| A. A. Milne | One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. |
| Abraham Lincoln | He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met. |
| Abraham Lincoln | Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left behind by those who hustle. |
| Abraham Lincoln | If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one? |
| Abraham Lincoln | You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. |
| Abraham Lincoln | Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? |
| Abraham Lincoln | America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. |
| Abraham Lincoln | We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. |
| Adolf Hitler | The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life. |
| Adolf Hitler | The Government of the Reich, which regards Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation, attaches the greatest value to friendly relations with the Holy See, and is endeavouring to develop them. |
| Adolf Hitler | What luck for the rulers that men do not think. |
| Adolf Hitler | We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out. |
| Al Gore | It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored. |
| Al Gore | A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. |
| Al Gore | An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution -- an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. |
| Al Gore | Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. |
| Al Gore | [The rule of law] means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint. |
| Al Gore | The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of power. |
| Al Gore | As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we have become a government of men and not laws. |
| Al Gore | The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned. |
| Al Gore | If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do? |
| Al Gore | [The "Unitary Executive" legal theory] threatens to expand the president's powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. |
| Al Gore | If the pattern of practice begun by [the Bush] Administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. |
| Al Gore | In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435. |
| Al Gore | It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens a radical transformation of the American system. |
| Al Gore | Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principle source of information. Its dominance has become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements. |
| Al Gore | The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people. |
| Al Gore | It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it. |
| Albert Einstein | 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 | Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. |
| Albert Einstein | I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field. |
| Albert Einstein | This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism--how I hate them! |
| Albert Einstein | The idea of achieving security through national armament is, at the present state of military technique, a disastrous illusion. |
| Albert Einstein | Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice. |
| Albert Einstein | It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. |
| Albert Einstein | A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. |
| Albert Einstein | A person starts to live when he can live outside himself. |
| Albert Einstein | Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. |
| Albert Einstein | As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. |
| Albert Einstein | Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. |
| Albert Einstein | Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater. |
| Albert Einstein | Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. |
| Albert Einstein | Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience. |
| Albert Einstein | Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler. |
| Albert Einstein | Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom. |
| Albert Einstein | I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime. |
| Albert Einstein | I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. |
| Albert Einstein | I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. |
| Albert Einstein | If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut. |
| Albert Einstein | If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. |
| Albert Einstein | Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. |
| Albert Einstein | In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep. |
| Albert Einstein | Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. |
| Albert Einstein | It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs. |
| Albert Einstein | Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population. |
| Albert Einstein | Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. |
| 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 mind. |
| Albert Einstein | Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile. |
| Albert Einstein | Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. |
| Albert Einstein | Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. |
| Albert Einstein | Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. |
| Albert Einstein | The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility. |
| Albert Einstein | The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax. |
| Albert Einstein | The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. The trite subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury have always seemed to me contemptible. |
| Albert Einstein | The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. |
| Albert Einstein | The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. |
| Albert Einstein | The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. |
| Albert Einstein | The only real valuable thing is intuition. |
| Albert Einstein | The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them. |
| Albert Einstein | The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. |
| Albert Einstein | The search for truth is more precious than its possession. |
| Albert Einstein | The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. |
| Albert Einstein | Truth is what stands the test of experience. |
| Albert Einstein | Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. |
| Albert Einstein | We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. |
| Albert Einstein | Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character. |
| Albert Einstein | Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods. |
| Albert Einstein | You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. |
| Albert Einstein | War cannot be humanized, only abolished. |
| Alberto Gonzales | There is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. |
| Alberto Gonzales | I don't recall. |
| Alex Carey | The 20th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda against democracy. |
| Alexander Hamilton | wherever a particular statute contravenes the Constitution, it will be the duty of the judicial tribunals to adhere to the latter and disregard the former. |
| Alexander Solzhenitsyn | A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. |
| Ambrose Gwinett Bierce | You cannot adopt politics as a profession and remain honest. |
| Andrew Carnegie | I don't believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. |
| Andrew Sullivan | The reduction of political conversation and discourse to the demands of political power and activist organization is inevitable. But don't blame me if I stand aside. |
| Andy Serwer | Subprime is Wall Street's euphemism for junk |
| Ann Coulter | We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee. |
| Anonymous | Where morality is present, laws are unnecessary. Without morality, laws are unenforceable. |
| Antonin Scalia | A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean, is worthless. |
| Antonin Scalia | With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our Nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists. |
| Antonin Scalia | The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive. |
| Aristotle | It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. |
| Aristotle | Law is mind without reason. |
| Aristotle | Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way...you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions. |
| Aristotle | Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. |
| Aristotle | Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime. |
| Aristotle | To perceive is to suffer. |
| Aristotle | We are what we repeatedly do. |
| Aristotle | For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. |
| Aristotle | He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god. |
| Aristotle | I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies. |
| Aristotle | It is possible to fail in many ways...while to succeed is possible only in one way. |
| Aristotle | It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences. |
| Aristotle | It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it. |
| Aristotle | Liars when they speak the truth are not believed. |
| Aristotle | Man is by nature a political animal. |
| Aristotle | Misfortune shows those who are not really friends. |
| Aristotle | Nature does nothing uselessly. |
| Aristotle | Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends. |
| Aristotle | To enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on excellence of character. |
| Aristotle | We make war that we may live in peace. |
| Aristotle | Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. |
| Aristotle | All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. |
| Aristotle | Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them. |
| Aristotle | Happiness depends upon ourselves. |
| Aristotle | In the arena of human life the honours and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities. |
| Aristotle | It is in justice that the ordering of society is centered. |
| Arkansas State Constitution | No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court. |
| Arundhati Roy | The only thing worth globalizing is dissent. |
| August Bebel | In time of war, the loudest patriots are the greatest profiteers. |
| Ayn Rand | The government was set to protect man from criminals - and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. |
| Bad Religion | Don't you see the trouble that most people are in and that they just want you for their own advantage? But I swear to you we're different from all of them! Come and join us. I can tell you are lookin' for a way to live where truth is determined by consensus, full of codified arbitrary directives; come and join us. All we want to have is your small mind, turn it into one of our own kind. You can go through life adrift and alone - desperate, desolate, on your own - but we're lookin' for a few more stalwart clones. |
| Barack Obama | We can't afford the same politics of fear that tells Democrats that the only way to look tough on national security is to talk, act and vote like George Bush Republicans. |
| Barney Frank | Partisanship is essential to a healthy democracy. There has never been a self-governing polity in the history of the world, I believe, of any size where political parties did not emerge, because large numbers of people trying to govern themselves need an organizing principle other than the authority of the leadership. |
| Barry Goldwater | I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue |
| Barry Goldwater | Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. |
| Benjamin Franklin | They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. |
| Benjamin Franklin | There never was a good war or a bad peace. |
| Benjamin Franklin | Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting that vote. |
| Benjamin Franklin | The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. |
| Bertrand Russell | I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. |
| Bertrand Russell | The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. |
| Bertrand Russell | To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true. |
| Bertrand Russell | As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. |
| Bertrand Russell | Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality. |
| Bertrand Russell | 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 | It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true. |
| Bertrand Russell | War does not determine who is right - only who is left. |
| Bertrand Russell | Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. |
| Bill Maher | You [a Scientologist], like all religious people, have a neurological disorder. And the only reason why people think it's sane is because so many other people believe the same thing. It's insanity by consensus. |
| Bill Maher | I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder. |
| Bill Maher | They say the word faith, and somehow we have to back off and pretend that what they believe is not destructive, and I won't do that. |
| Bill O'Reilly | And I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again. |
| Bill O'Reilly | I just wish Katrina had only hit the United Nations building, nothing else, just had flooded them out, and I wouldn't have rescued them. |
| Bill O'Reilly | Many parents are worried in America about the gay agenda and indoctrination of their children to see homosexuality in a certain way. |
| Brave New World | Every one belongs to every one else. |
| Brave New World | When the individual feels, the community reels |
| Brave New World | Community, Identity, Stability. |
| Brave New World | Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at one with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release. |
| Calvin Coolidge | It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. |
| Carl Jung | Where love rules, there is no will to power and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. |
| Charles Evans Hughes | War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals. |
| Chet Baker | You don't know what love is Until you've learned the meaning of the blues Until you've loved a love you've had to lose You don't know what love is |
| Chris Dodd | I've listened to the building frustration over this immunity and this administration's campaign of lawlessness. I've seen it in person, in mail, online -- the passion and eloquence of citizens who are just fed up. They've inspired me more than they know. |
| Christopher Hitchens | What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. |
| Christopher Hitchens | If you reduce religion to social work, secular organizations do [social work] more convincingly. And most of the philanthropists in the U.S. have been atheists. |
| Christopher Hitchens | If you gave Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox. |
| Clint Borgen | Nationalism is having the ego to think of the 191 countries you could have been born in, you happened to be born into the one that is perfect in every way. |
| Confucius | I am not bothered by the fact that I am unknown. I am bothered when I do not know others. |
| Confucius | To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous. |
| Confucius | To throw oneself into strange teachings is quite dangerous. |
| Confucius | The Superior Man is aware of Righteousness, the inferior man is aware of advantage. |
| Confucius | When you see a good person, think of becoming like her/him. When you see someone not so good, reflect on your own weak points. |
| Confucius | The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress. |
| Confucius | Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes. |
| Confucius | Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it. |
| Confucius | Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses. |
| Confucius | I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. |
| Confucius | Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star. |
| Confucius | It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop. |
| Confucius | Respect yourself and others will respect you. |
| Confucius | Study the past if you would define the future. |
| Confucius | To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle. |
| Confucius | What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others. |
| Confucius | When anger rises, think of the consequences. |
| Confucius | Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart. |
| Confucius | By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart. |
| Confucius | He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good. |
| Confucius | Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness. |
| Confucius | The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration. |
| Confucius | The people may be made to follow a path of action, but they may not be made to understand it. |
| Confucius | The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions. |
| Confucius | The superior man...does not set his mind either for anything, or against anything; what is right he will follow. |
| Confucius | There are three things which the superior man guards against. In youth...lust. When he is strong...quarrelsomeness. When he is old...covetousness. |
| Confucius | To be able to practice five things everywhere under heaven constitutes perfect virtue...[They are] gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness. |
| Confucius | Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors. |
| Confucius | What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others. |
| Cyril Bailey | If we think that this search for God is a vain search, and that there is no reality to be discovered, ... then the history of religion becomes a study of the aberrations of the human mind. |
| Damon J. Keith | Democracies die behind closed doors. |
| Dan Barker | I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil-you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy. Trust yourself. |
| Dan Barker | It turns out that the word atheism means much less than I had thought. It is merely the lack of theism. |
| Dan Barker | Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god -- both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter. |
| Dan Barker | It is wrong for a secular government to promote prayer. We think the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. What if the president declared a National Day of Cursing God because He failed us on September 11? Americans would say, 'You've overstepped your authority.' That's how we feel when he promotes prayer. |
| Dan Barker | Look at the posture of prayer. It is the posture of slavery, of bowing before your master. We are a proudly rebellious country. We kicked out the master. Now here comes the government telling us to humbly bow again. |
| Dan Barker | If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray? |
| Dan Barker | Not thinking critically, I assumed that the successful prayers were proof that God answers prayer while the failures were proof that there was something wrong with me. |
| Dan Barker | Prayer never changes the laws of nature. |
| Dan Barker | The trouble is that neutrality is confused with hostility. We're not disrupting churches, or interrupting people's prayers. We're not fighting religion. |
| Dan Barker | Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it. |
| Dan Barker | 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 | It's not easy to change world views. Faith has its own momentum and belief is comfortable. To restructure reality is traumatic and scary. That is why many intelligent people continue to believe: unbelief is an unknown. |
| Dan Barker | Some theists, observing that all 'effects' need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove. |
| Dan Barker | Theists claim that there is a god; atheists do not. Religionists often challenge atheists to prove that there is no god; but this misses the point. Atheists claim god is unproved, not disproved. In any argument, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim. |
| Dan Barker | If a person claims to have invented an antigravity device, it is not incumbent on others to prove that no such thing exists. The believer must make a case. Everyone else is justified in refusing to believe until evidence is produced and substantiated. |
| Dan Barker | The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased) by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural, Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, ... |
| Dan Barker | You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help? |
| Dan Barker | How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost? |
| Dan Barker | You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say God is love, they will claim that *you* are taking things out of context! |
| Dan Barker | I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being. |
| Dan Barker | There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling--absolutely essential to mental health and happiness. |
| Dan Barker | For my money, I'll bet on reason and humanistic kindness. Even if I am wrong I will have enjoyed my life, the existence of which is under little dispute. |
| Dan Barker | The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed Christian notions. |
| Dan Barker | To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance. |
| Dan Barker | I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief. |
| Dan Barker | Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender. |
| Dan Barker | Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence? After all, don't we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines? |
| Delos B. McKown | The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. |
| Denis Diderot | Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. |
| Dennis Kucinich | The belief in the inevitability of war is a self-fulfilling prophecy... We need an alternative vision, to see the world as one, as interconnected. |
| Dick Cheney | Go fuck yourself. |
| Dick Cheney | My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators [in Iraq]. |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | 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. The 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. |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing. |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | 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. |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America. |
| Edmund Burke | Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe. |
| Edward Dowling | The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it. |
| Epicurus | Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? |
| Ernest Hemingway | All thinking men are atheists. |
| Evelyn Beatrice Hall | I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. |
| Frieda Norris | Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them, and you have their shoes. |
| Gary Lloyd | When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence. |
| General David Petraeus | Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. |
| George H. Smith | Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation. |
| George H. Smith | Christianity has nothing to offer a happy man living in a natural, intelligible universe. If Christianity is to gain a motivational foothold, it must declare war on earthly pleasure and happiness, and this, historically, has been its precise course of action. |
| George H. Smith | Through inculcating the notion that sacrifice is a virtue, Christianity has succeeded in convincing many people that misery incurred through sacrifice is a mark of virtue. Pain becomes the insignia of morality - and conversely, pleasure becomes the insignia of immorality. |
| George H. Smith | Christianity, with some exceptions, has never explicitly advocated human misery; it prefers instead to speak of sacrifices in this life so that benefits may be garnered in the life to come. One invests in this life, so to speak, and collects interest in the next. Fortunately for Christianity, the dead cannot return for a refund. |
| George H. Smith | Christianity cannot erase man's need for pleasure, nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however, and what it has been extremely effective in accomplishing, is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure, when accompanied by guilt, becomes a means of perpetuating chronic guilt, and this serves to reinforce one's dependence on God. |
| George H. Smith | If the choice must be made between the comfort of religion and the truth of atheism, many people will sacrifice the latter without hesitation. From their perspective, there is much more to the issue of god's existence than whether he exists or not. |
| George H. Smith | 'Theism' is defined as the 'belief in a god or gods.' The term 'theism' is sometimes used to designate the belief in a particular kind of god -- the personal god of monotheism -- but as used throughout this book, 'theism' signifies the belief in any god or number of gods. The prefix 'a' means 'without,' so the term 'a-theism' literally means 'without theism,' or without belief in a god or gods. Atheism, therefore, is the absence of theistic belief. One who does not believe in the existence of a god or supernatural being is properly designated as an atheist. |
| George H. Smith | Atheism, in its basic form, is not a belief; it is the absence of belief. |
| George H. Smith | One either accepts the proposition 'god exists' as true, or one does not. One either believes in a supernatural being, or one does not. There is no third option or middle ground. |
| George H. Smith | The agnostic atheist maintains that any supernatural realm is inherently unknowable by the human mind, but this agnostic suspends his judgment one step further back. For the agnostic atheist, not only is the nature of any supernatural being unknowable, but the existence of any supernatural being is unknowable as well. We cannot have knowledge of the unknowable; therefore, concludes this agnostic, we cannot have knowledge of god's existence. |
| George H. Smith | Proof is applicable only in the case of a positive belief. To demand proof of the atheist, the religionist must represent atheism as a positive belief requiring substantiation. When the atheist is seen as a person who lacks belief in a god, it becomes clear that he is not obligated to 'prove' anything. |
| George Orwell | Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. |
| George Orwell | We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. |
| George W. Bush | I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family. |
| George W. Bush | The most important job is not to be governor, or first lady in my case. |
| George W. Bush | There ought to be limits to freedom. |
| George W. Bush | Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the president [Clinton] to explain to us what the exit strategy is. |
| George W. Bush | This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base. |
| George W. Bush | Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out. |
| George W. Bush | I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind. |
| George W. Bush | I'm the decider and I decide what's best. |
| George W. Bush | See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. |
| George W. Bush | Major combat operations have ended [in Iraq]. |
| George W. Bush | One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror. |
| George W. Bush | I will not withdraw [from Iraq], even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me. |
| George W. Bush | I think -- tide turning -- see, as I remember -- I was raised in the desert, but tides kind of -- it's easy to see a tide turn -- did I say those words? |
| George W. Bush | I heard there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft. |
| George W. Bush | You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on. |
| George W. Bush | I'm sure people view me as a war monger and I view myself as peacemaker. |
| George Washington | As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality. |
| George Washington | Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. |
| George Washington | Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected. |
| George Washington | If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. |
| George Washington | Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government. |
| George Washington | The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments. |
| George Washington | The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good. |
| Glenn Greenwald | Central to our system of government is the premise that there are laws which even the largest majorities are prohibited from enacting because such laws violate the constitutional rights of minorities. |
| Gore Vidal | Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. |
| H.L. Mencken | Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. |
| Hamlet | Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them. |
| Harold Koh | If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution. |
| Harry Emerson Fosdick | Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have. |
| Harry Truman | It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. |
| Harry Truman | Wherever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship |
| Hector Berlioz | Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. |
| Herbert Hoover | Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die. |
| Herm Albright | A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. |
| Hermann Goering | Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. |
| Hillary Clinton | We have a lot of kids who don't know what work means. They think work is a four-letter word. |
| Howard Thurman | During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism. |
| Hugh of GapingVoid.com | "RIAA: When the 'sellers' start thinking they're more important than the 'makers' or the 'users', you know we've got trouble." |
| Isaac Asimov | Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. |
| Isaac Asimov | Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night |
| Issac Asimov | Violence is the first refuge of the incompetent. |
| James Baldwin | I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. |
| James Baldwin | Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. |
| James Baldwin | I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. |
| James Madison | In no instance have ... the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people. |
| James Madison | All men having power ought to be mistrusted. |
| James Madison | If men were angels, no government would be necessary. |
| James Madison | If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. |
| James Madison | No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. |
| James Madison | Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. |
| James Madison | The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty. |
| James Madison | The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. |
| James Madison | The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse. |
| James Madison | The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war. |
| James Madison | The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad. |
| James Madison | What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. |
| James Madison | 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 with blood for centuries. |
| James Madison | We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties. |
| James Madison | The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home. |
| James Madison | Congress should not establish a religion and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contary to their conscience, or that one sect might obtain a pre-eminence, or two combined together, and establish a religion to which they would compel others to conform. |
| James Madison | Strongly guarded as is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history. |
| James Madison | The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. |
| James Madison | Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. |
| James Madison | There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation. |
| James Madison | I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations |
| James Reston | All politics are based on the indifference of the majority. |
| Jeannette Rankin | You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. |
| Jerry Falwell | The ACLU is to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews. |
| Jerry Falwell | The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country. |
| Jerry Falwell | 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! |
| Jerry Falwell | AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharaoh's charioteers ... AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals. |
| Jerry Falwell | The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped [the 9/11 attacks] happen.' |
| John Adams | The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not men. |
| John Adams | There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. |
| John Adams | In politics the middle way is none at all. |
| John Adams | There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution. |
| John Adams | Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. |
| John Adams | The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical. |
| John Adams | Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it. |
| John Ashcroft | To those who pit Americans against immigrants, citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. |
| John F. Kennedy | Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind. |
| John F. Kennedy | Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. |
| John F. Kennedy | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. |
| John F. Kennedy | What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. |
| John F. Kennedy | If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity. |
| John F. Kennedy | Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. |
| John F. Kennedy | Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. |
| John F. Kennedy | If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. |
| John F. Kennedy | Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. |
| John F. Kennedy | My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. |
| John F. Kennedy | Don't sacrifice your political convictions for the convenience of the hour. |
| John F. Kennedy | I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute [...] where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. |
| John Hay | The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. |
| John Locke | All just power is derived from the consent of the governed. |
| John Stuart Mill | Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservative. |
| John Stuart Mill | War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. |
| Jon Stewart | If Bill O'Reilly needs to have an enemy, he needs to feel persecuted, you know what, here's my Kwanzaa gift to him: I'm your enemy; make me your enemy. I, Jon Stewart, hate Christmas, Christians, Jews, morality! And I will not rest until every year families gather to spend December 25th together at Osama's Homobortion Pot and Commie Jizzporium. |
| Jon Stewart | With the situation in Iraq growing ever more dangerous, the thirty-four-member Coalition of The Willing are, one by one, dropping out to join the other coalition known as Most of The Rest of The World. |
| Jon Stewart | It's as though there's only two positions you can have: You're either for the war or against the troops. |
| Jon Stewart | Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake. |
| Jon Stewart | Last night, the Republican faithful were angry. After four years of being in charge of the House, Senate, Supreme Court and Executive branch, they were not gonna take it anymore. Yeah! Down with the people who are already down! |
| Jon Stewart | Despite reports that John Kerry was wounded three times in Vietnam, it was revealed today that he was only wounded twice. So in other words, he's a pussy. |
| Jon Stewart | Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion. |
| Jon Stewart | Seriously, the House of Representatives is full of insane jackasses. |
| Jon Stewart | If you're keeping score at home, so far our war in Iraq has created a police state in that country and socialism in Spain. So, no democracies yet, but we're really getting close. |
| Jon Stewart | If the events of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it's that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us American -- our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that. |
| Joseph Stalin | The people who vote decide nothing. The people who count the vote decide everything. |
| Jude Wanniski | All growth, including political growth, is the result of risk-taking. |
| Judge Anna Diggs Taylor | There are no hereditary kings in America, and no powers not created by the Constitution |
| Karl Marx | Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. |
| Lee Camp | What is Fox News? It's just a parade of propaganda, isn't it? It's just a...festival of ignorance. |
| Lord Acton | The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. |
| Malcolm X | The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. |
| Mark Schnitzius | If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color. |
| Mark Twain | Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any. |
| Mark Twain | Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing. |
| Mark Twain | Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. |
| Mark Twain | History does not repeat itself, It rhymes. |
| Mark Twain | In all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane. |
| Mark Twain | It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt. |
| Mark Twain | Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. |
| Mark Twain | Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. |
| Mark Twain | Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. |
| Mark Twain | Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. |
| Mark Twain | Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it. |
| Mark Twain | Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with. |
| Mark Twain | I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position. |
| Mark Twain | Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with. |
| Mark Twain | I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world. |
| Mark Twain | Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. |
| Mark Twain | The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them. |
| Martin Luther King, Jr. | I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. |
| Martin Luther King, Jr. | One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. |
| Martin Luther King, Jr. | Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war. |
| MattTaibbi | You can run any shit up the flag pole, and these reporters will salute it. |
| Mel Brooks | Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die. |
| Mel Gibson | F**king Jews. ... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. ... Are you a Jew? |
| Mike Huckabee | I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do, is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards. |
| Mikhail Bakunin | God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master. |
| Mikhail Bakunin | All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers. |
| Mikhail Bakunin | The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth. |
| Mikhail Bakunin | With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians or poets: the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice. |
| Mikhail Bakunin | People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy. |
| Mikhail Bakunin | Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason. |
| Mikhail Bakunin | Religion is a collective insanity. |
| Mikhail Bakunin | Theology is the science of the divine lie |
| Mohandas Gandhi | Truth alone will endure; all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | You should be the change that you want to see in the world. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | To believe in something, and not live it, is dishonest. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | I do not want my house to be walled in on sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | I don't know which is the greater task: to decentralize a top-heavy civilization or to prevent an ancient civilization from becoming centralized and top-heavy. In both cases the core of the problem is to discover what constitutes a good civilization, then proclaim it to the people and help them to erect it. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | I do not believe in the doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number. The only real, dignified, human doctrine is the greatest good of all. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | I have been known as a crank, faddist, madman. Evidently the reputation is well deserved. For wherever I go, I draw to myself cranks, faddists, and madmen. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | Things undreamt of are daily being seen, the impossible is ever becoming possible. We are constantly being astonished these days at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | Passive resistance is an all-sided sword; it can be used anyhow; it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | We must always seek to ally ourselves with that part of the enemy that knows what is right. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | I can combine the greatest love with the greatest opposition to wrong. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | Whether humanity will consciously follow the law of love, I do not know. But that need not disturb me. The law will work just as the law of gravitation works, whether we accept it or not. The person who discovered the law of love was a far greater scientist than any of our modern scientists. Only our explorations have not gone far enough and so it is not possible for everyone to see all its workings. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | All my actions have their rise in my inalienable love of mankind. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | Use truth as your anvil, nonviolence as your hammer and anything that does not stand the test when it is brought to the anvil of truth and hammered with nonviolence, reject it. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | Even as a tree has a single trunk but many branches and leaves, there is one religion - human religion - but any number of faiths. |
| Mohandas Gandhi | When the missionary of another religion goes to them, he goes like a vendor of goods. He has no special spiritual merit that will distinguish him from those to whom he goes. He does however possess material goods which he promises to those who will come to his fold. |
| Morton C. Blackwell | Moral outrage is the most powerful motivating force in politics. |
| Nancy Pelosi | The Congress of the United States has always been an institution that has been mockable. |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich. |
| Native American proverb | WE do not inherit the world from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. |
| Native American proverb | It is easy to be brave from a distance. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they can not become conscious. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | When war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. |
| Noam Chomsky | If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all. |
| Noam Chomsky | There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich. |
| Noam Chomsky | It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them. |
| Noam Chomsky | Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism. |
| Noam Chomsky | If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. |
| Og Mandino | The value of experience is overrated, usually by old men who nod wisely and speak stupidly. |
| Og Mandino | In truth, experience teaches thoroughly yet her course of instruction devours men's years so the value of her lessons diminishes with the time necessary to aquire her special wisdom. The end finds it wasted on dead men. Furthermore, experience is comparable to fashion; an action that proved successful today will be unworkable and impractical tomorrow. |
| Og Mandino | Failure is a person's inability to reach his or her goals in life, whatever they may be. In truth, the only difference between those who have failed and those who have succeeded lies in the difference of their habits. Good habits are the key to all success. Bad habits are the unlocked door to failure. |
| Oscar Wilde | Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. |
| Pablo Casals | The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? |
| Pat Robertson | Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians.
Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history. |
| Pat Robertson | (T)he feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians. |
| Pat Robertson | I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period. |
| Pat Robertson | Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history. |
| Patrick Henry | Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings - give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else! [...] Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. |
| Penn Jillette | [Penn & Teller] are pro-science, and when you're pro-science, that means you're an atheist, by definition |
| Pierre Bayle | In matters of religion it is very easy to deceive a man, and very hard to undeceive him. |
| Ralph Bunche | There are no warlike people, just warlike leaders. |
| Ralph Reed | In public policy, it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard - and by whom. |
| Ralph Reed | In public policy, it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard - and by whom. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Consistency is the hobgolbin of small minds. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to think. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Every hero becomes a bore at last. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Give all to love; obey thy heart. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Let not a man guard his dignity, but let his dignity guard him. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Nothing can be preserved that is not good. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon-balls and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The ancestor of every action is a thought. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The only gift is a portion of thyself. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The only way to have a friend is to be one. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The world belongs to the energetic. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | We do what we must, and call it by the best names. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Every artist was first an amateur. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | As soon as there is life there is danger. |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. |
| Richard Jeni | You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend. |
| Robert F. Kennedy | Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly |
| Robert F. Kennedy | Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital, quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change. |
| Robert F. Kennedy | The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country. |
| Robert F. Kennedy | Men without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed. |
| Robert F. Kennedy | There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were and ask why not. |
| Robert F. Kennedy | Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. |
| Robert F. Kennedy | Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it. |
| Robert F. Kennedy | Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted - when we tolerate what we know to be wrong - when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy, or too frightened - when we fail to speak up and speak out - we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice. |
| Robert Ingersoll | Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. |
| Robert McChesney | The first argument of the successful propagandist is to claim that what you are doing is telling the straight truth, while everyone with whom you disagree is doctoring their story to cover up their flaws. |
| Rodney Dangerfield | I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio. |
| Rodney Dangerfield | During sex, my girlfriend always wants to talk to me. Just the other night she called me from a hotel. |
| Rodney Dangerfield | I have good-looking kids. Thank goodness my wife cheats on me. |
| Rodney Dangerfield | My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met. |
| Rodney Dangerfield | I said to the bartender "Suprise me." He pulled out a naked picture of my wife. |
| Ron Paul | The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. |
| Ronald Reagan | There is a mandate to impose a voluntary return to traditional values. |
| Ronald Reagan | In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. |
| Ronald Reagan | 'Trust me' government is government that asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what's best for us. My view of government places trust not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties. The trust is where it belongs -- in the people. |
| Ronald Reagan | I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. |
| Rudy Giuliani | What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do. |
| Russ Feingold | Resisting overreaching by the federal government is appropriate and, yes, even patriotic. |
| Russ Feingold | The Democrats were in the majority in the U.S. Senate when we voted for the Iraq war and passed the U.S. Patriot Act. It's not enough to be in the majority, you have to stand for something. |
| Sam Harris | Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. |
| Sam Harris | Unreason is now ascendant in the United States - in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. |
| Sam Harris | Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world. |
| Sam Harris | The point at which we fully acquire our humanity, and our capacity to suffer, remains an open question... |
| Sam Harris | ...but anyone who would dogmatically insist that these traits must arise coincident with the moment of conception has nothing to contribute, apart from his ignorance, to this debate. |
| Sam Harris | The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. |
| Sam Harris | The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith-perfect faith, as it turns out-and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be. |
| Sam Harris | All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughts-of family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetener-inexplicably usurped by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below. |
| Sam Harris | A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life. |
| Sam Harris | We are no more free to believe whatever we want about God than we are free to adopt unjustified beliefs about science or history, or free to mean whatever we want when using words like "poison" or "north" or "zero." |
| Sam Harris | Every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. |
| Sam Harris | Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors. |
| Sam Harris | We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. |
| Sam Harris | Spirituality can be-indeed, must be-deeply rational. |
| Sam Harris | The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. |
| Sam Harris | To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world-to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish-is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. |
| Sam Harris | The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics. |
| Sam Harris | The Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions-jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate. |
| Sam Harris | Christian missionaries have been known to preach the sinfulness of condom use in villages where no other information about condoms is available. This kind of piety is genocidal. |
| Sam Harris | The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable. |
| Samuel Adams | The Constitution shall never be construed [...] to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. |
| Sandra Day O'Connor | We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens. |
| Sarah Palin | That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But, ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, umm ... helping the ... uh, it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that. |
| Stephen Colbert | I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq. |
| Stephen Colbert | My name is Stephen Colbert, and tonight it's my privilege to celebrate the president! I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a powerful message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebounds with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world! He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will. |
| Stephen Colbert | If you [Bill O'Reilly] are an act, then what am I? |
| Stephen Colbert | Atheism, a religion dedicated to its own sense of smug superiority. |
| Stephen Colbert | We won. Rebuilding is for losers. Time to party. And then it's off to Syria for the next invasion. |
| Stephen Colbert | It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. |
| Stephen Colbert | I would say laughter is the best medicine. But it's more than that. It's an entire regime of antibiotics and steroids. Laughter brings the swelling down on our national psyche, and then applies an antibiotic cream... Obviously, it's a challenge to make light of the darkness but, um, it's better than crying about it. |
| Stephen Colbert | You can't laugh and be afraid at the same time -- of anything. If you're laughing, I defy you to be afraid. |
| Stephen Colbert | That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. |
| Stephen Colbert | I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the "No Fact Zone". Fox News, I hold a copyright on that term. |
| Stephen Colbert | I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias. |
| Stephen Colbert | Over the last five years you people [the media] were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew. |
| Stephen Colbert | Who's Britannica to tell me that the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say that it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American. |
| Stephen Colbert | I've said it before... science is elitist. Making rules, setting boundaries, constantly telling us what is and isn't flammable -- all without input from the very people who are expected to abide by those laws. I know I never consented to Gravity Without Representation. |
| Stephen Colbert | Guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well known liberal bias. |
| Stephen Henry Roberts | 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. |
| Susan B. Anthony | I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. |
| Ted Stevens | The internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effects of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. |
| Thomas Jefferson | The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. |
| Thomas Jefferson | I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Delay is preferable to error. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies. |
| Thomas Jefferson | History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. |
| Thomas Jefferson | I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. |
| Thomas Jefferson | An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will. |
| Thomas Jefferson | The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty. |
| Thomas Jefferson | To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Experience has already shown that the impeachment the Constitution has provided is not even a scarecrow. |
| Thomas Paine | Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good. |
| Thomas Paine | A long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. |
| Thomas Paine | The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. |
| Thomas Paine | Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one. |
| Thomas Paine | It is of the utmost danger to society to make it [religion] a party in political disputes. |
| Thomas Paine | Mingling religion with politics may be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America. |
| Thomas Paine | An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. |
| Thomas Paine | It is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. |
| Thomas Paine | But where says some is the king of America? I'll tell you friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Britain. ... so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. |
| Thomas Paine | That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices among Nations, it becomes the more unpardonable. |
| Thomas Paine | I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. |
| 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 | All national 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 | It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. |
| Thomas Paine | I am unwilling to attribute bad designs, deliberate wickedness, to you or to any man; I cannot avoid believing, that you think you have truth on your side, and that you are doing service to mankind in endeavouring to root out what you esteem superstition. What I blame you for is this-that you have attempted to lessen the authority of the Bible by ridicule, more than by reason. |
| Thomas Paine | Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. |
| Tom Delay | Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills. |
| Tom Delay | Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes. |
| Tom Wolfe | A cult is a religion with no political power |
| Troy Witte | The fool says in his heart: 'There is no God.' The Wise Man says it to the world. |
| unknown | People are brought together not by similarity, but by emotions. |
| unknown | Evict your inner wussy. |
| unknown | For every love that dies, a new one is born. |
| unknown | To live is to fight, for this world is but a hurricane of challenges all aimed at you. |
| V for Vendetta | Voila! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition! The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V. |
| Voltaire | [Christianity] is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world. |
| Voltaire | To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature. |
| Voltaire | It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong. |
| Walter Bagehot | So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it unwise, and their conscience it is wrong. |
| Will Rogers | I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat |
| William Ewart Gladstone | Justice delayed is justice denied. |
| William Ewart Gladstone | Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home. |
| William Ewart Gladstone | Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear. |
| William F. Buckley Jr. | Idealism is fine; but as it approaches reality, the cost becomes prohibitive. |
| William Shakespeare | I give unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture. |
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