Quotes

"You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was."

- Abe Lincoln

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But, they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness."

- Albert Camus, The Plague

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."

- Albert Einstein

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

- Albert Einstein

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."

- Andre Gide

"Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts."

- Bernard M. Baruch

"Science is the best thing humans beings have ever come up with. And if it isn’t, science will fix it."

- Bill Nye

"Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful."

- Buddha

"John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth."

- Carl Sagan

"Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself."

- Confucius

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

- Dr. Seuss

"If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal."

- Emma Goldman

"Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind."

- George Orwell

"The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the Omnipotent Father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and those of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home."

- Gore Vidal

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

- H.L. Mencken

"‎Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’"

- Isaac Asimov

"The measure of the state’s success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not."

- Joseph Sobran

"‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless. The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.’"

- Louis C.K.

"Atheists are not required to ask imaginary friends like Jesus or Yahweh to forgive them for wronging a fellow human in some way. My conscience and human laws tend to keep me at a fairly high standard of morality. We don’t have the convenience of secret forgiveness and the “Get out of Hell for free” card like the Christians, either. If we feel guilty, we approach the real person, not a skydaddy instead."

- Mark Pogue

"If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all other things we know."

- Marvin Minsky

"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."

- Matthew 7:12

"There is no god and that's the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again."

- Penn Jillette

"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 G. Ingersoll, The Ghosts

"At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie."

- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

"It is all-essential to the continuance of our healthy national life that Republicans should recognize this community of interest among our people. The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us"

- Theodore Roosevelt

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus."

- Thomas Jefferson

"My country is the world and my religion is to do good."

- Thomas Paine

"I can only tell you that if you have considerable doubts about fatherhood, it would not be wise to enter into the process. It is so much more overwhelming than one expects, and I believe only the most committed should become parents. However, I must point out that, as illogical as it seems, being a father can have infinite rewards, far more than would seem possible. My children occupy a significant portion of my thoughts, now more than ever."

- Tuvok (Star Trek Voyager) on Fatherhood