A collection of quips of the famous, the infamous, and the anonymous.

The abominable laws respecting [women in the Bible] . . . are a disgrace to civilization and English literature; and any family which permits such a volume to lie on their parlor-table ought to be ostracized from all respectable society. -Ella E. Gibson, 19th century American badass

Abortion is a blessing. -Anne Nicol Gaylor

Absent some countervailing pressure from what we’ll call, for short, the Left, it’s a foregone conclusion that the political system will evolve in a way that responds to the desires of the wealthy and powerful. Over time, the Democratic Party has assumed the role of ensuring that the countervailing pressure from the Left doesn’t happen. The party contains and neutralizes the Left, or what there is of it. Left voters are supposed to support the Democrat, come what may — and it’s amazing how many of us have internalized this supposed obligation — but they are not allowed to have any influence on the party’s policies. -Michael J. Smith

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate. -Bertrand Russell

The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life. -Robert Browning

All of the personality disorders have an inherent tendency to live in the past, or in fantasy, with too little input from the here and now. This produces a characteristic infantile quality in these individuals. (Kantor, 1992, p. 36)

Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made. -Former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, May 2013

America’s political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas — beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity. -Paul Krugman

Among human beings, the subjection of women is much more complete at a certain level of civilization than it is among savages. And the subjection is always reinforced by morality. -Bertrand Russell

Another friend began to say, “Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he…” This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, “I don’t agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him.” -Quentin Crisp

[A]nybody who knows politicians knows that they never do anything because of principle. The more honest among them may occasionally decline to do something because of principle; but no politician will walk up to the altar and sacrifice himself by taking an initiative on principle. People who have that kind of personality get weeded out of electoral politics very early in the game. -Michael J. Smith

Anyone who thinks that the best approach to changing the public mind about a topic is a quiet, analytical debate really needs to lean out the window of his ivory tower and look into how marketing and politics actually work. -Naked Bunny with a Whip

Any place where churches outnumber bars and bookstores has too damn many churches. -PZ Myers

The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage — and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still — I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation and appreciation of art. -Kurt Vonnegut

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. -H.L. Mencken [Note: that day was January 20, 2001. -Ed.]

[A]s for helping me in the outside world, the convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser it will erase ink. And I remember the smell of oilcloth, the smell of nuns’ garb. I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion. -Dorothy Parker

As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.  – Richard Dawkins

As is your sort of mind,
So is your sort of search:
You will find what you desire.
-Robert Browning

As it happens, no atheist should call himself or herself one. The term already sells a pass to theists, because it invites debate on their ground. A more appropriate term is “naturalist”, denoting one who takes it that the universe is a natural realm, governed by nature’s laws. This properly implies that there is nothing supernatural in the universe – no fairies or goblins, angels, demons, gods or goddesses. Such might as well call themselves “a-fairyists” or “a-goblinists” as “atheists”; it would be every bit as meaningful or meaningless to do so. -AC Grayling

Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then? -Quentin Crisp

As near as I can tell, the modern Republican Party seems to be an alliance between the evil and the stupid. It is a formidable alliance. The stupid provide the numbers, while the evil provide the “moral flexibility”. -a_ray_in_dilbert_space, OM

As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. -Bertrand Russell

As always with any discussion of elite immunity, it’s crucial to note that what makes this development such a particularly warped travesty is that the very same elites who enjoy this immunity have created the world’s largest, and the Western world’s most oppressive and merciless, penal state for ordinary citizens. -Glenn Greenwald

Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people. -Voltaire

Atheists in general don’t commit atrocities, and the examples they provide that do are in good company with many of the religious who do so as well. Lack of faith does not cause atrocities; faith does not prevent them. -sandlin.john

At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt. -John McCain, responding to his wife Cindy commenting that his hair was thinning, as reported by three Arizona reporters on the campaign trail in 1992.  [Via The G Spot.]

Belonging to the Catholic Church gives your support to an organization that conceals and protects child rapists. Again, not as a few isolated incidents, but as a massive, institution-wide culture, a matter of policy even, that extends throughout the organization and reaches all the way to the top. Belonging to the Catholic Church — giving them money, letting them count you in their rolls, sending your children to their schools — gives this behavior your personal thumbs-up, and actively enables it to continue. -Greta Christina

[A] big part of the problem is the way the Democratic Party soaks up the energies of people who might otherwise be part of the environmental movement, or the anti-war movement, or the anti-globalization movement, or a band of hardy urban guerrillas spray-painting the lenses of surveillance cameras. (I strongly approve of this kind of thing but I’m a little old for it myself.) -Michael J. Smith

[T]he blossom of benevolence, of charity, is the fairest flower, no matter whether it blooms by the side of a hovel, or bursts from a vine climbing the marble pillar of a palace. I respect no man because he is rich; I hold in contempt no man because he is poor. -Robert Green Ingersoll

Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters. -Ernestine Rose

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional “next world” is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them. -Richard Dawkins

By all means, everyone, do what it takes to find your cozy place inside the margins. But don’t be surprised when those of us on the outside shoot you a middle finger instead of applauding. -ohtarzie

[C]apitalism at its most ruthless is a manifestation of psychopathy. -Jon Ronson

[Christianity] has reinvented itself so often, and with such breathtaking hypocrisy, in the interests of retaining its hold on the gullible, that a medieval monk who woke today, like Woody Allen’s Sleeper, would not be able to recognise the faith that bears the same name as his own. -AC Grayling

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism, extermination and tyranny. -George Santayana

Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn’t have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout. -Andy Rooney

The church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down. -Robert Green Ingersoll

The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. -Ferdinand Magellan

The clergy, no less than the capitalist class, lives on the backs of the people, profits from the degradation, the ignorance and the oppression of the people. -Rosa Luxemburg

Clever tyrants are never punished. -Voltaire

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving. -Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff. -Frank Zappa

Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves. -Bertrand Russell

The country is ideologically polarized, but the only place that it is polarized between centrism and conservatism is in Washington. Many Democrats around the country have an agenda too and it’s … liberal, even if they don’t know it. -digby

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. -Dorothy Parker

Darwin has done more to change human thought than all the priests who have existed. -Robert Green Ingersoll

[D]ebt increases that didn’t arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments. -Paul Krugman

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage. -H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

The Democratic Party is not only a necropolis where activists decay into bureaucrats; it’s also a toxic growth poisoning the soil where activism grows — the crabgrass or milfoil that crowds out all the other species and devours all the nutrients. It is not merely an alternative to activism; it is the enemy of activism, and thus the enemy of any politics worthy of the name — by which I mean politics that goes beyond an empty, meaningless rivalry between two white-collar street gangs for the spoils of office. -Michael J. Smith

Despite what you may have heard, free markets are, at best amoral. I’d go farther than that, but my therapist says I really need to work on making friends. -eastsidekate

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. -John Stuart Mill

Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who’ll shout at you, or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it’s the latter, so I sign up. -Margaret Atwood

Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all? -Kurt Vonnegut

The domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition. The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation’s most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism. Accepting that bargain enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom — “he who does not move does not notice his chains,” observed Rosa Luxemburg — but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice. -Glenn Greenwald

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your experiences are the only correct, rational ones. Don’t drive people of minority backgrounds away by refusing to listen to them and making them feel unwelcome. Be open-minded and willing to learn from your fellow human beings. If you’re not willing to do that, then organised atheism will always be a bastion of rich, white, straight dudes who pat themselves on the back for being better than everyone else, and wonder why no one wants to join them. -Winterwind

Don’t worry so much about the next four years; they’re going to be a disaster no matter who gets into the White House. Face that fact squarely, keep a bag packed and your passport handy by way of preparation for the next President, and when you vote, think ahead a little more. -Michael J. Smith

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one. -Voltaire

A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole. -Frank Zappa

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. -John Stuart Mill

The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn’t asked any questions. -Frank Zappa

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. -Bertrand Russell

Eskimo: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?
Priest: No, not if you did not know.
Eskimo: Then why did you tell me?
-Annie Dillard

The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it’s yours. That’s our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars — that’s the Biblical view. -Ann Coulter

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne. -Quentin Crisp

Everyone in life has a purpose, even if it’s to serve as a bad example. -Carroll Bryant

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. -Voltaire

Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice. -Quentin Crisp

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. -Carl Sagan

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac. -Quentin Crisp

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. -Richard Dawkins

[Fascism] was explicitly anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and corporatist, and it endorsed violence as a chief means to its ends. It was also, obviously, authoritarian, but claiming that it was oriented toward “socialism” is just crudely ahistorical, if not outrageously revisionist. Socialists, let’s not forget, were among the first people imprisoned and “liquidated” by the Nazi regime. -Dave Neiwert

Feminist rage is not a finite substance. There’s enough for all the doomed rebellions. -Jill Psmith and/or Twisty Faster

Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society. -Rush Limbaugh

Few people become assholes reluctantly. -Geoffrey Nunberg

The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue. -Dorothy Parker

The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’ Because the wise say it aloud. -Ing

For a fact, the Christians stole Christmas. We don’t mind sharing it with them, but we don’t like this pretense of theirs that it is the birthday of Jesus. It is the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun–Dies Natalis Invicti Solis. Christmas is a relic of sun worship. -Anne Nicol Gaylor

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook. -Quentin Crisp

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster. -Quentin Crisp

For my part, the thing I would wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendour, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals. -Bertrand Russell

The Founding Fathers knew the only way to insure religious freedom and to maintain democracy is to keep religion and government separate. We cannot allow our government to endorse religion even slightly for it’s a thin line from endorse to enforce.-Brian Cottle

A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness. -Richard Dawkins

The genius of America’s endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. -Glenn Greenwald

Give a man a fish , and you’ll feed him for a day. Give him a religion and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish. -Timothy Jones.

God is the only being who does not have to exist in order to reign. -Charles Pierre Baudelaire

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. -Richard Dawkins

‘God’s plan’ is often a front for men’s plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil. -Mary Daly

God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said. -Quentin Crisp

The government usually announces it killed a Big Terrorist 5 or 6 different times before they’re dead – they’re almost like cats. -Glenn Greenwald

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. -Daniel J. Boorstin

[H]aving the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian. -Glenn Greenwald

He [Cardinal Keith O’Brien] also claimed that homosexuality is against “natural law”. Natural law seems to be very poorly enforced in this case, then, and besides, you want to know what really defies natural law? Celibacy. -PZ Myers

Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbours. -Quentin Crisp

He hasn’t a single redeeming vice. -Oscar Wilde

Here’s one atheist hoping there is a rapture. Otherwise the rest of us are truly fucked. – Rincewind’s muse.

Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common. -Dorothy Parker

Hey, you know something people? I’m not black, but there’s a whole lots a times I wish I could say I’m not white. -Frank Zappa

History is merely a list of surprises. … It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down. -Kurt Vonnegut

How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds? -John Stuart Mill

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables to us? -Michel de Montaigne

How presumptuous of someone to think the world is interested in a half-dozen or eight or 10 of their kids. -Anne Nicol Gaylor

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -Robert Heinlein

Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn’t often, on their own, the hard way. -Robert Heinlein

I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: “O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!” God granted it. -Voltaire

I always say, ‘I don’t believe in God, I believe in Al Pacino’ – and that’s true. -Javier Bardem

I am a greedy bitch with voracious expectations, and I dream long and lustfully of a better world that is both my muse and objective.  I want it like the cracked earth of the desert wants rain, and I will neither apologize for nor amend my desire because of its remove from the here and now; its distance encourages my reach. -Melissa McEwan

I am a lesbian trapped in a man’s body. -Eddie Izzard

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom. -Voltaire

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind–that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.  I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious… I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect. -H.L. Mencken

I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that. -Donald Rumsfeld

The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity. -Carl Sagan

I didn’t really believe anything that had been demonstrated to be absurd…while anyone was watching. When nobody was watching, I believed some seriously crazy bullshit. -Greta Christina [h/t Sastra]

I distrust all generalizations about women, favourable and unfavourable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience. -Bertrand Russell

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires. -Susan B. Anthony

I do not believe in loving enemies; I have pretty hard work to love my friends. -Robert Green Ingersoll

I do not have a problem with Christians: I have a problem with faith and religion in general. It didn’t grow out of bitter personal experiences, but from sincere epistemic and ethical concerns. As I see it, the problem is not Bad People distorting what ought to be a wonderful thing. It’s that the religious methodology cannot distinguish between what is good and reasonable, and what is is false and harmful. And it teaches good people not to care. -Sastra

I don’t believe in heaven and hell. I don’t know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won’t allow this life—the only thing I know to exist—to be wasted. -George Clooney

I don’t care if religious people consider me amoral because I lack their beliefs in God. I do, however, care deeply about efforts to turn religious beliefs into law, and those efforts benefit greatly from the conviction that individually and collectively, we cannot be good without God. -Wendy Kaminer

I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true. -Dorothy Parker

I don’t have a chance [on being elected Mayor of New Orleans]. I’m running on the gay marriage, no religion, legalization and taxation of marijuana platform. -Brad Pitt

If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style. -Quentin Crisp

If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination. -Mary Daly

If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction. -Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism, 1811

I find it … curious that clergy (and religious men) are subservient only to an invisible, silent being. -Iris Vander Pluym

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable. -Quentin Crisp

If one lived for ever the joys of life would inevitably in the end lose their savour. As it is, they remain perennially fresh. -Bertrand Russell

If people are good only because they fear punishment or want a reward, we’re doomed. -Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

If you are a conservative you can never get anything wrong. I was very proud of the fact that I didn’t get anything wrong that I said during the course of the debates. -Michele Bachmann

If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way.-Robert Heinlein

[I]f you look at United States history since World War II, you find that of the 10 presidents who preceded Barack Obama, seven left office with a debt ratio lower than when they came in. Who were the three exceptions? Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. -Paul Krugman

If you really want to talk about being dependent on government, $16 trillion for Wall Street, not one of them gone to jail involved in the criminal activity linked to predatory lending, market manipulation or insider trading. The government protects them. Jamal gets caught with a crack bag; he going to jail. But Mr. McGillicuddy gets caught on Wall Street; he’s protected by the government. Neither administration—Bush, Obama—have any investigations, no prosecutions at all. So the folk who are really dependent, they get interest-free loans from the Federal Reserve. Wouldn’t it be nice if students could get interest-free loans? -Cornell West

If you remove the fear of criminal punishment for the nation’s political and financial elites — as we have done — what possible constraint on their behavior does anyone think will remain? -Glenn Greenwald

[I]f you want instant, reflexive support for the US government’s police and military powers, MSNBC is the place to turn these days. -Glenn Greenwald

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. -Dorothy Parker

If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT.  -Frank Zappa

Ignorance is not innocence but sin. -Robert Browning

I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives’ tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen. -Dorothy Parker

I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made. -John Stuart Mill

I had other priorities in the sixties than military service. –Dick Cheney on his five draft deferments.

I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it. -Dorothy Parker

I have a counter-theory…I believe men built most things because women were shut out of political power, job opportunities, and education for most of history, and instead forced into servitude towards men in the home. I believe my theory has a lot of evidence for it, in the form of all of history. -Amanda Marcotte.

I have to admit that one of my favorite fantasies is that next Sunday not one single woman, in any country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they would have to cease to do so. -Sonia Johnson

I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religions document.-Neil deGrasse Tyson

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace. -George W. Bush

I know nothing of the mother of Attila, but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims. -Bertrand Russell

I love watching creationists butt heads against the evidence. They’re so cute when they’re reeling about, blood streaming down their faces, brains getting increasingly addled, as they try to deny reality. I guess it’s a kind of historical tradition in Christianity, this business of tying a blindfold on and throwing themselves to the lions. It used to be you needed a legionnaire or two poking them with a spear to get them to enter the arena, but nowadays they just do it voluntarily. -P.Z. Myers

I’m a Christian first, and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don’t you ever forget it. -Ann Coulter

[I]magine the culture we would live in now if, instead of a dead corpse on an instrument of torture, our signifier was a child staring in wonder at the stars. -PZ Myers

I’m an atheist. . . . how unfortunate it is to assign responsibility to the higher up for justice amongst people. -Ani DiFranco

I’m offended by [evangelical leaders’] actions, but I’m not offended by their opinion. They believe in a sky god who’s going to suck them up into the sky with a vacuum cleaner. What’s there to get offended by? That’s funny! That’s hilarious! Have at it, Hoss, I’d love to see it! -Cenk Uygur

I’m sure we can count on the billionaires to be generous and give more than enough money to hospitals for the poor to adequately care for them. And gruel. I’m sure there would be gruel. -digby

I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. -Rebecca West

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. -Quentin Crisp

[I]n America, at least, we have a pretty good record for behaving in a fiscally responsible fashion, with one exception — namely, the fiscal irresponsibility that prevails when, and only when, hard-line conservatives are in power. -Paul Krugman

In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercize their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them. -Bertrand Russell

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. -John Stuart Mill

In former days, men sold themselves to the Devil to acquire magical powers. Nowadays they acquire those powers from science, and find themselves compelled to become devils. There is no hope for the world unless power can be tamed, and brought into the service, not of this or that group of fanatical tyrants, but of the whole human race, white and yellow and black, fascist and communist and democrat; for science has made it inevitable that all must live or all must die. -Bertrand Russell

In its bleeding-heart modern form, Christianity is a recent and highly modified version of what, for most of its history, has been an often violent and always oppressive ideology – think Crusades, torture, burnings at the stake, the enslavement of women to constantly repeated childbirth and undivorceable husbands, the warping of human sexuality, the use of fear (of hell’s torments) as an instrument of control, and the horrific results of calumny against Judaism. -AC Grayling

In my judgment, the Deists were all successfully answered. The god of nature is certainly as bad as the God of the Old Testament. It is only when we discard the idea of a deity, the idea of cruelty or goodness in nature, that we are able ever to bear with patience the ills of life. I feel that I am neither a favorite nor a victim. Nature neither loves nor hates me. -Robert Green Ingersoll

I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist. -Quentin Crisp

In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. -Carl Sagan

“In sex ed, they told us that sex could lead to herpes, AIDS, babies, low self-esteem… but they didn’t mention backrubs.”
“Oh yes. Sometimes there are backrubs.”
“They should mention that in class. Teach the controversy.” -Cliff Pervocracy

In social justice, not all tactics that are divisive are effective, but all tactics that are effective are divisive. That doesn’t mean we should set our phasers to “divide,” but when a tactic is labeled as “divisive” or “radical”, there is a chance it might be one worth considering. Effective tactics are divisive because the majority is most comfortable with activism that is ineffective. [Emphasis in original.] -Garland Grey

Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem. -Neil deGrasse Tyson

I persist in preferring philosophers to rabbis, priests, imams, ayatollahs, and mullahs. Rather than trust their theological hocus-pocus, I prefer to draw on alternatives to the dominant philosophical historiography: the laughers, materialists, radicals, cynics, hedonists, atheists, sensualists, voluptuaries. They know that there is only one world, and that promotion of an afterlife deprives us of the enjoyment and benefit of the only one there is. A genuinely deadly sin. -Michel Onfray

I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. -Quentin Crisp

I should have Googled before posting, but it makes no sense to call me ignorant. -Dingbat

I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability. -Oscar Wilde

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. -Robert Heinlein

It is best to keep men poor and on a permanent war footing, for this will be an antidote to the two great enemies of obedience—ambition and boredom—and the ruled will then feel in constant need of great men to lead them (the twentieth century offers us only too much evidence for this sharp insight). -Isaiah Berlin paraphrasing Machiavelli’s The Prince, in The New York Review of Books (Nov. 1971)

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one. -Voltaire

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong. -Voltaire

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. -Voltaire

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for any public office. -H.L. Mencken

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom. -Quentin Crisp

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry. -H.L. Mencken

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. -Voltaire

It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions. -Voltaire

It is simply an invariable truth in the history of politics, in the history of government, that whenever a new power is acquired in the name of some threat, it always — not sometimes, not often, not usually —it always extends beyond its original application, beyond its original justification. -Glenn Greenwald (VIDEO @ 36:30)

It’s an incredible con job, when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations, with all their reward systems, don’t try to make it posthumous. -Gloria Steinem

[I]t’s impossible to evade the fact that Endless War will inevitably degrade the citizenry of the country that engages in it. A country which venerates its military above all other institutions, which demands that its soldiers be spoken of only with religious-like worship, and which continuously indoctrinates its population to believe that endless violence against numerous countries is necessary and just — all by instilling intense fear of the minorities who are the target of that endless violence — will be a country filled with citizens convinced of the virtues and nobility of aggression. -Glenn Greenwald

It’s not the tragedies that kill us, it’s the messes. -Dorothy Parker

It was while I was studying philosophy that I came to understand. . . that it is no sign of moral or spiritual strength to believe that for which one has no evidence, neither a priori evidence as in math, nor a posteriori evidence as in science. . . . It’s a violation almost immoral in its transgressiveness to shirk the responsibilities of rationality. -Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. -Ann Coulter

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” -Kurt Vonnegut

I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense. -Dorothy Parker

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: “C-Students from Yale”. -Kurt Vonnegut

I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment. -John Stuart Mill

I went to the librarian [at age 5] and asked for a book about stars …And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light …The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me. -Carl Sagan

I would never underestimate a combination of wealthy plutocrats, churches, right wingers with an ax to grind and a willingness among all of them to cheat their way to victory. That’s an American success story in the making. -digby

Joy of life… depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work’s sake never produced any work worth doing. -Bertrand Russell

Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous. -Richard Dawkins

The justification for every religious atrocity ever perpetrated, or that ever will be perpetrated, ultimately boils down to “God wants this”. It’s no good countering this with “No, actually, God wants something else” — you have to come right out and say “There is no God”, and mean it.  -AJS

Killing people is wrong because it destroys their hopes, cuts short their enjoyment of life, and traumatizes their loved ones; not because it’s against the rules of your Dungeons and Dragons for Dimwits game.  -hyperdeath

KILL THE “($;&(:#* LIBERAL HECKLERS! -Ann Coulter

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic. -H.L. Mencken

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level. -Quentin Crisp

Leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods … express a preference for “natural” methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation. -Richard Dawkins

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson. -Voltaire

Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion. -Neil deGrasse Tyson

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world. -Voltaire

Liberalism is clinical insanity and moral syphilis.-Some d00d on some blog comment.

The long arc of history does not bend towards justice, because the bad guys get to use tactics we couldn’t get away with and couldn’t justify to ourselves, what with the whole conscience thing. It takes shitloads of effort and resources and ingenuity to just stay in place, and the US has not been doing so well even with that. -Jadehawk

Los Angeles is just New York lying down. -Quentin Crisp

“Love is the magician, the enchanter,
That changes worthless things to joy,
And makes right royal kings and queens of common clay.
Love is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart;
And without that sacred passion,
That divine swoon, we are less than beasts;
But with love, earth is heaven, and we are gods.”
-Robert Green Ingersoll

The magical thinking encouraged by any belief in the supernatural, combined with the vilification of rationality and skepticism, is more conducive to conspiracy theories than it is to productive political debate. -Wendy Kaminer

Man is a rational animal — so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. -Bertrand Russell

Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by the dozen. -Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1580)

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. -Robert Heinlein

A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. -John Stuart Mill

Meeting half way is a great way to compromise, but a terrible tactic if the other side is playing tug-of-war. It just makes half way your starting position so they can drag you further. -Gordon

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -Blaise Pascal

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home. -Carl Sagan

More and more of our imports come from overseas. -George W. Bush

The more fear confrontational activism can put into the heart of the political class, the better. -Glenn Greenwald

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anyone but himself. -Sir Richard F. Burton

The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else’s life. -Frank Zappa

Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don’t know it. -Richard Dawkins

Mothers, wives, and maids,
There be the tools wherewith priests manage men.
-Robert Browning

Mr. None-Of-The-Above received more votes in the 2004 election than either Bush or Kerry, so his supporters constitute a very substantial plurality. – Michael J. Smith

My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. -Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003

My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method. -Carl Sagan

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a ‘they’ as opposed to a ‘we’ can be identified at all. -Richard Dawkins

The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves? -Glenn Greenwald

Need of money, dear. -Dorothy Parker, in response to an interviewer’s question, “What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?”

[T]he next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good. And real-world policy — policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families — is being built on that foundation. -Paul Krugman

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely. -Glenn Greenwald

No, entitled violent douchebaggery is not a mental illness. People WITH mental illness generally are better behaved and don’t deserve being blamed and diminished by conflation with assholes. -Pteryxx

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. -Oscar Wilde

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. -Mary Wollstonecraft

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. -H.L. Mencken

[N]othing is less reliable than unchecked claims from political officials that their secret conduct is justified by National Security Threats and the desire to Keep Us Safe. -Glenn Greenwald

Nothing fails like prayer. -Anne Nicol Gaylor

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. -Michel de Montaigne

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence – Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class – clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. -Glenn Greenwald

Of all learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks. -H.L. Mencken

Of all the views that are detached from reality, the most delusional is that Christians are persecuted in the U.S. -Glenn Greenwald

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t? -Quentin Crisp

Of course, ministers look upon theaters as rival attractions, and most of their hatred is born of business views. They think people ought to be driven to church by having all other places closed. In my judgment the theater has done good, while the church has done harm. The drama never has insisted upon burning anybody. Persecution is not born of the stage. -Robert Green Ingersoll

Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this dim world
That the pale name of priest might shrink and dwindle
Into the Hell from which it first was furled.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Once a nation’s population becomes prosperous and secure, for example through economic security and universal health care, much of the population loses interest in seeking the aid and protection of supernatural entities. This effect appears to be so consistent that it may prevent nations from being highly religious while enjoying good internal socioeconomic conditions. -Gregory S. Paul

One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests. -John Stuart Mill

One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. -Bertrand Russell

The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible. -Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Only Puritans think of the Devil as the most fascinating figure in the universe. -Heywood C. Broun

Only the shallow know themselves. -Oscar Wilde

[T]he only thing that will make the Democrats change is the prospect of annihilation if they don’t. And the only way to raise that specter before their eyes is for their captive constituencies to desert them in droves. As long as they think you have nowhere else to go, they will take you for granted. And the only way to convince them you have somewhere else to go is… to go there. -Michael J. Smith

The only thing the invisible hand of the market does is give the middle finger to 90% of the population. -Aquaria

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours. -Voltaire

Organized religions in general, in my opinion, are dying forms. They were all very important when we didn’t know why the sun moved, why weather changed, why hurricanes occurred, or volcanoes happened. Modern religion is the end trail of modern mythology. -Bruce Willis

Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid. -Carl Sagan

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own? -Kurt Vonnegut

People are always studying successful political movements in America hoping to learn how to make it happen for their own cause. For my money, there is nobody who has done it better than the NRA. They’ve made mass murder as common as the weather and they’re so powerful they’ve completely dismantled any opposition. Who else can claim such success? -digby

People who routinely wear clothes and post on the Internet don’t get to complain about “unnatural acts”. -Naked Bunny with a Whip

Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy. -Bertrand Russell

Philosophy is doubt. -Michel de Montaigne

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. -Tom Leher

Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike. -Bertrand Russell

Privilege means you can walk away from the conversation whenever you like because the issues being raised aren’t important to you, and you can always imagine that the marginalized people you are walking away from don’t matter. -Garland Grey

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. -H.L. Mencken

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. . . . Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find inducements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. -Thomas Jefferson

Rarely is the question asked,… our… is our children learning? -George W. Bush

Reality is a harsh mistress. She demands our honesty. She demands our work. She demands that we give up comforts, that we let ourselves feel pain, that we accept how small we are and how little control we have over our lives. And she demands that we make her our top priority. But she is more beautiful, and more powerful, and more surprising, and more fascinating, and more endlessly rewarding, than anything we could ever make up about her. -Greta Christina

Religion does a lot of good, especially the loving kind, like at Grace Church.  I know people who went to a more liberal kind of Christianity and were happy with that. The problem is, for me, there was a process involved in moving from Pentecostalism to a more liberal theology, like Grace Church. What makes me different is that process didn’t stop, and it took me all the way. In the end, I couldn’t help feeling that all religion, even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the progress of the human race. -Jerry DeWitt, former pastor

Religion is the diaper of humanity’s childhood; it’s OK to grow out of it. -PZ Myers

Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything and the whole world was sinking deeper and deeper into filth and disease and poverty and ignorance. It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved. -Robert M. Pirsig

Science is the poetry of reality. -Richard Dawkins

Science is the record of dead religions. -Oscar Wilde

The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture. -Glenn Greenwald

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything. -Voltaire

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith. -Adolf Hitler

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. -Oscar Wilde

Sensible Catholics have for generations been ignoring the views on contraception held by reactionary old men in the Vatican, but alas, since it is the business of all religious doctrines to keep their votaries in a state of intellectual infancy (how else do they keep absurdities seeming credible?), insufficient numbers of Catholics have been able to be sensible. -AC Grayling

Shakespeare has done far more for the world than the Bible. -Robert Green Ingersoll

Significant and seemingly impossible social and political change happens more often than we think, and it happens more rapidly than we realize.  Even the most momentous change is always possible if one finds the right way to make it happen. -Glenn Greenwald.

So, fall asleep love, loved by me…for I know love, I am loved by thee. -Robert Browning

Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person’s notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. -John Stuart Mill

A sufficiently advanced civility is indistinguishable from condescension. -anteprepro

Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents. -H.L. Mencken

Supernaturalists are fond of claiming that some irreligious people turn to prayer when in mortal danger, but naturalists can reply that supernaturalists typically repose great faith in science when they find themselves in (say) a hospital or an aeroplane – and with far greater frequency. -AC Grayling

Sure, science arose out of Catholicism…in the same sense that plumbing, sanitation systems, and public health policies arose out of sewage. -PZ Myers

The system operates in one direction only; and it is crucial for Democratic voters to understand that their “lesser evil” votes are actively promoting this process, not retarding it. -Michael J. Smith

Take away love and our earth is a tomb. -Robert Browning

Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra, as opposed to the Bible? Who wins? -Frank Zappa

Tell him I was too fucking busy—or vice versa. -Dorothy Parker

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject. -George Santayana

That kind of skeptical, questioning, “don’t accept what authority tells you” attitude of science — is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don’t think you can have one without the other. -Carl Sagan

[T]hat no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief: but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil
capacities. -Thomas Jefferson

[T]hat’s what Democrats do. They may run to the left, or even govern to the left, if they have to; but they govern to the right whenever they can, because they want to. If you don’t hold their feet to the fire every minute, they’ll sell you down the river every time. -Michael J. Smith

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment. -Dorothy Parker

The theory that religion is a force for peace… does not fit the facts of history. -Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so. -Mary Daly

There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.  -Anne Nicol Gaylor

There are those who believe something, and therefore will tolerate nothing; and on the other hand, those who tolerate everything, because they believe nothing. -Robert Browning

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings. -Quentin Crisp

There is also the phenomenon of the self-identified “centrist” or “independent”, who “sits on the fence” complaining about “both sides” all the time, even though the regressives’ conduct involves strawmen, silencing tactics, lies, threats and overall dishonesty and bullying while the liberals’ involves calling out that conduct.-Setár, self-appointed Elf-Sheriff of the FreethoughtBlogs Star Chamber

There is a mass delusion in whitebread suburban America that they are the real America, and that they are being oppressed by high taxes to pay for poor minorities, even though the reality is actually the reverse: urban centers pay the bills for parasitic suburban lifestyles, which are ultimately unsustainable socially, fiscally and environmentally. -David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

[T]here is, I am certain, among the Iraqi people a respect for the care and the precision that went into the bombing campaign. -Donald Rumsfeld

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along. -Elizabeth Warren

There is no horror, no amount of evil in the world, that a true believer can’t rationalize as consistent with a loving God. It’s the ultimate way of fooling yourself. -Jerry Coyne

There is no necessity for going to the church and hearing the same story forever. Let the minister write what he wishes to say. Let him publish it. If it is worth buying, people will read it. It is hardly fair to get them in a church in the name of duty and there inflict upon them a sermon that under no circumstances they would read…the idea of going fifty-two days in a year to hear anybody on the same subject is absurd. -Robert Green Ingersoll

There is no prize for being the most world’s most accommodating person. And if there were a prize, it would be “hanging out with people who walk all over you, being afraid to speak up, and silently seething at them, forever.” -Captain Awkward

There is no sin except stupidity. -Oscar Wilde

There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings. -Friedrich Nietzsche

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. -Oscar Wilde

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. -Richard Dawkins

There’s peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and I’m responsible. -Brad Pitt

There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages. -Ruth Hurmence Green

There was no need to do any housework at all. After four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse. -Quentin Crisp

There were many groups working for women’s rights, but none of them dealt with the root cause of women’s oppression–religion. -Anne Nicol Gaylor

They say I’m un-American. -Cornell West referring to the Obama Administration.

[T]hey want the federal government controlling Social Security, like it’s some kind of federal program. -George W. Bush

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. -Oscar Wilde

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

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. -Dorothy Parker

This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here [in Congress]. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today. – Sen. Angus King of Maine after listening to how the Obama administration interprets its war powers under the AUMF, May 2013

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

Thus the creationist’s favourite question “What is the use of half an eye?” Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye. -Richard Dawkins

Time and again—from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the events of 9/11 to the onset of the Arab Spring—events have caught the experts, whether in government or on the outside, completely by surprise. Business owners with comparable performance records go bust. Brokers lose their clients. Physicians get sued for malpractice. Yet think-tankers and policy wonks continue to opine, never pausing to reflect on—or apologize for—their spotty records. -Andrew J. Bacevich

Time doth flit; oh shit. -Dorothy Parker

To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there’s more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged. -Norman Mailer

[T]o confuse lack of “bad” words with not just civility but intelligence is a sign that you’re probably neither civilized nor intelligent, since you confuse form for substance. -Jadehawk

To divine the course of world events, you’d do as well to probe the entrails of dead animals. Better still, ask your hairstylist. She will be at least as insightful and probably more entertaining a prophet than anyone you can read in Foreign Affairs or the op-ed page of the Washington Post. -Andrew J. Bacevich

To hold a pen is to be at war. This world is one vast temple consecrated to discord.-Voltaire

To know much is often the cause of doubting more. -Michel de Montaigne

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance. -Oscar Wilde

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody. -Quentin Crisp

To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature. -Voltaire

To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest. -Richard Dawkins

To put it simply, large-scale corruption and violence are the result of greed minus intelligence and humanity, not greed plus calculation and sophistication. -Mark Morford

Totalitarianism is neither left nor right, and within its empire both will perish. I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us. In Prague, they hanged the Socialists and the priests. Thus a fraternity of the hanged was born. -Milan Kundera

The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. -Carl Sagan

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. -Carl Sagan

Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived. -Oscar Wilde

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom. -Anne Nicol Gaylor

The unending election dog-and-pony shows and Lesser Evilism aren’t the root of these political indoctrination campaigns. They’re the cover for them. We should quit pretending that an oligarch-controlled system and the people who serve it can produce anything else. -ohtarzie

The universe is as fine tuned for life as humans are fine tuned for syphilis. -Ing: Od Wet Rust

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are. -Carl Sagan

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. -Richard Dawkins

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. -H. L. Mencken

Use, do not abuse; as the wise man commands. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy. -Voltaire

The very purpose of existence it to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think of us. -Quentin Crisp

Vice is its own reward. -Quentin Crisp

[V]ote for the Green anytime the Democrat isn’t up to snuff, even if the Republican is a wild-eyed berserker who wants to pave the world. It’ll take a few more losses like Gore’s in Florida in 2000 before the Democrats will get the message – if then — and you have to be willing to stay the course until they do get it. Just remember that the only difference between a pave-the-world Republican and an “environmentalist” Democrat is – well, none, really; the Republican means what he says, but the Democrat means what the Republican says, too. -Michael J. Smith

War is murder writ large. -Carl Sagan

[T]he “war on terror” cannot and will not end on its own for two reasons: (1) it is designed by its very terms to be permanent, incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US (the operational definition of “terrorism”), and (2) the nation’s most powerful political and economic factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation. -Glenn Greenwald

The War on Terror has been and continues to be, above all, a war on the most basic liberties and political safeguards that we’re all taught are what distinguishes the US and keeps it free. -Glenn Greenwald

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame. -H.L. Mencken

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’–but none exists. -Stephen J. Gould

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. -John Stuart Mill

We can refuse to dignify idiocy with solemnity. Instead, we should laugh, we should mock, we should denounce. I’m not suggesting we ignore the rightwing. I’m suggesting we sneer a lot more than we are, and only engage when the ideas rise to a level of seriousness where they actually deserve a debunking. -tristero

We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That’s a clear prescription for disaster. -Carl Sagan

We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. -U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

We need to care about reality more than we care about what we want to be true about it. -Greta Christina

We’re terrible animals. I think that the Earth’s immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should. -Kurt Vonnegut

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. -Adolf Hitler

We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn’t been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake. -Catherine Fahringer

What is the evidence for the existence of any god? What is the source for your information about the nature of this god, as well as all the specifics about what he wants right now? Why have the prophets and priests of your god, who apparently have a communications line to an omniscient being, done such a poor job of describing the world and how it works? If god’s will is the fundamental arbiter of moral behavior, how do we determine god’s will? Why is it that when the defenders of this god-centric view sit down to write books that should answer these kinds of questions, they always, without fail, write such vapid tripe? -PZ Myers

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. -George Santayana

What’s the earth
With all its art, verse, music, worth —
Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?
-Robert Browning

When I try to convert you, I’m being nice. When you show me scientific evidence my religious book makes no sense, you’re being hostile. -Privilege Denying Dude.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion. -Robert M. Pirsig

When someone who wields political power does something you dislike or disagree with, it’s incumbent upon you to object, criticize, and demand a different course. Those who refuse to do so are abdicating the most basic duty of citizenship and rendering themselves impotent. -Glenn Greenwald.

When we hear news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation. -Voltaire

Where some seek balms for a troubled soul, I seek irritants. -PZ Myers.

Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does. -Glenn Greenwald

While I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race. -Bertrand Russell

Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once. -Robert Browning

Who knows most, doubts most. -Robert Browning

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -H.L. Mencken

Why the archaic natterings of diaspora Jews negotiating a new orientation to a larger culture dominated by pagan religious expression should concern you, or any modern person, as anything other than an interesting historical question, is completely baffling to me. But I guess that’s why I’m an atheist. -CJO

Why do so many people on the left keep insisting that capitulation and brownnosing will produce something  new and desirable? -ohtarzie

The wild-eyed Bible-humper living in a shotgun shack who advocates stoning homosexuals in accordance with Leviticus is not the biggest threat to gay rights or reproductive freedom. It’s the calm, neighborly, moderate Christian who lives next door and turns out on election day to vote on his principles who you have to worry about. -Akira MacKenzie

Wisdom comes from disillusionment. -George Santayana

A wise man once said, “never discuss philosophy or politics in a disco environment.” -Frank Zappa

With soap, baptism is a good thing. -Robert Green Ingersoll

A woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan. -Mary Daly

Women cannot choose the “I’m-not-a-victim” choice. Not even the funfeminists can choose it, not really, because when stuff like “you cannot rape me” or “my appearance is meaningless” or “the state cannot interfere with the contents of my own personal uterus” is not on the menu of choices, no real agency exists. -Jill Psmith and/or Twisty Faster

The words ‘In God WE trust’ are not only unconstitutional, they aren’t even accurate. -Anne Nicol Gaylor

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. -Bertrand Russell

The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. -Carl Sagan

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did. -Quentin Crisp

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen. -Quentin Crisp

You can be a tolerant, liberal, generous, kind-hearted Christian who rejects fundamentalism, and that does not grant your goofier beliefs protection from criticism. -PZ Myers

You can offer the ability to citizens to choose from one of the two parties and elect their leaders as much as you want. But “democracy” is an illusion — a sham — if the most significant acts taken by those leaders are kept concealed from the citizenry. -Glenn Greenwald

You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth. -H.L. Mencken

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues. -Richard Dawkins

You don’t change the world by placidly finding your bliss — you do it by focusing your discontent in productive ways. -PZ Myers

You don’t owe anyone a performance of being okay when you are not feeling okay so that they can feel better about themselves. -Captain Awkward

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty. -Jessica Mitford