2008-10-06

"You Can Take Your Governments and Your Religions and Shove Them..."

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
~ H. L. Mencken


Knowledge, idea, belief stands in the way of wisdom.
~ J. Krishnamurthi





Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
~ Michel de Montaigne



Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
~ Ambrose Bierce




All great truths begin as blasphemies.
~ George Bernard Shaw






All Bibles are man-made.
~ Thomas Edison







The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
~ Bertrand Russell





It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
~ Voltaire


What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
~ Mohandas Gandhi


The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scale.
~ Aesop




The corporation is a true Frankenstein's monster, an artificial person run amok, responsible only to its own soulless self.
~ William Dugger



It is a government of the people by the people for the people no longer; it is a government of corporations by corporations for corporations.
~ Rutherford B. Hayes



He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
~ Thomas Jefferson




I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
~ James Buchanan



In order to learn, one must change one's mind.
~ Orson Scott Card



It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that just isn't so.
~ Satchel Paige




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. 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


It is hard to free fools from chains they revere.
~ Voltaire




All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
~ Thomas Paine

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe




The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine.
~ George Washington Administration Treaty



Religion, comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.
~ Sigmund Freud


If you can conceive of morality without god, why can you not conceive of society without government?
~ Peter Saint-André



I am amazed how many people on this planet are happy and free and never even saw the US constitution.
~ Reason



The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.
~ Ivan Illich


There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth.
~ Chinese proverb



Prohibition goes beyond reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite through legislation. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles this country was founded upon.
~ Abraham Lincoln


Religion is the end of love and honesty, the beginning of confusion; faith is a colorful hope or fear, the origin of folly.
~ Tao Te Ching


Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.
~ Elbert Hubbard






The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
~ Thomas Paine


When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist.
~ Archbishop Helder Camara


Git yer guns, the liberal folks are gonna let the coloreds vote!
~ Unknown




A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
~ Carl Sagan



The greatest artists of this world are never puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
~ H. L. Mencken




Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.
~ Steven Weinberg


Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
~ John Morley




If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
~ Steve Allen


If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it, you are deemed fit to govern the country.
~ Jonathan Meades


Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
~ Oscar Wilde


Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
~ Henry David Thoreau




No one rules if no one obeys.
~ TaoDo




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 Galilei



A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
~ Albert Einstein


The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
~ Thomas Paine


The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.
~ Jean de la Bruyère





The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.
~ Whitney Young



Cast aside those who liken godliness to whimsy and who try to combine their greed for wealth with their desire for a happy afterlife.
~ Kahlil Gibran



If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.
~ Japanese Proverb




When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
~ J. Krishnamurthi


There must be more to life than having everything.
~ Maurice Sendak



Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.
~ Scottish proverb



I saw a human skull the other day. There was an inscription below it: ‘Look long and hard at me, for I was once as you are and you will soon be as I am.
~ Unknown


Life is too short to waste in critical peep or cynic bark, quarrel or reprimand: It will soon be dark.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson





We will be known by the tracks we leave behind.
~ Dakota proverb







Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.
~ Satchel Paige




Your every decision conspires to make this moment happen.
~ Christi Philpott




Everyone's values are defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others.
~ William Greider



The modern conservative is engaged in one man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
~ John K. Galbraith


Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.
~ St. Augustine




Just as a picture is drawn by an artist, surroundings are created by the activities of the mind.
~ Buddha




A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but can’t afford an air force.
~ William Blum




Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way; stop participating in it.
~ Noam Chomsky



Once you have seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.
~ Arundhati Roy


Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
~ Andre Gide





Everyone laughs and cries in the same language.
~ dreamslaughter




To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.
~ Confucius






May your fondest wish be granted.
~ Traditional Chinese curse




Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
~ Samuel Johnson




Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
~ Thomas Huxley




When encountering a new philosophy or religion, do not convert, but rather assimilate.
~ Shawn Mikula


The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.
~ Martin Luther



If the doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
~ Isaac Asimov





Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
~ Abraham Lincoln





I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
~ Frederick Douglass, escaped slave





Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
~ Anacharsis


You simply cannot hang a millionaire in America.
~ Bourke Cockran




I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
~ Robert Frost






Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?
~ Mark Twain





In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
~ Mohandas Gandhi





Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
~ Tao Te Ching



The first clergyman was the first rascal who met the first fool.
~ Voltaire








The state has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he may desire.
~ Pope Pius IX




I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll


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





You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do.
~ [Usenet]



If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
~ Thomas Szasz



One man's magic is another man's engineering. Supernatural is a null word.
~ Robert Heinlein





Insanity in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
~ Nietzsche



Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
~ Henry David Thoreau





The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody cares to talk about them.
~ Harold Pinter


The truth is more important than the facts.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright






Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.
~ Lucy Parsons






Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
~ Napoleon




The Pope!?! How many divisions has he got?
~ Joseph Stalin





Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
~ Jean Rostand


Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson






Take only memories; leave nothing but footprints.
~ Chief Seattle






I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
~ Mohandas Gandhi





Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
~ Arthur C. Clarke



The wise man will love; all others will desire.
~ Afranius



When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
~ Jack Gurney - "The Ruling Class"




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


Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
~ Denis Diderot




The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
~ Anatole France


Civil disobedience, that’s not our problem. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.
~ Howard Zinn


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



If child molestation is actually your concern, how come we don't see Bradley tanks knocking down Catholic churches?
~ Bill Hicks, 1993, referencing the Waco siege



Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have 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.
~ Adolf Hitler


Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
~ Nietzsche






I have examined all of the known superstitions of the world and I do not find in our superstitions of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all founded on fables and mythology. Christianity has made one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.
~ Unknown (Thomas Jefferson disputed)


Do you see now that your self-righteousness was nothing more than breeding and years of privilege? You know, we are one nation under a god. Yes, you were right. An angry, crack slinging god who decorates with bullets and spent condoms, a blind god whose eyes are just like yours.
~ Solipsist by Henry Rollins


Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
~ George Bernard Shaw





Unless Americans come to realize that they are not stronger in the world because they have the bomb but weaker because of their vulnerability to atomic attack, they are not likely to conduct their policy, in a spirit that furthers the arrival at an understanding.
~ Albert Einstein


Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
~ John Maynard Keynes



The same people that wrote the bible thought the world was flat.
~ Unknown - (disputed)




The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.
~ Prophet Muhammad


The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
~ Joseph Heller


I'm ineffably tired of pro-war ideologues moaning about how the anti-war folk are just 'complaining' without 'offering solutions' to global dilemmas. Peace doesn't need a freekin moral, ethical, economical, or political qualification; war does. Peace doesn't ravage, plunder, rape, or kill; war does. Peace does not need justification, war does.
~ <|OnAir|>


If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
~ Orson Scott Card


I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.
~ Harry S Truman, 1961


The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
~ Aleister Crowley




Laurel and Hardy, that's John and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot.
~ John Lennon


If I could find a way to get [Saddam Hussein] out of there, even putting a contract out on him, … ahh … if the CIA still did that sort of thing, . . . ahh . . . assuming it ever did . . . . . . . I would be for it.
~ Richard Nixon


Does anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was? . . . And do you know how far away he was? . . . Two hundred and fifty feet. He was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. He got off three shots with a bolt action rifle in six seconds, and got two hits, including a head shot. Do you know where those men learned to shoot like that? . . . In the Marines! Outstanding! Those individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do! And before you ladies leave my island, you will be able to do the same thing!
~ Full Metal Jacket


I love talking about the Kennedy assassination. The reason I do is because I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated that our government could lie to us so blatantly, so obviously for so long, and we do absolutely nothing about it.
~ Bill Hicks


The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
~ George Orwell


Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.
~ Voltaire



Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear, kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor, with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
~ General Douglas MacArthur


Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
~ Albert Einstein


We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
~ Kahlil Gibran





My humble friend, we know not how to live this life which is so short yet seek one that never ends.
~ Anatole France



It makes no difference as to the name of the God, since love is the real God of all in the world.
~ Apache



If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe.
~ A church sign in Northern Ireland




On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
~ Virginia Woolf




Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
~ John Updike




God favors no group. Only religions do that.
~ Bumper Sticker



Guns make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
~ Nazi Hermann Göring





Everyone likes to say Hitler did this and Hitler did that. But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class asshole, but the evil actually done, from the death camps to World War Two, was all done by citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.
~ Michael Rivero


... The CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over twenty countries.
~ John Stockwell, former CIA official





Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.
~ Mark Twain



All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
~ Ho Chi Minh, 1945, as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was created



If there has to be a blood bath, let's get it over with.
~Ronald Reagan, Vietnam




You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
~ Ho Chi Minh




I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong ... No Vietcong ever called me nigger.
~ Muhammad Ali, stripped of boxing title, convicted of a felony for refusing to serve during the Vietnam War


I can envision a small cottage somewhere, with a lot of writing paper, and a dog, and a fireplace and maybe enough money to give myself some Irish coffee now and then and entertain my two friends.
~ Richard Van de Geer, letter, 1975, last American to die in Vietnam War, Time, 1985


If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too.
~ Katherine Anne Porter


We, on our side, are praying to Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, too, for victory, believing they are right. What must He think of us?
~ Abraham Lincoln


Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.
~ Dalton Trumbo


Vietnamese deaths during the Vietnam war were approximately 6,000,000 people. The approximate population of Vietnam during the war was 33,000,000. This means that the war killed 18 percent of the total population of Vietnam. Proportionately, 18 percent of the United States is 50,000,000. That would be like killing every person in Arkansas, Mississippi, West Virginia, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa.


I spent thirty-three years in the marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.
~ General Smedley Butler, Marine


When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
~ George Bernard Shaw






Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.
~ Duke of Wellington




I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse; because that's the memory that haunts.
~ Bob Kerry told to The New York Times


I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.
~ Richard Cohen


Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or disappeared, at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame.
~ Amnesty International, in its annual report on U.S. Military aid and human rights, 1996


It is not so much the suffering as the senselessness of it that is unendurable.
~ Nietzsche





They made a wasteland and called it peace.
~ Tacitus




Pity the warrior that kills all his foe.
~ Seyetik and Sisko, citing a fragment of G'Trok's Fall of Kang


I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good and it would spread a lively terror.
~ Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after World War I


I am tired of fighting, our chiefs are killed...it is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death...hear me, my chiefs, I am tired: my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands...I will fight no more forever...
~ Chief Joseph


If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow



I did not know how to say goodbye. It was harder still, when I refused to say it.
~ Native American saying


Pain is certain, suffering is optional.
~ Buddha






When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
~ Eugene V. Debs




Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
~ Malcolm X



The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll Quoting Ferdinand Magellan - no citation


A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
~ Nietzsche




In all the disputes, which have excited Christians against each other, Rome has invariably decided in favor of that opinion which tended most towards the suppression of the human intellect and the annihilation of the reasoning powers.
~ Voltaire


Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
~ Tom Robbins


Fascism is capitalism in decay.
~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin







Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
~ P. J. O'Rourke




The police are not here to create disorder. They're here to preserve disorder.
~ Ex-Chicago Mayor Daley during the 1968 riots




We need a common enemy to unite us.
~ Condoleezza Rice, March 2000






I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
~ President George Bush, August 27, 1988


You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
~ Malcolm X



In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.




Peace is over rated. Any slave can have peace. Just pick the cotton.
~ TheSong




Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
~ Ron Patterson


The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
~ Stanley Kubrick


Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
~ Jeff Burroughs


It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
~ Albert Einstein




I'm so sick of arming the world, then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms; you know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of them. We're like the bullies of the world, y'know. We're like Jack Palance in the movie Shane, throwing the pistol at the sheepherder's feet. ‘Pick it up.’ ‘I don't wanna pick it up, mister, you'll shoot me.’ ‘Pick up the gun.’ ‘Mister, I don't want no trouble, I just came downtown here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don't even know what gingham is, but she goes through about ten rolls a week of that stuff. I ain't looking for no trouble, Mister.’ ‘Pick up the gun.’ The sheepherder picks up the gun, three shots ring out. ‘You all saw him, he had a gun.’
~ Bill Hicks


I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work.
~ Adolf Hitler




It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
~ General Douglas MacArthur


Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.
~ Norman Vincent Peale



The most heinous and the cruelest crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
~ Mohandas Gandhi



I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’
~ Annie Dillard


Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
~ Douglas Adams



Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.
~ Charles Dickens



Now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.
~ Voltaire, deathbed, when asked to renounce Satan



I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
~ Oscar Wilde





If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for them Mexicans.
~ Texas politician, Spanish as a second language


Probably no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and education.
~ Braham Flexner



The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
~ Woodrow Wilson



Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
~ Louis Brandeis




It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
~ Thomas Jefferson



In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll





No Nazi woman will ever be motivated to work for money. Serving men is our only wish.
~ Gertrud Scholtz-Klink




We always obeyed the law. Isn't that what you do in America? Even if you don't agree with a law personally, you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos.
~ Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, explaining Nazi policy


I hit him to get his attention. I shot him to calm him down. I killed him to reason with him.
~ Henry Rollins



Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower


How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy!
~ Nietzsche



How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.
~ Emma Goldman



The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
~ Denis Diderot



My final point about alcohol, about drugs, about pornography; what business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, fuck or take into my body as long as I don't harm another human being whilst on this planet? And for those of you having a little moral dilemma on how to answer this, I'll answer for you. None of your fucking business! Take that to the bank, cash it and take it on a vacation outta my fucking life.
~ Bill Hicks


If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because, man, they're gone.
~ Jack Handey



You get what anyone gets; you get a lifetime.
~ Death, Neil Gaiman Comic Sandman





Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
~ Steve Eley


All our lauded technological progress, our very civilization, is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
~ Albert Einstein


I don’t really miss God, but I sure miss Santa Claus!
~ Courtney Love

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