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Agnosticism | Atheism | Bible | Christianity | Church & State | Death & Afterlife | Faith
Freedom | God/Deity | Good & Evil | Knowledge | Morality | Nature | Prayer | Reality | Reason
Religion | Science | Superstition | Truth | Wisdom

Agnosticism

• "I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means." (Clarence Darrow)

 
• "We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc." (Sir Julian Huxley)

 
• "Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. ... Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable." (T.H. Huxley)

 
• "I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them." (Bertrand Russell)

 
• "My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn't believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I'm agnostic." (Carl Sagan)

Atheism

• "If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease" (Clark Adams)

 
• "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" (Annie Besant)
 
• "We only have a notion about existence in a rational sense, in my opinion. And, of course, 'what we know' is, and must remain, subject to revision or even rejection. As an atheist, and as a rationalist, everything I know is provisional. Even my atheism must be provisional." (Nolan Mecham)

 
• "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." (Stephen Roberts)

Bible

• "If the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?" (Robert G. Ingersoll)

 
• "Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind." (Thomas Paine)

 
• "No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means." (George Bernard Shaw)

 
• "The bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire...Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up." (Elizabeth Cady Stanton)

 
• "Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook." (Ludwig von Mises)

Christianity

• "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 calamaties that engine of grief has produced! " (John Adams)

 
• "The very concept of sin comes from the bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?" (Dan Barker)

 
• "I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine." (Charles Darwin)

 
• "Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter, fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ." (Will Durant)

 
• "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!" (Rev. Jerry Falwell) 

 
• "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country." (Rev. Jerry Falwell)

 
• "Christianity, above all, consoles; but there are naturally happy souls who do not need consolation. Consequently Christianity begins by making souls unhappy, for otherwise it would have no power over them." (André Gide)

 
• "The Christian churches were offered two things: the spirit of Jesus and the idiotic morality of Paul, and they rejected the higher inspiration. Following Paul, we have turned the goodness of love into a fiend and degraded the crowning impulse of our being into a capital sin." (Frank Harris)

 
• "A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain, then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?" (Robert A. Heinlein)

 
• "And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter." (Thomas Jefferson)

 
• "I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology." (Thomas Jefferson)

 
• "When, in short, we shall have unlearned everything which has been taught since his [Jesus'] day, and got back to the pure and simple doctrines he inculcated, we shall then be truly and worthily his disciples: and my opinion is that if nothing had ever been added to what flowed purely from his lips, the whole world would at this day have been Christian." (Thomas Jefferson)

 
• "My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them." (Abraham Lincoln)

 
• "The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world." (Bertrand Russell)

 

Church & State

• "Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion." (John Adams)

 
• "Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives." (Barry Goldwater)

 
• "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."  (James Madison)

Death & Afterlife

• "I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse." (Isaac Asimov)

 
• "Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other." (Sir Francis Bacon)

 
• "Heaven, n.: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own." (Ambrose Bierce)

 
• "Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism." (Albert Einstein)

 
• "I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it." (Albert Einstein)

 
• "Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?" (Epicurus)

 
• "I have little confidence in any investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders." (Robert G. Ingersoll)

 
• "There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?" (Lazarus Long)

 
• "I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting." (Bertrand Russell)

 
• "If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy." (Carl Sagan)

Faith

• "Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits." (Dan Barker)

 
• "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." (Richard Dawkins)

 
• "The word 'belief' is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. If I know a thing, then I know it -- I don't need to believe it." (Carl Jung)

 
• "With most people unbelief in one thing is founded upon blind belief in another." (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)

 
• "The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in Shadow than in the Church." (Ferdinand Magellan)

 
• "Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.... A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill." (H.L. Mencken)

 
• "How many things that were articles of faith yesterday are fables today." (Michel de Montaigne)

 
• "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." (Friedrich Nietzsche) 

• "To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer." (Ayn Rand)

 
• "No evidence against a firmly-held belief, no matter how good or abundant it may be, will sway the true believer." (James Randi)

 
• "I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." (Bertrand Russell)

 
• "We may define 'faith' as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of 'faith.' We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions." (Bertrand Russell)

 
• "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."(George Bernard Shaw)

 
• "In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed." (Gore Vidal)

Freedom

• "Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when decide how to respond." (Jeffery Borenstein)

 
• "Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes." (Mohandas Ghandi)

 
• "The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion -- except for the sect that can win political power." (Robert H. Jackson)

 
• "The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it." (John Stuart Mill)

 
• "To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say." (Lionel Tiger)

God/Deity

• "Both the existence and the non-existence of God are preposterous notions. I believe in God because it seems the less preposterous of the two." (Steve Allen)

 
• "We can know what God is not, but we cannot know what He is." (Saint Augustine)

 
• "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)

 
• "To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." (Isaac Asimov)

 
• "When the virtuous are victorious, they heap honor upon God surpassing a

sovereign.  They shout 'Lo Heathens!  For the pious, His rewards are
manifold!  This is His glorious plan for us!' Yet when the vile prosper and
the innocent perish, they throw up their hands and murmur, 'Who are we to
know His ways?'" (Richard Bamford, "A Shard of Heaven")

• "I don't believe in God, because I don't believe in Mother Goose." (Clarence Darrow)

 
• "I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God." (Thomas Edison)

 
• "I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."  (Albert Einstein)

 
• "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. " (Albert Einstein)

 
• "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism." (Albert Einstein)

 
• "The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 
• "Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms." (Robert Ingersoll)

 
• "Jehovah, 'from the clouds and darkness of Sinai,' said to the Jews: 'Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.... Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them; for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.' Contrast this with the words put by the Hindu into the mouth of Brahma: 'I am the same to all mankind. They who honestly serve other gods, involuntarily worship me. I am he who partaketh of all worship, and I am the reward of all worshipers.'" (Robert G. Ingersoll)

 
• If God created the world, where was he before creation?. . . How could God have made the world without any raw material?. . . If he is ever  perfect and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him?"  (Jain sacred text)

 
• "You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." (Anne Lamott)

 
• "We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing god, all-powerful god,who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." (Gene Roddenberry)

 
• "Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions.  Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case" (Bertrand Russell)

 
• "God and Satan alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies." (Bertrand Russell)

• "If by 'God' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying . . . It does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity." (Carl Sagan)

 
• "It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it." (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

 
• "I believe in God, only I spell it Nature." (Frank Lloyd Wright)

Good & Evil

• "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for the good men to do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

 
• "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." (Joseph Conrad)

 
• "The cosmos is neither moral or immoral; only people are. He who would move the world must first move himself." (Edward Ericson)

 
• "Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense." (Robert A. Heinlein)

 
• "The devil personifies not the nature that is around us but the nature that is within us- the infinitely ferocious and cunning prehuman creature that is still within us, sealed in the subconscious cellars of the psyche." (Eric Hoffer)

 
• "Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake." (Blaise Pascal)

 
• "Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be." (Ayn Rand)

Knowledge

• The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge. (Daniel J. Boorstin)

 
• "Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance." (Confucius)

 
• "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." (Charles Darwin)

 
• "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." (Albert Einstein)

 
• "To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity." (H.L. Mencken) 

 
• "No one is less ready for tomorrow than the person who holds the most rigid beliefs about what tomorrow will contain."  (The Visionary's Handbook)

Morality

• "The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of oneself." (Jane Addams)

 
• "If we assume that there is no God, it follows that morality is even more important than if there is a Deity. If there is no God, then it is up to man to be as moral as he can." (Steve Allen)

 
• "Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it." (Mikhail Bakunin)

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

 
• "I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it." (Albert Einstein)

 
• "There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue." (Erich Fromm)

 
• "Yes, I am an atheist, and yes, I care for people. My moral system is stronger and not as rigid as any commandment or commandments might be, because sometimes doing the right thing can't be read in a book or heard in a sermon. It has to come from your own conscience, because you know it is right." (Walter Galanek)

 
• "Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other 'sins' are invented nonsense." (Robert A. Heinlein)

 
• "What is hateful to thyself do not do to another. That is the whole Law, the rest is Commentary." (Rabbi Hillel)

 
• "The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out." (Thomas Macaulay)

 
• "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." (Plato)

 
• "If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have, but conceal them like a vice lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people." (Robert Louis Stevenson) 

 
• "People fare best when they look not to moral rules and principles, not to priests and churches, and not to creeds, but to the actual results of what they do." (Richard Taylor)

Nature

• "Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence." (Camille Flammarion)

 
• "Nothing is truly unnatural, because everything that exists, including human intelligence, is a product of nature. If human intelligence can devise ways for the genes from two men to result in a child, their doing so is an entirely natural event." (A.C. Grayling)

 
• "I love to think of the whole universe together as one eternal fact. I love to think that everything is alive; that crystallization is itself a step toward joy. I love to think that when a bud bursts into blossom: it feels a thrill. I love to have the universe full of feeling and full of joy, and not full of simple dead, inert matter, managed by an old bachelor for all eternity." (Robert G. Ingersoll)

 
• "Nature does not loathe virtue: it is unaware of its existence." Françoise Mallet-Joris

Prayer

• "Prayer is not a substitute for work, thinking, watching, suffering, or giving; prayer is a support for all other efforts." (George Buttrick)

 
• "Where prayer, amulets and incantations work it is only a manifestation of the patient's belief." (Hippocrates)

 
• "It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain." (Mark Twain)

Reality

• "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." (Philip K. Dick)

 
• "There is no reality except the one contained within us." (Hermann Hesse)

 
• "It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." (Carl Sagan)

Reason

• "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." (Buddha ) 

 
• "The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds." (Will Durant)

 
• "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 Gallilei)

 
• "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." (Gallileo Gallilei)

 
• "All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason. (Immanuel Kant)

 
• "There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking." (Alfred Korzybski)

 
• "If you don't think that logic is a good method for determining what to believe, make an attempt to convince me of that without using logic.  No one has even bothered to try yet." (Brett Lemoine)

 
• "The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in Shadow than in the Church." (Ferdinand Magellan)

 
• "He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak." (Michel de Montaigne)

 
• 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".  (Thomas Jefferson)

 
• "Never try to reason the predjudice out of a man. It wasn't reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out." (Sydney Smith)

Religion

• "I do not understand those who take little or no interest in the subject of religion. If religion embodies a truth, it is certainly the most important truth of human existence. If it is largely error, then it is one of monumentally tragic proportions—and should be vigorously opposed." (Steve Allen)

 
• "Of the struggle between reason and religion, I know this:  Religion is more

dangerous.  When reason is challenged, it will raise an objection.  It will
raise questions.  When religion is challenged, it will raise an army.  It
will raze cities." (Richard Bamford, "A Shard of Heaven")
 
• "Religion is he daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable." (Ambrose Bierce)

 
• "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." (The Dalai Lama)

 
• "One man's religion is another man's belly laugh." (Robert A. Heinlein)

 
• "I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men." (Robert Ingersoll)

 
• "All religious systems enslave the mind. Certain things are demanded--certain things must be believed--certain things must be done--and the man who becomes the subject or servant of this superstition must give up all idea of indivuality or hope of intellectual growth or progress." (Robert G. Ingersoll)

 
• "We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God." (Chief Joseph)

 
• "The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window." ( Stephen King) 

 
• "The incompatibility between religion and science is simply this: a Scientist will not believe anything unless he sees it; a Religious man will not see anything until he believes in it." (Charles Lyall)

 
• "I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking." (H. L . Mencken) 

 
• "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the same extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart." (H.L. Mencken)

 
• "When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow." (Anais Nin)

 
• "Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system." (Thomas Paine)

 
• "Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law." (Thomas Paine)

 
• "I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." (Thomas Paine)

 
• "A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge." (Carl Sagan)

 
• "There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it." (George Bernard Shaw)

 
• "There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed." (Albert Schweitzer)

 
• "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."(Jonathan Swift)

 
• "In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing." (Mark Twain)

 
• "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." (Stephen Weinberg)

 
• "Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion; rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science." (Gary Zukav)

Science

• "The incompatibility between religion and science is simply this: a Scientist will not believe anything unless he sees it; a Religious man will not see anything until he believes in it." (Charles Lyall)

 
• "What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer." (Bertrand Russell)

 
• "Truth seeking has already been perfected. It's called science. If you want to know if something is true or false, just test it fairly again and again. Accept nothing on simple faith." (Charles Webb)

Superstition

• "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)

 
• "Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams." (Source unknown)

Truth

• "Truth is like a shining mirror that's been shattered. Each philosopher, priest, and mage regards his small piece and thinks he sees the whole." (Source unknown))

 
• "The search for Truth does not begin with an answer on behalf of which all questions must constantly rearrange themselves. It begins with fearless questions." (Matt Berry)

 
• "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." (Niels Bohr)

 
• "Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." (Winston Churchill)

 
• "No evidence will convince you of the truth of what you do not want." (A Course in Miracles)

 
• "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." (Arthur Conan Doyle)

 
• "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." (Albert Einstein)

 
• "When we believe something to be the absolute truth and cling to it, we cannot be open to new ideas. Even if truth itself is knocking at our door, we will not let it in." (Thich Nhat Hahn)

 
• "No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic." (H.L. Mencken)

 
• "It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth.' and so it goes away. Puzzling." (Robert M. Pirsig)

 
• "The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts." (Bertrand Russell)

 
• "We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact." (Carl Sagan)

 
• "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth... It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken." (Carl Sagan)

 
• "Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics." (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.)

 
• "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." (Arthur Schopenhauer)

 
• "All great truths begin as blasphemies." (George Bernard Shaw)

 
• "The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none. Recognizing our limitations and imperfections is the first requisite of progress. Those who believe they have "arrived" believe they have nowhere to go. Some not only have closed their minds to new truth, but they sit on the lid." (Dale Turner )

 
• "Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one." (Voltaire)

 
• "As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, 'What is truth?'" (Richard Whately)

 
• "Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived." (Oscar Wilde)

 
• "If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance." (Orville Wright)

Wisdom

• "Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom." (George Iles)

 
• "Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom." (Bertrand Russell)

 
• "Science at best is not wisdom; it is knowledge. Wisdom is knowledge tempered with judgement." (Lord Ritchie-Calder)

 
• "When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power." (Hugh White)