their heads for shit that dosen't make sense.”
Bill Maher
“To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.”
David Brooks
“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
Mark Twain
[It is normally insulting to not take someone's belief seriously.]
“I'm an atheist. I don't believe in 2700 gods. Christians don't believe in 2699, so they're nearly as atheistic as me.”
Ricky Gervais
“No one believes in Zeus or Thor. Almost everyone is an atheist regarding 99 out of 100 gods; however, most believers simply make one exception for the god that they were told to believe in when they were children.”
Richard Dawkins
“Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young... Inculcating the various competing - competing, note - falsehoods of the major faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal.”
A. C. Grayling
“What is it like to lie to children and tell them that they have an authority, that they must love and be terrified of it at the same time? What's that like? I want to know.”
Christopher Hitchens
George Washington:
“I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain (what I consider the most enviable of all titles) the character of an honest man.”
“We have abundant reason to rejoice, that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition...”
“Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated.”
George Washington
“Truth itself is beyond all human authority.”
Karl Popper
“Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
Bernard Baruch
“Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
W. E. B. Du Bois
“What you know, you know, what you don't know, you don't know. This is true wisdom.”
“The Superior Man is all-embracing and not partial. The inferior man is partial and not all-embracing.”
Confucius
“In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.”
Rene Descartes
“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”
Abraham Lincoln
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Abraham Lincoln
William J. Clifford:
“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
“If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.”
William J. Clifford
Albert Einstein:
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly....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...For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions...In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position...With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.”
Albert Einstein
“It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.”
Galileo Galilei
“Our faiths are similar -- it's merely our religions that may differ..." Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" is the greatest phrase ever written. If everyone followed that creed, this world would be a paradise.”
Stan Lee
“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”
Charles Darwin
The Framers of the American Constitution knew these three great ideas that made America great.
“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”
John Locke
“In America, the law is king.”
Tom Paine
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves... Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
Thomas Jefferson
“You won't find any assertion, articulation or defense of Democracy in any of the great religions. The notion that we can rule ourselves, and govern ourselves is a human value, and it's a secular value.”
Phil Zucherman
“All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price.”
Juvenal
“These are kinds of disiciplins in the field of science that you have to learn: That to know when you know and when you don't know and what it is you know and what it is you don't know... You've got to be very careful not to confuse yourself.”
Richard Feynman
Penn Jillette:
“[Y]ou cannot have community, you cannot have love unless you have a shared reality. And anything that comes from within, any revelation that comes from within by definition can't be shared. So what science did for us mostly was science gave us a reality that we could share and talk about. So if I feel the presence of my dead mother with me that's personal; that's poetic. But if I'm going to actually talk about what death means we have to go with things that we've proven. And proof has been given such a hard cold kind of connotation; whereas another way to say proof is just something you can share. It's another way to say love! If I believe there's a God in the universe and I can't prove it, I have said nothing to the community. If I think there's such a thing as black holes and I can give some evidence to that, that's a way of showing love for other people.”
Penn Jillette
Lawrence Krauss:
“If you base your beliefs and your actions on myths that are incorrect, you're inevitably going to take irrational actions. And so, what we want to do is what science does (which is, force people's beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around) and not assume the answer to questions before we even ask them, and use the rational world to build a global society, not an exclusionary society, but a global world where people can live together based on the reality that we're all humans sharing this planet, and we need to work together to build a better place: a morality based on rationality and not outmoded religious beliefs.”
Lawrence Krauss
“Every sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed his will to man.”
Robert G. Ingersol, "The Great Agnostic"
“The Presidency ... is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Adolf Hitler:
“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith...We need believing people...Believing soldiers are the most valuable ones. They give their all.”
Adolf Hitler [Statement April 26, 1933 during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933; from Ernst Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979, p. 241 ISBN: 9780814316030]
“We must be careful not to permit ourselves to be moved by personal prejudices, or religious bigotry.”
Harry S. Truman
“Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.”
Bertrand Russell
“New beginnings are disguised as painful endings.”
Lao Tzu
Barack Obama:
“And my grandparents explained that folks in these parts, they didn’t like show-offs. They didn’t admire braggarts or bullies. They didn’t respect mean-spiritedness, or folks who were always looking for shortcuts in life. Instead, what they valued were traits like honesty and hard work, kindness, courtesy, humility, responsibility, helping each other out. That’s what they believed in. True things. Things that last. The things we try to teach our kids.”
Barack Obama
“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
Nelson Mandela
Mahatma Gandhi:
“A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.”
“Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must continue to bear testimony to truth even if I am forsaken by all. Mine may today be a voice in the wilderness, but it will be heard when all other voices are silenced, if it is the voice of Truth.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.”
John Locke
“Here, Right Matters.”
Alexander Vindman
“Let us have faith that right makes might...”
Abraham Lincoln
“In a just cause the weak o'ercome the strong.”
Sophocles
“Reason itself is true and just, but the reason of every particular man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his interests, his passions, and his vices.”
Jonathan Swift
“It is a great folly to wish to be wise alone.”
François de La Rochefoucauld
“Friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons.”
Aristotle
Hillary Clinton:
“[W]hen people in power invent their own facts and attack those who question them, it can mark the beginning of the end of a free society. That is not hyperbole. It is what authoritarian regimes throughout history have done. They attempt to control reality. Not just our laws and our rights and our budgets, but our thoughts and beliefs.”
Hillary Clinton
“A wise man ought not to desire to inhabit that country where men have more authority than laws.”
Walter Raleigh
“Where law ends, there tyranny begins.”
William Pitt
“Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.”
Antony Flew
“Perhaps the best way to avoid fallacies is to be humble and emotionally mature.”
Paul Stearns