%% Nothing is so often irretrievably missed as a daily opportunity. -- Ebner-Eschenbach %% Where your attention goes, you go. -- Gary Zukav %% He forced us to understand that in giving your soul, strength, time, and money to the mountains, you must not demand anything in return; that a relationship of equals with the mountains is impossible; that a person is only a grain of sand in the ocean of existence; that the most important thing in the mountains is the people, your friends, and your relationships; and that not a single mountain is worth a single frostbitten and amputated little toe. -- Alexander Odintsov, "Training for Alpine Climbing in the Former USSR", from "Training for the New Alpinism" %% Let go or be dragged. -- Zen proverb %% Stop starting and start finishing. %% Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny. -- Lao Tzu %% May I be filled with love and kindness May I be well May I be peaceful And at ease May I be happy -- Metta Sutta %% True merit consists, not in genius or talent, but in diligence. -- "Complete Method for Clarinet", Carl Baerman %% Endure. In enduring, grow strong. -- Dak'kon, "Planescape: Torment" %% Suffer the pain of discipline or suffer the pain of regret. %% So, so what? I'm still a rock star I've got my rock moves And I don't need you And guess what? I'm having more fun And now that we're done I'm gonna show you tonight I'm alright I'm just fine And you're a tool So, so what? I am a rock star I've got my rock moves And I don't want you tonight -- P!nk, "So What" %% You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know. -- René Daumal, "Mount Analogue" %% Living well is the best revenge. %% From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving, Whatever gods may be, That no life lives forever, That dead men rise up never, That even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea. -- Swinburne %% Go to the extremes; then retreat to a more useful position. -- Brian Eno %% 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 %% Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On!' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. -- Calvin Coolidge %% Don't walk in front of me . . . I may not follow Don't walk behind me . . . I may not lead Walk beside me . . . just be my friend. -- Albert Camus %% Tetris is an inventory management survival horror game from the Soviet Union in 1984. -- "Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need", suckerpinch (https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio) %% I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating. -- Slavoj Žižek %% Fat privilege is being born in a place and time where food is so abundant that you can gorge while others starve, all the while complaining of the social inconveniences that you suffer as a consequence of your choices. %% The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is. -- Marcel Proust, "Remembrance of Things Past", vol. 5, "The Prisoner" paraphrased %% The past is history, Tomorrow is a mystery, But today is a gift - That is why it is called the present! %% He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. -- J.R.R. Tolkien %% We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. -- Ursula K. Le Guin %% What gets measured gets managed - even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so. -- Peter Drucker %% Look down. It does not matter where your feet were yesterday or where they are going to be tomorrow. It matters where your feet are at this moment. -- Dag Aabye %% There is nothing to fear from gods, There is nothing to feel in death, Good can be attained, Evil can be endured -- The Four Herbs of Epicurus, 341-270 BC %% Good luck reinforces bad habits. -- Dave McGrail %% People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs. -- Banksy %% Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep. -- "Fuck the South", https://web.archive.org/web/20080819221253/http://www.fuckthesouth.com/ %% Here's a clue: we are not your enemies; we are your countrymen. Your enemies are the greedy multinationals that the Republican Party bends over backwards to accommodate. -- "Reach out and sneer: Dem radicals speak to the Red States", https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/07/blue_state_to_reds/ %% The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail, he must direct himself. -- Peter Drucker, "The Effective Executive", 1967 %% People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway. -- "The Paradoxical Commandments", Dr. Kent M. Keith %% Don't cling to pain. Don't expect happiness. Don't fear loss. Accept reality as it is. Enjoy the good. Endure the bad. Don't make a big deal out of anything. Be selfless, and unconditionally kind and just, without ever expecting a reward. We're all going to end up as piles of dust, so why not be nice to each other and get those pleasant fuzzies? %% Comparison is the thief of joy. -- Theodore Roosevelt %% I will accept the many flaws of whoever runs in opposition to unhinged & regressive white nationalist theocracy. This is not a tough choice. -- seen on https://www.reddit.com %% Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. -- Frank Wilhoit %% Some people claim that there's a woman to blame, But I know It's my own damn fault. %% I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs. -- Larry Lee %% It's not as bad as it seems. It's going to get better, because You are going to make it better. %% I can handle all the hell that happens every day, When you smile and touch my face, you make it all just go away. Yes, I know there ain't no finish line, I know this never ends We are just learning how to fall, climb back up again. I know there is nothing perfect, I know there is nothing new, We are just learning how to live together, me and you. You know I live for the day: When you say "baby let's just run away" -- "Learning How To Smile", Everclear %% So needless to say, I'm odds and ends, but that's me I'm Stumbling away, Slowly learning that life is okay, and, say after me: It's no better to be safe than sorry %% Boredom is a mask that frustration wears. -- "Anathem", Neal Stephenson %% What I love about both programming and music is that they enable you to build incredibly creative, complex, and beneficial things seemingly from thin air -- no additional materials required, just your brain and a keyboard in front of you. -- Peter Borum %% That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything, and they don't drink all your beer. -- Paul Leary %% Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. -- Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash" %% Simple, powerful, and sometimes painfully obvious things are out there just waiting to be noticed. -- "Basic Instructions", Scott Meyer %% Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. -- Arthur Schopenhauer %% The markets can remain irrational for far longer than you can remain solvent. -- John Maynard Keynes %% Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. -- Neal Stephenson, "In the Beginning was the Command Line" %% Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material. -- Alan Kay %% Lisp is a language for doing what you've been told is impossible. -- Kent Pitman %% These were "Maxwell's Equations of Software!" This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over. -- Alan Kay (creator of SmallTalk) describing Lisp, https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 %% You have confused a war on religion with not getting everything you want. -- Jon Stewart %% And it's too easy To turn a blind eye to the light It's too easy to bow your head and pray But there are some times When you should try to find your voice And this is one voice that you must find today -- "Miracle", Oceanlab %% Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own. -- Bruce Lee %% You can actually type any Python expression, which is wonderful and terrifying. -- HackRF Lesson 1, on entering values into the GUI for controlling an SDR. %% Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody dies. -- "Rick and Morty" %% Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. -- Schopenhauer %% I know you You're the one I've waited for Let's have some fun Life is precious Every minute And more precious with you in it So let's have some fun -- "Little Person", Jon Brion %% This is my body And I live in it It's 32 and 8 months old It's changed a lot Since it was new It's done stuff It wasn't built to do I often try to fill it up with wine And the weirdest thing about it is I spend so much time hating it But it never says a bad word about me This is my body And it's fine It's where I spend the vast majority of my time. It's not perfect But it's mine It's not perfect This is my brain And I live in it It's made of love and bad song lyrics It's tucked away behind my eyes Where all my fucked up thoughts can hide 'Cause god forbid I hurt somebody. And the weirdest thing about a mind Is that every answer that you find Is the basis of a brand new cliché This is my brain and it's fine It's where I spend the vast majority of my time It's not perfect but it's mine It's not perfect but it's mine It's not perfect I'm not quite sure I've worked out how to work it. It's not perfect but it's mine -- "Not Perfect", Tim Minchin %% Men don't make passes at women with fat asses. %% Life's too short to dance with fat women. %% You must not hate those who do wrong or harmful things; but with compassion, you must do what you can to stop them - for they are harming themselves, as well as those who suffer from their actions. -- Dalai Lama %% The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win - you pass the test. If you are mentally weak for that moment and you let that weakness keep you in bed, you fail. Though it seems small, that weakness translates to more significant decisions. But if you exercise discipline, that too translates to more substantial elements of your life. -- "Extreme Ownership", Jocko Willink %% Relax. Look around. Make a call. -- "Extreme Ownership", Jocko Willink %% Discipline equals freedom. -- "Extreme Ownership", Jocko Willink %% When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. %% Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible -- not to have run away. -- Dag Hammarskjold %% There is an art to bivouaking, but you will soon enough learn by doing. It's basically quite easy. You stop on a ledge, secure yourselves and your gear, eat, drink, put on warm clothes, and pass out. If you can't pass out because of too little or too much fatigue, or because you aren't used to a firm bed, no matter, you pass the night watching Orion or the Great Bear tick the minutes off the celestial clock, until that faint greying in the east that you have been awaiting turns to light blue, and then so slowly to yellow. If you are watching at the right moment the sun will appear as a bubble of molten gold boiling up between two peaks. It lasts only a moment, but it's worth waiting for, and you won't have a choice anyway. -- "Advanced Rockcraft", Royal Robbins %% There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games. -- Ernest Hemingway (apocryphal) %% "Who decides what's bad? I do." Even Dr. G.E.B. Kivistik was flustered. He wasn't sure if Randy was joking. "Excuse me?" Randy was in no great hurry to answer the question. He took the opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He was feeling good. "It's like this," he said, "I've read your book. I've seen you on TV. I've heard you tonight. I personally typed up a list of your credentials when I was preparing press materials for this conference. So I know that you're not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues." "Oh," said in mock confusion, "I didn't realize one had to have qualifications." "I think it's clear," Randy said, "that if you are ignorant of a particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I'm sick, I don't ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have questions about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know about it." -- "Cryptonomicon", Neal Stephenson %% I'm an adult with no wife or dependants. Every day is christmas for me. -- "How the Brent Stole Christmas", pvponline.com %% I used to bite my tongue and hold my breath, Scared to rock the boat and make a mess, So I sat quietly, Agreed politely. I guess that I forgot I had a choice, I let you push me past the breaking point, I stood for nothing, So I fell for everything. You held me down, but I got up. Already brushing off the dust. You hear my voice, you hear that sound, Like thunder gonna shake the ground. You held me down, but I got up. Get ready 'cause I've had enough. I see it all, I see it now. I've got the eye of the tiger, a fighter. Dancing through the fire, 'Cause I am a champion and you're gonna hear me roar. -- "Roar", Katy Perry %% It's not over-analysis when every stray thought about the film has to be quashed lest you realize how stupid the movie is. -- Howard Tayler %% Of all the varieties of irritating comment out there, the absolute most annoying has to be "Why can't you just watch the movie for what it is??? Why can't you just enjoy it? Why do you have to analyze it???" If you have posted such a comment, or if you are about to post such a comment, here or anywhere else, let me just advise you: Shut up. [...] SHUT. UP. First of all, when we analyze art, when we look for deeper meaning in it, we are enjoying it for what it is. Because that is one of the things about art, be it highbrow, lowbrow, mainstream, or avant-garde: Some sort of thought went into its making - even if the thought was, "I'm going to do this as thoughtlessly as possible!" - and as a result, some sort of thought can be gotten from its reception. That is why, among other things, artists (including, for instance, James Cameron) really like to talk about their work. Now, that doesn't mean you have to think about a work of art. I don't know anyone who thinks every work they encounter ought to only be enjoyed through conscious, active analysis - or if I do, they're pretty annoying themselves. And I know many people who prefer not to think about much of what they consume, and with them I have no argument. I also have no argument with people who disagree with another person's thoughts about a work of art. That should go without saying. Finally, this should also go without saying, but since it apparently doesn't: Believe me, the person who is annoying you so much by thinking about the art? They have already considered your revolutionary "just enjoy it" strategy, because it is not actually revolutionary at all. It is the default state for most of humanity. %% A film that aims low should not be praised for hitting that target. -- Gene Siskel %% Obesity is the human body version of hoarding. %% Obsessed is a word the lazy use to describe the disciplined. %% Don't Forget to be Awesome. %% Swords don't run out of ammo. -- "Snow Crash", Neil Stephenson %% Your body is a reflection of your lifestyle. %% try not to let work, money or time get in the way of gold medal moments -- "1001 Climbing Tips", Andy Kirkpatrick %% Do what it takes . . . If you don't think you can do this, or your partners can't keep up, then don't try. -- "1001 Climbing Tips", Andy Kirkpatrick %% I can make movies when I'm 80, but I can't do expedition stuff when I'm 80. -- James Cameron %% [James] Bond is essentially an attempt to make being an unthinking tool of the conservative establishment sexy and cool and bad . . . The appeal of Fleming novels is a lot like the appeal of mediocre casual sex. A mechanical, formulaic buld up to an inevitable climax that leaves you unfulfilled and vaguely cheapened, yet somehow wanting more. -- http://www.dead-philosophers.com/?p=469 %% I saw adults in shorts fighting and throwing themselves on the ground in order to send a leather ball between a pair of wooden posts. -- fairly accurate description of many organized sports; honestly, this works with little stretching for football, soccer, rugby, hockey . . . %% Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory. -- Ed Viesturs, "No Shortcuts to the Top" %% Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition. -- Jon Krakauer, "Eiger Dreams" %% As an alpinist who carries a long list of dead friends and partners, I approach the mountains differently than most. I go to them intending to survive, which I define as a success. A new route or the summit is a bonus. -- Mark Twight, "Extreme Alpinism" %% Mr. Sandler, what you have made is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever watched. At no point in your rambling, incoherent movie, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this theater is now dumber for having watched it. -- valid criticism for any Adam Sandler "film" %% A well built physique is a status symbol. It reflects you worked hard for it, no money can buy it. You cannot borrow it, you cannot inherit it, you cannot steal it. You cannot hold onto it without constant work. It shows discipline, it shows self respect, it shows patience, work ethic and passion. -- Arnold Schwarzenegger %% It is not the critic who counts, or how the strong man stumbled, or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, and who spends himself in a worthy cause, and if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that he'll never be with those cold and timid souls who never know either victory or defeat. -- Teddy Roosevelt %% Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. -- Alexis Carrel %% Most of what we believe isn't derived from the pure and perfect reasoning power of our flawless brains - it's learned by trial and error by brains that are often afflicted with stubbornly bad ideas. Like believing in gods, for instance. -- Pharyngula post on C.S. Lewis nonsense of "reasoning with atheists" (https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/08/24/so-this-c-s-lewis-guy-was-supposed-to-be-a-smart-fellow/#more-25155) %% Whatever you have written, _will_ be rewritten. -- reason enough to write code first and foremost to be easy to understand and change, from "Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp", Robert J. Chassel %% No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable. -- Socrates %% I am so old that I can remember when other people's achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance. -- Thomas Sowell %% Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% After all, religion is an adolescent social device; it takes a serious and grown-up concern -- spirituality -- and by its very nature reduces it to both an adolescent sense of eternity and an adolescent moral scheme in which absolutely everything is cast in stark contrasts, in which whatever doubt and mystery can't be bleached out of human experience is codified into ritual and myth. -- Steve Erikson's column "Unspun" in Salon %% Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion? -- P. W. Atkins, "The Limitless Power of Science" essay in "Nature's Imagination", John Cornwell, ed.; 1995 Oxford University Press, p.123 %% Virtues Who understands the world is learned; Who understands the self is enlightened. Who conquers the world has strength; Who conquers the self has harmony; Who is determined has purpose. Who is contented has wealth; Who defends his home may long endure; Who surrenders his home may long survive it. -- Lao Tse, "Tao Te Ching" %% Do you know how important theological problems are? Not important at all. There was no original sin - Adam and Eve are metaphors, they didn't actually exist. Jesus was an executed rabble-rouser (or metaphorical legend himself) with book after book after book of rationalizations and legend-building written after the fact. Both concepts will mean nothing to extraterrestrial life, except maybe as bizarre and peculiar myths held by the Earthlings, because they are not factual events or concepts. If and when we find extraterrestrial life (as single-celled organisms beneath the ice of Europa, or alga-like patterns of biological growth on a distant planet, or in the form of signals from an alien intelligence), nobody should give a good goddamn what an ignorant rabble of priests think about it, much less how they interpret it and reconcile it to their books of superstitions. I won't be looking up the latest papal declaration on Catholic dogma about it, except to piss on it. -- http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/25/who-cares/#more-21256 %% sorry man, but you might just have to accept humans aren't rational. I know it might be difficult to be a libertarian after that, but I'm sure you'll deal. -- seen on https://news.ycombinator.com %% Because it's also a movie for people who've been duped into believing that America consists of an "us" and a "them," made by people who profit off Americans being divided into an us and a them. The "real America" and those Godless haters on the coasts. It's not about a little boy's trip to Heaven, it's about one man's struggle against those bastard people who might question his beliefs after he's dared them to. Why would he dare them to? So he can start a fight! Which he will win, because Jesus hands out knuckle sandwiches until everyone is full (from the book of Stone Cold Steve Austin, 14:20). -- from a review of "Heaven Is For Real" (http://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/2014/04/review-heaven-is-for-real-is-not-shameless-pandering-its-much-worse/) %% By making Heaven is for Real all about the haters it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You believe your kid went up to Heaven and came back? Cool, man. Fine by me. Like I said, I even want to believe. Yet the movie obsesses over this conspiracy to deny Todd Burpo's beliefs, when even in the Burpo-authored movie reality, the only reason anyone thinks about them at all is that he never shuts up about them. The perfect scene is when Todd first becomes convinced that his son has been to Heaven. His evidence for this is that Colton describes scenes he couldn't possibly have witnessed in real life, like Todd yelling at God while Colton was on the operating table, and Colton meeting his miscarried sister his parents never told him about, and describing a great grandfather who died 30 years before he was born (though, to be fair, the kid didn't even describe the grandfather, Todd just pulled out a picture of the dude and Colton said "yeah that's him."). Todd is struggling, so he finds a psychiatrist at the local university to ask for a second opinion. Could it be real?? Am I crazy?? He briefly lays out his case, asking "How can you explain this?" The psych patiently offers a couple reasonable explanations, like the history of "out-of-body" hallucinations, and that maybe the kid was just imagining things he has seen his parents do. The key word being "offers." She doesn't push any of them on him, he just asks her for a possible explanation and she provides it. Nonetheless, Todd immediately jumps up from his chair asking, "Why is it so hard for you to admit you don't have an explanation for this?" and storms off. -- from a review of "Heaven Is For Real" (http://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/2014/04/review-heaven-is-for-real-is-not-shameless-pandering-its-much-worse/) %% I'll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged them, burnt them alive. And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you. -- Madalyn Murray O'Hair %% The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate his "knowldege" in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself. -- A. J. Ayer, "Language, Truth and Logic" %% The only way for a Linux user to look at Windows and OSX users is down. -- H. L. Mencken, slightly parahrased %% We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity. That's called civilization and its discontents. -- Erica Jong, "Fear of Flying" %% As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It's called the Internet and it's more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook [today]. -- "Facebook is the new AOL", http://www.kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-aol %% The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war. %% That leaves one quadrant - men under 25 - at whom the majority of studio movies are aimed, the thinking being that they'll eat just about anything that's put in front of them as long as it's spiked with the proper set of stimulants. That's why, when you look at the genres that currently dominate Hollywood - action, raunchy comedy, game/toy/ride/comic-book adaptations, horror, and, to add an extra jolt of Red Bull to all of the preceding categories, 3-D - they're all aimed at the same ADD-addled, short-term-memory-lacking, easily excitable testosterone junkie. In a world dominated by marketing, it was inevitable that the single quadrant that would come to matter most is the quadrant that's most willing to buy product even if it's mediocre. -- "The Day the Movies Died", (http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris?currentPage=all) %% There is no security on this earth. There is only opportunity. -- General Douglas MacArthur %% L'hasard ne favorise que l'esprit prepare. -- L. Pasteur %% Facebook is godsend for people who love to talk, but have nothing to say. -- "The Facebook experiment has failed", https://medium.com/a-programmers-tale/f7b8c66109ea %% No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending. -- Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations" %% It's important to consider the timeline here. Separate /usr was accidentally broken by a sudden increase in dependencies from base system packages to desktopy things. It was only later that certain people decided that "oh, separate /usr is a bad idea anyway", and they did so because they couldn't figure out how to fix the mess they'd caused. This is very much a case of carelessly letting the horse escape and then trying to convince everyone that no-one needs a horse anyway . . . -- Ciaran McCreesh %% There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton %% Sometimes not pissing in the pool isn't enough, sometimes asking people nicely to stop isn't enough, sometimes you have to force people out of the pool if you want to swim somewhere that doesn't have piss in it. -- why "brogrammers" should be ostracized, from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3894404 %% So when I say "We're all in this together," I'm not stating a philosophy. I'm stating a fact about the way human life works. No, you never asked for anything to be handed to you. You didn't have to, because billions of humans who lived and died before you had already created a lavish support system where the streets are all but paved with gold. Everyone reading this -- all of us living in a society advanced enough to have Internet access -- was born one inch away from the finish line, plopped here at birth, by other people. So when somebody else asks for your help, in the form of charity or taxes, or because they need you to help them move a refrigerator, you can cite all sorts of reasons for not helping ("I think you're lying about needing help" or "I don't care" or "I'm too tied up with my own problems"), but the one thing you can't say is, "Why should you need help? I've never gotten help!" Not unless you're either shamefully oblivious, or a lying asshole. -- http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-things-rich-people-need-to-stop-saying_p2/ %% Telling an atheist to respect religion is like telling a black person to respect the klu klux klan. -- Andre Oliver %% Religion is the diaper of humanity's childhood; it's OK to grow out of it. -- PZ Meyers %% As an atheist, having a christian threaten me with hell is like having a hippy threaten to punch me in my aura. -- seen on the Internet %% It's 2011. The appropriate reaction to people who think Jesus is a supernatural being is mild embarrassment, sighing tolerance and patient education. And anger when they're being bigots. -- Tim Minchin %% For those who believe in god, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the god formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us. -- Bukowski %% Telling an atheist they're going to hell is like putting a person in the penalty box for not being on a hockey team. -- seen on the 'net %% Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy' -- Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers" (1926), Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness %% If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is - if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it. -- Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Ch. 7, "Seeking New Laws" %% There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov, Column in Newsweek (21 January 1980) %% By definition, alternative medicine has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call "alternative medicine" that's been proved to work? "Medicine". -- Tim Minchin %% We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan %% Either god can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely. The only sense to make of tragedies like this is that terrible things can happen to perfectly innocent people. This understanding inspires compassion. Religious faith, on the other hand, erodes compassion. Thoughts like, this might be all part of god's plan, or there are no accidents in life, or everyone on some level gets what he or she deserves, these ideas are not only stupid, they are extraordinarily callous. They are nothing more than a childish refusal to connect with the suffering of other human beings. It is time to grow up and let our hearts break at moments like this. -- Sam Harris %% Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed. The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en mass what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation. -- Sam Harris %% . . . [it] should make us shiver whenever we hear a man of sensibility dismiss science as someone else's concern. The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery. -- Jacob Bronowski %% Most Americans can rightfully complain, 'I pay more federal income taxes than General Electric, Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, Verizon, etc., etc., all put together.' -- From "Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10", a report put together by the Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy %% The key to understanding Emacs is that it's all about efficiency, which includes economy of motion. Any trained musician will tell you that economy of motion is critical to becoming a world-class virtuoso. Any unnecessary motion is wasted energy and yields sloppy results. -- Steve Yegge, "Effective Emacs", http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs %% Using the mouse is almost always the worst possible violation of economy of motion, because you have to pick your hand up and fumble around with it. The mouse is a clumsy instrument, and Emacs gurus consider it a cache miss when they have to resort to using it. -- Steve Yegge, "Effective Emacs", http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs %% Compared to Emacs Wizards, graphical-IDE users are the equivalent of amateur musicians, pawing at their instrument with a sort of desperation. An IDE has blinking lights and pretty dialogs that you can't interact with properly ..., and gives newbies a nice comfortable sense of control. But that control is extremely crude, and all serious programmers prefer something that gives them more power. -- Steve Yegge, "Effective Emacs", http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs %% The rest of you: I think your Eclipse just finished launching, so you can get back to work now. -- Steve Yegge, "Effective Emacs", http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs %% On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things. On the other hand, I literally can't imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Ritchie did and the people he inspired. By the mid 80s, Ritchie's influence had taken over, and even back then very little remained of the pre-Ritchie world. -- Jean-Baptiste Queru on why Dennis Ritchie was more important than Steve Jobs (https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe) %% Nature is not personal. She is the compound of all these processes which move through the universe to effect the results we know as Life and of all the ordinances which govern that universe and that make Life continuous. She is no more the Hebrew's Jehovah than she is the Physicist's Force; she is as much Providence as she is Electricity; she is not the Great Pattern any more than she is the Blind Chance. -- Luther Burbank %% Attention is scarce. Information is not. Do the math. -- Nina Paley %% All of the greatest engineers in the world use Emacs. The world-changer types. Not the great gal in the cube next to you. Not Fred, the amazing guy down the hall. I'm talking about the greatest software developers of our profession, the ones who changed the face of the industry. The James Goslings, the Donald Knuths, the Paul Grahams, the Jamie Zawinskis, the Eric Bensons. Real engineers use Emacs. You have to be way smart to use it well, and it makes you incredibly powerful if you can master it. Go look over Paul Nordstrom's shoulder while he works sometime, if you don't believe me. It's a real eye-opener for someone who's used Visual Blub .NET-like IDEs their whole career. -- http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel %% Emacs is the 100-year editor. -- http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel %% I'm typing in Emacs right now. I'd never voluntarily type anywhere else. It's more than just a productivity boost from having great typing shortcuts and text-editing features found nowhere else on the planet. I type 130 to 140 WPM, error-free, in Emacs, when I'm doing free-form text. I've timed it, with a typing-test Emacs application I wrote. -- http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel %% Emacs has the Quality Without a Name. -- http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel %% >> From a relatively free Maemo platform to a walled garden is not an >> improvement. > So says you. The 30 million iPhone 4 owners seem to disagree. aka "Eat shit, 50 billions of flies can't be wrong" -- Why the popularity of iPhone does not make it superior (from a comment on http://slashdot.org by TeXMaster) %% 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, on social contracts and taxes %% What we have here is religious bigotry, and it represents the same insidious type of exclusion that I experienced growing up black in Dixie. -- Morgan State prof. Stefan Goodwin, on religious convocation ceremonies, Washington Post, August 17, 1994 %% Apple is the biggest pusher of every concept that's ever been criticized on Slashdot. They're simply the easiest example, so stop whining. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% There is no perfect language for all problems, although C comes pretty close. -- "How to be a better programmer", http://richardkmiller.com/212/how-to-be-a-better-programmer %% A programmer will eventually tell you to use Mac OSX or Linux. If the programmer likes fonts and typography, they'll tell you to get a Mac OSX computer. If they like control and have a huge beard, they'll tell you to install Linux. Again, use whatever computer you have right now that works. -- from "Learn Python the Hard Way" (2nd ed) %% "I have examined Bogota," he said, "and the case is clearer to me. I think very probably he might be cured." "That is what I have always hoped," said old Yacob. "His brain is affected," said the blind doctor. The elders murmured assent. "Now, what affects it?" "Ah!" said old Yacob. "This," said the doctor, answering his own question. "Those queer things that are called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable soft depression in the face, are diseased, in the case of Bogota, in such a way as to affect his brain. They are greatly distended, he has eyelashes, and his eyelids move, and consequently his brain is in a state of constant irritation and distraction." "Yes?" said old Yacob. "Yes?" "And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him completely, all that we need do is a simple and easy surgical operation -- namely, to remove those irritant bodies." "And then he will be sane?" "Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen." "Thank heaven for science!" said old Yacob. -- Herbert George Wells, "The Country of the Blind" %% "O Sandwich Maker from Bob!" he pronounced. He paused, furrowed his brow and sighed as he closed his eyes in pious contemplation. "Life," he said, "will be a very great deal less weird without you!" Arthur was stunned. "Do you know," he said, "I think that's the nicest thing anybody's ever said to me?" -- Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless" %% "You say there are two types of people?" "Yes, those who separate people into two groups and those that don't." "Wrong. There are three groups: Those who separate people into three groups. Those who don't separate people into groups. Those who can't decide." "Wait a minute, what about people who separate people into two groups?" "Oh. Okay, then there are four groups." "Aren't you then separating people into four groups?" "Yeah." "So then there's a fifth group, right?" "You know, the problem is these idiots who can't make up their minds." %% . . . And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the naive. As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we might be advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately, do us the same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in god, then, is just that -- a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect for Jesus christ arises from the fact that he seems to have been the most virtuous inhabitant of planet earth. But even well-educated christians are frustrated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognized bible scholar is perfectly aware of it. Some christians, alas, resort to formal lying to obscure such reality. -- Steve Allen, comedian, from an essay in the book "The Courage of Conviction", edited by Philip Berman %% . . . But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds" %% . . . Deep Hack Mode -- that mysterious and frightening state of consciousness where mortal users fear to tread. -- Matt Welsh %% . . . I can but admire the courage and clear foresight of the anglican divine who tells us that we must be prepared to choose between the trustworthiness of scientific method and the trustworthiness of that which the church declares to be divine authority. For, to my mind, this declaration of war to the knife against secular science, even in its most elementary form this rejection, without a moment's hesitation, of any and all evidence which conflicts with theological dogma -- is the only position which is logically reconcilable with the axioms of orthodoxy. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, "Science And Hebrew Tradition Essays", pp. 229, 230 %% . . . I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses" %% . . . I will never understand why the advent of tourists and beer is considered damaging to the culture [of the Bahinemo people in Papua New Guinea] while introducing Jesus is not. These people have survived centuries with their own beliefs, invoking their own gods. -- Richard A. Boni of Budapest, Hungary, in letter to the editor, National Geographic, June 1994 %% . . . I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate. All these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last week. Time to die . . . -- Peter Gutmann, posting in a.s.r. %% . . . Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice . . . -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods" 1872 %% . . . Jesus was almost certainly not 'of Nazareth'. An overwhelming body of evidence indicates that Nazareth did not exist in biblical times. The town is unlikely to have appeared before the third century. -- Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, _The Messianic Legacy_ %% . . . Jesus was not as peaceful as commonly believed, and that his actual teachings did not represent a fundamental break with the tradition of jewish military messianism. A strong pro-zealot-bandit and anti-Roman bias probably pervaded his original ministry. The decisive break with the jewish messianic tradition probably came about only after the fall of Jerusalem, when the original politico-military components in Jesus' teachings were purged by jewish christians living in Rome and other cities of the empire as an adaptive response to the Roman victory. -- Marvin Harris, anthropologist, _Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches_ %% . . . Local prohibitions cannot block advances in military and commercial technology . . . Democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain the world's democracies, not the world as a whole. -- K. Eric Drexler %% . . . Rand's pet theory known as Objectivism, which can be described as "Us? There is no 'us'!" -- from an LA Times review of "Atlas Shrugged: The Movie" %% . . . The fact that only poor women are denied reproductive freedom when abortions are illegal is unpersuasive to those who oppose abortion on moral grounds. -- Kristin Luker, Dubious Conceptions (1996) %% . . . UNIX, MS-DOS, and [Microsoft] Windows NT (also known as the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). -- Matt Welsh %% . . . [T]his court has rejected unequivocally the contention that the Establishment Clause [of the First Amendment] forbids only governmental preference of one religion over another. -- Justice Tom Clark, lead opinion, School Dist. of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 US 203 (1963) %% . . . a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests . . . The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. -- Albert Einstein, address at the Princeton Theological Seminary, May 19, 1939, published in _Out of My Later Years_, New York: Philosophical Library, 1950. %% . . . and I'd go into a room and shout "I'm Pepsi boy!" and no one would want to go out with me. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% . . . and even when I do [get quoted], it gets attributed to someone else. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% . . . anger is the common substitute for logic among those who have no evidence for what they desperately want to believe. -- Isaac Asimov, in essay "Hobgoblin", 1980, reprinted in his essay collection "The Tyrannosaurus Prescription" %% . . . any belief in supernatural creators, rulers, or influencers of natural or human process introduces an irreparable split into the universe, and prevents us from grasping its real unity. Any belief in absolutes, whether the absolute validity of moral commandments, of authority of revelation, of inner certitudes, or of divine inspiration, erects a formidable barrier against progress and the responsibility of improvement, moral, rational, and religious. -- Julian Sorell Huxley %% . . . balance the budget? Tax religion. -- Jello Biafra %% . . . being a [GNU/]Linux user is sort of like living in a house inhabited by a large family of carpenters and architects. Every morning when you wake up, the house is a little different. Maybe there is a new turret, or some walls have moved. Or perhaps someone has temporarily removed the floor under your bed. -- UNIX for Dummies, 2nd Edition %% . . . bleakness . . . desolation . . . plastic forks . . . %% . . . but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature. -- "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", David Hume, 10:2:30 %% . . . claiming my right to follow whethersoever science should lead . . . it is as respectable to be modified monkey as modified dirt. -- Thomas Henry Huxley %% . . . difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a common censor morum over each other. 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. -- Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia" %% . . . giving Apple your money so they can tell you what you can run on your hardware is ludicrous, and I find anyone who gives into it a pathetic retard. -- MightyMartian on http://slashdot.org on Apple's DRM on the iPhone. %% . . . historically it is clear that the heart and soul of anti-Semitism rested in christianity. -- Glock & Stark, "Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism", 1966, page xvi, 5-year study by Survey Research Department of University of California %% . . . how many entertainers got death threats for supporting the war? -- comment on http://slasdhot.org by misanthrope101 (253915) %% . . . if I were not an atheist, I would believe in a god who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is god, god, god, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. -- Isaac Asimov, _I. Asimov: A Memoir_ %% . . . if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power. -- Dwight David Eisenhower %% . . . if all the bones of all the victims of the catholic church could be gathered together, a monument higher than all the pyramids would rise . . . -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "What Must We Do To Be Saved?" 1880, in Robert Green Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 497 %% . . . in every religion the priest insists on five things -- First: There is a god. Second: he has made known his will. Third: he has selected me to explain this message. Fourth: We will now take up a collection; and Fifth: Those who fail to subscribe will certainly be damned. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Has Freethought a Constructive Side?", printed in The Truth Seeker, New York 1890 %% . . . inclined to think that not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt. -- Thomas Henry Huxley %% . . . it is claimed that women owe their advancement to the Bible. It would be quite true to say that they owe their impoverished condition to the almanac or to the vernal equinox. Under Bible influence woman has been burned as a witch, sold in the shambles, reduced to a drudge and a pauper, and silenced and subjected before her ecclesiastical and marital law-givers. -- Josephine K. Henry %% . . . it is my measured opinion - after thirty-five years of study - that religion is all bad, without a single good feature. And, of course, that means I don't go gunning after "certain religious denominations" but send my gas bombs into the whole kit and kaboodle. It's part of my philosophy that the world would be a better place for all of us if we managed to get rid of the mental disease called religion. -- E. Haldeman-Julius %% . . . it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs about the existence of god in any recognizable sense continuous with the great systems of the past, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability. -- Sidney Hook %% . . . maybe it will encourage people to pray and they will become christian. -- Rep. Ferry Hooper Jr. (R-Montgomery) on the "Alabama Live" show, Nov. 20, 1997, exposing the true motive of his bill requiring all students to participate in a daily moment of "quiet reflection" at the beginning of each class day %% . . . mid-eighteenth century America had a smaller proportion of church members than any other nation in christendom . . . in 1800 [only] one of every fifteen Americans was a church member. -- Richard Hofstadter, _Anti-Intellectualism in American Life_, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, p. 89 %% . . . nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages. -- Galileo Galilei, quoted in "Blind Watchers of the Sky", p. 101 %% . . . one cannot by fair dealing, and without injury to others, satisfy the nobles, but you can satisfy the people, for their object is more righteous than that of the nobles, the latter wishing to oppress, whilst the former only desire not to be oppressed. -- Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince," chapter 9 %% . . . our constitutional tradition, from the Declaration of Independence and the first inaugural address of Washington . . . down to the present day, has, with a few aberrations, see church of holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457, 12 S.Ct. 511, 36 L.Ed. 226 (1892), ruled out of order government-sponsored endorsement of religion -- even when no legal coercion is present, and indeed even when no ersatz, "peer-pressure" psycho-coercion is present -- where the endorsement is sectarian, in the sense of specifying details upon which men and women who believe in a benevolent, omnipotent creator and ruler of the world are known to differ (for example, the divinity of christ). -- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, _Lee v. Weisman_, 505 U.S. 577, 641 (1992) %% . . . so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrranize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. -- Voltarine de Cleyre %% . . . the [estate] tax, or in fact any tax that is levied more heavily towards those who are wealthier, is fair simply because wealthy people derive more benefit from each tax dollar spent proportionally than anyone else. Before you freak out and stop reading, consider: A middle-class person who pays taxes to go to public school earns an education; a rich person who pays taxes to support a school gains...an educated and skilled workforce. A middle-class person who pays car and gas taxes earns a road they may drive on; a rich person who pays those taxes gains...a transportation system that allows them to transport their company's goods to far-flung locations and markets. And so forth. Any person who uses wealth to produce wealth (i.e. true Capitalists) are using the benefits of an infrastructure that most taxpayers can barely fathom. So, yeah, they get to pay a little more. -- comment by Elemenope (905108) on http://slashdot.org on taxes %% . . . the bible was a collection of books written at different times by different men -- a strange mixture of diverse human documents -- and a tissue of irreconcilable notions. Inspired? The bible is not even intelligent. It is not even good craftsmanship, but is full of absurdities and contradictions. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% . . . the bible, a book that glorifies behavior you abhor. -- Freedom From Religion Foundation %% . . . the functor, which is more commonly called a closure. -- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_object on "functors" (function objects) in Lisp %% . . . the official religions and patriotic fervor of many states make their troops willing to fight suicidally. The latter willingness is one so strongly programmed into us citizens of modern states, by our schools and churches and governments, that we forget what a radical break it makes with previous human history . . . Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. Fanaticism in war, of the type that drove recorded christian and Islamic conquests, was probably unknown on Earth until chiefdoms and especially states emerged within the last 6,000 years. -- Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies", pp 281-282 %% . . . the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or to forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because in the opinions of others to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. -- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty [1859] %% . . . the unprecedented rise of the christian social party . . . was to assume the deepest significance for me as a classical object of study. -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3 %% . . . there are no two points of view more antithetical than classical liberalism and capitalism -- and that's why when the University of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of Smith, they have to distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly opposed to all of the idiocy they now sprout in his name. -- Noam Chomsky, In Understanding Power, 2002 %% . . . this government, swollen and arrogant with pelf, goes butting into our business . . . It checks the amount of tropical oils in our snack foods, tells us what kind of gasoline we can buy for our cars and how fast we can drive them, bosses us around about retirement, education, and what's on TV; counts our noses and asks fresh questions about who's still living at home and how many bathrooms we have; decides whether the door to our office or shop should have steps or a wheelchair ramp; decrees the sex and complexion of the people we hire there; lectures us on safe sex; dictates what we can sniff, smoke, and swallow; and waylays young men, ships them to distant places, and tells them to shoot people they don't even know. -- P.J. O'Rourke %% . . . very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two noted exceptions: being struck by lightning, or worse, your *computer* being struck by lightning. -- Matt Welsh %% . . . violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism. -- Errico Malatesta, "Anarchism, Authoritarian Socialism and Communism" in What Is Anarchism?: An Introduction by Donald Rooum, ed. (London: Freedom Press, 1992, 1995) p. 59. %% . . . we can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe[s,] to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act. -- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man", p. 218 %% . . . we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations. I do not doubt that natural selection acted in building our oversized brains -- and I am equally confident that our brains became large as an adaptation for definite roles (probably a complex set of interacting functions). But these assumptions do not lead to the notion, often uncritically embraced by strict Darwinians, that all major capacities of the brain must arise as direct products of natural selection. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man" %% . . . we must counterpose the overwhelming judgment provided by consistent observations and inferences by the thousands. The earth is billions of years old and its living creatures are linked by ties of evolutionary descent. Scientists stand accused of promoting dogma by so stating, but do we brand people illiberal when they proclaim that the earth is neither flat nor at the center of the universe? Science *has* taught us some things with confidence! Evolution on an ancient earth is as well established as our planet's shape and position. Our continuing struggle to understand how evolution happens (the "theory of evolution") does not cast our documentation of its occurrence -- the "fact of evolution" -- into doubt. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2. %% . . . why should you waste a single moment of *your* life seeming to be something you don't want to be? Lord, that's so simple. If you hate your job, quit it. If your friends are tedious, go out and find new friends. You are queer, you lucky fool, and that makes you one of life's buccaneers, free from the clutter of 2000 years of judeo-christian sermonizing. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and start raising your sails. You haven't a moment to lose. -- Edmund Carlevale %% "About A Boy" teaches us all a valuable lesson. Life is better when shared with others. And for god's sake, grow up. If you buy into that, then this will leave you smiling, crying with joy and otherwise making a complete fool of yourself. If, like me, you think life is best shared with Captain Morgan and a subscription to Skinemax, the movie will still evoke a hearty giggle from you, but the lesson may go over your head. -- From a review of "About a Boy" at http://www.brunching.com %% "Faith," said St. Paul, "is the evidence of things not seen." We should elaborate this definition by adding that faith is the assertion of things for which there is not a particle of evidence and of things which are incredible. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% "I am a theist" means "I know that god exists." "I am an atheist" means "I do not know that god exists." Appending the Greek prefix "a" could in no way be construed as meaning "I know that god does not exist." -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% "My country, right or wrong" is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying "My mother, drunk or sober." -- G.K. Chesterton, "The Defendant" %% "Nominal fee". What an ugly [phrase]. It's one of those things that implies that if you have to ask, you can't afford it. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% "Oh come on, Bill, they're the New Kids, don't pick on them, they're so good and they're so clean cut and they're such a good image for the children." Fuck that. When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children? I want my children to listen to people who fucking rocked. I don't care if they died in puddles of their own vomit. I want someone who plays from his fucking heart. -- Bill Hicks %% "On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced," said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. "While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don't have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them." -- from a News in Brief on "The Onion" %% "One Architecture, One OS" also translates as "One Egg, One Basket". %% "She had the dubious distinction of being known as America's most outspoken atheist," NBC's Tom Brokaw said (9/30/96) in introducing a jokey segment on Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who has been missing for the past year. It's impossible to imagine Brokaw making light of the disappearance of someone who has the "dubious distinction" of being a leader of America's catholics or jews -- but atheists are assumed to be fair game for ridicule or attack. That must be why NBC quoted a "conservative christian commentator" as saying of O'Hair: "If she is indeed dead, then she's burning in the fires of hell." Plenty of fundamentalist christians believe that all catholics burn in hell, but we doubt we'll see NBC quoting any of them the next time a pope dies. -- _Extra! Update_, a periodical from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), December 1996 issue, page 2. FAIR is a New York NY-based media watchdog organization. %% "Since 1984, a contest has been held on Usenet for the most unreadable, creative, bizarre but working C program", Gates said. "What is the name of this contest?" "Windows," shot back Gassee, naming Microsoft's premier product - a product over which Apple sued Microsoft five years ago. Not the right answer - it's "The Obfuscated C Contest [sic]" - but it brought down the house of Apple partisans . . . [The expression on Bill Gates' face was a sight to behold, as reported to us by several who were there]. -- From the San Jose Mercury News (May 15, 1993 page 20A "West Hackers trounce East in computer quiz game") %% "Sure there are outliers" and "it's just a few people who got mixed up" and "they were being stupid anyway" are just variations of "It wasn't me, so I don't have to worry." Because you weren't unlucky enough that a known terrorist happened to use your name while boarding a flight, because you weren't unlucky enough that you weren't identified by some hapless guy on a street looking to make a quick buck, because you weren't unlucky enough that you didn't fit the completely arbitrary criteria for what a terrorist is, you think that it isn't a problem. Here's the problem you're overlooking: the criteria ARE arbitrary. That's what the term "security theater" means. Everyone who complains about the current state sees that and is worried that these arbitrary criteria might be applied to them one day. This is the time to fight back - not when your ass is sitting in a police van headed to god knows where. Furthermore, no one is complaining about airport security, except to point out that it is a rather silly exercise. What people are truly worried about (and that includes me) is the completely arbitrary and CYA approach that puts EVERYONE at risk of being arrested and have their lives turned upside down. If you can't see that . . . gimme your name, cuz I'll just laugh if they ever come for you. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." -- Theodore Harold White, "The Once and Future King" %% "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? -- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) %% "There was no deathbed conversion," Druyan says. "No appeals to god, no hope for an afterlife, no pretending that he and I, who had been inseparable for twenty years, were not saying goodbye forever." "Didn't he want to believe?" she was asked. "Carl never wanted to believe," she replies fiercely. "he wanted to KNOW." -- Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's wife, from Newsweek magazine %% "Today it is more of an armed camp, suspicious of everyone," he continues in an e-mail. "The Net I knew and loved is dead, killed by uncivilized greedy incompetents who came barging in, without caring that when you barge into a foreign culture it behooves you to learn how they do things. This would not have been a problem, except that they arrived in sufficient numbers to overload the mechanisms that normally would have either brought newcomers up to speed on the culture or rejected them; as a result they killed off the culture we had, the only culture I've ever seen work based on mutual friendship and helpfulness on a large scale." -- Der Mouse, "A spam cop goes AWOL", Salon %% "Vista launched this week, and it's already broken". Now excuse me while I snicker for a fraction of a second and then return to ignoring the Windows world again. -- Martin F. Krafft (Debian developer) %% "We know who the chicken hawks are. They talk tough on national defense and military issues and cast aspersions on others," he said. "When it was their turn to serve where were they? AWOL, that's where they were . . . the lead chickenhawk against Sen. Kerry [is] the vice president of the United States, Vice President Cheney. -- United States Senator Frank Lautenberg, on the floor of the Senate, April 28, 2004 %% "We never make assertions, Miss Taggart," said Hugh Akston. "That is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell -- we *show*. We do not claim -- we *prove*." -- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged" %% "We're not talking about the same thing," he said. "For you the world is weird because if you're not bored with it you're at odds with it. For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must accept responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it." -- Don Juan %% "What would you think of a man who not only kept an arsenal in his home, but was collecting at enormous financial sacrifice a second arsenal to protect the first one? What would you say if this man so frightened his neighbors that they in turn were collecting weapons to protect themselves from him? What if this man spent ten times as much money on his expensive weapons as he did on the education of his children? What if one of his children criticized his hobby and he called that child a traitor and a bum and disowned it? And he took another child who had obeyed him faithfully and armed that child and sent it out into the world to attack neighbors? What would you say about a man who introduces poisons into the water he drinks and the air he breathes? What if this man not only is feuding with the people on his block but involves himself in the quarrels of others in distant parts of the city and even in the suburbs? Such a man would clearly be a paranoid schizophrenic, Mr. Flanagan, with homicidal tendencies. This is the man who should be on trial, though under our modern, enlightened system of jurisprudence we would attempt to cure and rehabilitate him rather than merely punish." "Speaking as a judge", he continued, "I dismiss this case on several grounds. The State is clinically insane as a corporate entity and is absolutely unfit to arrest, try and incarcerate those who disagree with it's policies." -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, "The Illuminatus Trilogy" %% "Would you tax god?" asks a defender of church tax exemption. Well, if there were a god he should be able to pay his own way and support his own business. If not, then he should do like other business men and close up shop. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% "intellectual property" - The distorting and confusing term did not arise by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it . . . eject the narrow perspectives and simplistic picture the term "intellectual property" suggests. Consider each of these issues separately, in its fullness, and you have a chance of considering them well. -- Richard Matthew Stallman %% 'Believing' cannot tip the scales in making a historical judgment about whether something really happened. I can choose to believe that George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock, but my believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether or not he really did do it. So also with the story of Jesus walking on the water: Believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether he really did do it. 'Belief' cannot be the basis for historical conclusion; it has no direct relevance. -- "Faith and Scholarship" by Marcus J. Borg August, 1993 issue of _Bible Review_ %% 'There are no atheists in foxholes' isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes. -- James Morrow %% 'Tis the gift to be simple 'Tis the gift to be free 'Tis the gift to come down Where you ought to be And when we find ourselves In the place just right, 'Twill be in the valley Of love and delight When true simplicity is gained To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed To turn, turn will be our delight 'Till by turning, turning we come round right. -- "Simple Gifts", Shaker melody %% (For the true believer) To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs. -- Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer" %% (Religious) Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness. -- Jubal hershaw, from _Stranger in a Strange Land_, by Robert Heinlein %% 3. Interpreting the bible: All reading of scripture (including a literalist approach) involves subjective interpretation. For example, to read the stories of Jesus' birth as literal historical accounts involves an act of interpretation just as much as reading them as symbolic narratives (namely, it involves a decision to read them literally). The recognition that all interpretations are subjective does not, however, mean that all are equally good. About any interpretation, one may ask (or be asked), "what have you got to go on? Why do you read it that way?" -- "Faith and Scholarship" by Marcus J. Borg August, 1993 issue of _Bible Review_ %% > Also another major deciding factor is availability of source code. It > just gives everybody a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that there is source > code available to the product you are using. It allows everybody to > improve on the product and fix bugs etc. sooner that the author(s) > would get the time/chance to. I think this is one the really BIG reasons for the snowball/onslaught of [GNU/]Linux and the wealth of stuff available that gets enhanced faster than the real vendors can keep up. -- Norman %% > Haha! The term "Linux-extremist" is redundant. The very definition of > a "Linux-user" already contains the connotation of "extremist," > inasmuch as all the users are zealous users and defenders of Linux. I > have never met a lukewarm Linux user. Well, think of it like this: we stepped outside, noticed the house was on fire, and we're trying to tell you to get the fuck out of there while you still can. Yes, I'd say we're a pretty zealous lot. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% > No manual is ever necessary. May I politely interject here: BULLSHIT. That's the biggest Apple lie of all! -- Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of interfaces %% > OSX is clearly stamped down the side "Desert Eagle point five oh" That's certainly an apt comparison, since most people that have or want DE50's think they look cool and work really awesome, but have no fucking idea what they're doing when using a gun. They feel this strange sense of smugness about the elite status their choice in firearm has afforded them, perhaps not having any idea that a boring old Casull 454 has more muzzle energy, or that the DE50 is utterly impractical for essentially any worthwhile endeavour. They know that they spent way more money than other guns cost, but they don't realize that there's always something cheaper that does a better job. Yet nothing else seems to have caught and held the affection of hollywood so effectively, so nothing else will suffice for the discriminating individuals that know nothing about firearms or marksmanship --- except that they are better than everyone else at both by virtue of their wise purchase. -- "If Operating Systems were guns", seen on http://slashdot.org %% > Of course socialism doesn't truly protect the most important of all > rights: the right to earn and keep property. If you truly consider that the most important right of all, above every other right, you're pathologically materialistic and need an attitude adjustment. -- comment on http://slashdot.org about filesharing, socialism, and rights %% > So perhaps getting smarter makes people more violent. I certainly feel more inclined to kill people the more I learn about them. -- Anonymous Coward, on http://slashdot.org in response to an article about how playing video games makes people smarter %% > The ends justify the means. No they don't, because the ends, as in the effect, are a consequence of the means, as in the cause. So if the ends you want are peace and democracy, and your means are violence and torture, then the ends you get are a non-stop insurgency, civil war, and lawlessness that will at best settle into a theocratic state run by the personal militias of religious extremists. Are you paying attention to the news? What you are seeing is cause and effect. Are these the ends that you desired? No? Well guess what -- that's why the ends don't justify the means, because you don't get to pick what end your means will achieve! Wishing that torturing random people accused of being terrorists will bring peace and harmony doesn't make it so, and if it isn't obvious to you at this point it never will be because you are deliberately avoiding anything resembling a fact. Well let me clue you in a little: Abu Ghraib had consequences. Very bad, very tragic consequences. While hardly the lone example of your misplaced philosophy, the fact is that those means have seriously damaged our ends, such that they are probably unachievable. The ends, whether you like it or not, stemmed directly from the means, and hence those means cannot be justified. -- comment on http://slashdot.org by Chris Burke (6130) on "ends justifying means." %% > [GNU/]Linux is not user-friendly. It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly. -- Seen somewhere on the net %% A "free market" is made up of more than just businessmen trying to conquer markets. It's also the customers. The needs of the customers are not the needs of the men trying to lock down markets. It is more than fair that users should organize to keep a few operators from telling everyone what to do and what to pay for it. Businesses are fictional individuals licensed to exist by the people as corporations. They exist for our benefit. We do not exist to service them. They are not the bosses, we are. -- comment by Catbeller (118204) on http://slashdot.org on free markets and their participants %% A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket. It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn't matter how many votes your candidate got, he's not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared. -- Charles Pierce in "Esquire", 2005-11-01 %% A 'No' uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi %% A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean, is worthless. -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia %% A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by god with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% A Think Tank is an organization that claims to serve as a center for research and/or analysis of important public issues. In reality, many think tanks are little more than public relations fronts, usually headquartered in state or national seats of government and generating self-serving scholarship that serves the advocacy goals of their industry sponsors . . . -- sourcewatch.org article on so called "think tanks" %% A [GNU/]Linux machine! Because a [386] is a terrible thing to waste! -- Joe Sloan %% A bad man is worse when he pretends to be a saint. -- Francis Bacon %% A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain. -- Robert Frost %% A believer is a bird in a cage, a free-thinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality", 1873 %% A book is the work of a mind, doing its work in the way that a mind deems best. That's dangerous. Is the work of some mere individual mind likely to serve the aims of collectively accepted compromises, which are known in the schools as 'standards'? Any mind that would audaciously put itself forth to work all alone is surely a bad example for the students, and probably, if not downright antisocial, at least a little off-center, self-indulgent, elitist . . . It's just good pedagogy, therefore, to stay away from such stuff, and use instead, if film-strips and rap-sessions must be supplemented, 'texts,' selected, or prepared, or adapted, by real professionals. Those texts are called 'reading material.' They are the academic equivalent of the 'listening material' that fills waiting-rooms, and the 'eating material' that you can buy in thousands of convenient eating resource centers along the roads. -- The Underground Grammarian %% A boss in heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore if god did exist, he would have to be abolished. -- Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876) Russian anarchist, atheist author, and founder of Nihilism, from "God and the State", 1874 %% A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discussion respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a premium for dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest. This is a fallacy. Rogues are very keen in their profession, and already know much more than we can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. Rogues knew a good deal about lock picking long before lock smiths discussed it among themselves, as they have lately done. If a lock -- let it have been made in whatever country, or by whatever maker -- is not so inviolable as it has hitherto been deemed to be, surely it is in the interest of *honest* persons to know this fact, because the *dishonest* are tolerably certain to be the first to apply the knowledge practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too earnestly urged, that an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end, be better for all parties. -- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, published around 1850 %% A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time. -- Alfred E. Wiggam %% A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt %% A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats. -- Ben Franklin %% A crime against god is a demonstrated impossibility. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Second Interview on Rev. Talmadge, 1882 %% A disturbing fact continues to surface in sex abuse research. The first best predictor of abuse is alcohol or drug addiction in the father. But the second best predictor is conservative religiosity, accompanied by parental belief in traditional male-female roles. This means that if you want to know which children are most likely to be sexually abused by their father, the second most significant clue is *whether or not the parents belong to a conservative religious group with traditional role beliefs and rigid sexual attitudes*. (Brown and Bohn, 1989; Finkelhor, 1986; Fortune, 1983; Goldstein et al, 1973; Van Leeuwen, 1990). (emphasis in original) -- "Sexual Abuse in christian Homes and churches", by Carolyn Holderread Heggen, herald Press, Scotdale, PA, 1993 p. 73 %% 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 %% A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% A few weeks ago a hurricane struck the little religious community of Bethany, Okla. A number of pious citizens of the little town were killed. Houses were destroyed -- homes in which prayer and devotion reigned. A church was demolished. Only a few miles away is the large, wicked city of Oklahoma City -- at least we can certainly assume that, from the religious viewpoint, many sinners live in Oklahoma City. Assuming also (which is a great deal riskier assumption) that there is a god, why should he perpetrate this grim and sardonic joke? The sinners in the big city were left untouched. The godly folk in the little nearby village were punished by the evidences of god's wrath. How do the religious people interpret this calamity? Often they explain such calamities as flood, fire and storm by saying that god is angry at the sinful people and is warning them or destroying them for their sins. Was the hurricane in Bethany a sign of the love of god for his faithful worshipers? And god missed an even better chance, if there were a god who wished to punish rebels against his majesty and inscrutability. Just a few hundred miles north and east of Bethany, Okla., is Girard -- the home of The American Freeman: and The Debunker and The Joseph McCabe Magazine and the Little Blue Books -- the center of American free thought where an enormous stream of atheistic literature and godless modern knowledge pours forth to enlighten the masses. If there were a god directing hurricanes and he wanted to really "get" an uncompromising foe, whom he has no chance of persuading in the ordinary way, it would have been a devastating stroke for him to send his howling punitive blasts through the town of Girard. It would be a more remarkable suggestion of the avenging act of a god if only the Haldeman-Julius plant were destroyed and the rest of the town left unhurt -- and, as good neighbors, we shouldn't wish the christian and respectable, people of Girard nor those who are respectable and not so christian nor those who are christian and not exactly respectable to suffer from our proximity and our propaganda of atheism. Is god a joker? No -- let us whisper it -- the joke is that there is no god. Hurricanes come upon the just and the unjust, the pious and the impious. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% A few years ago the deists denied the inspiration of the bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time they worshiped what they were pleased to call the god of nature. Now we are convinced that nature is as cruel as the bible; so that, if the god of nature did not write the bible, this god at least has caused earthquakes and pestilence and famine, and this god has allowed millions of his children to destroy one another. So that now we have arrived at the question -- not as to whether the bible is inspired and not as to whether jehovah is the real god, but whether there is a god or not. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% A fiat monetary system allows power and influence to fall into the hands of those who control the creation of new money, and to those who get to use the money or credit early in its circulation. The insidious and eventual cost falls on unidentified victims who are usually oblivious to the cause of their plight. This system of legalized plunder (though not constitutional) allows one group to benefit at the expense of another. An actual transfer of wealth goes from the poor and the middle class to those in privileged financial positions. -- Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), "Paper Money and Tyranny" %% A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government. -- George Washington, First Annual Message to Congress January 8,1790 %% A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. -- Adlai Ewing Stevenson %% A god of love, a god of wrath, a god of jealousy, a god of bigotry, a god of vulgar tirades, a god of cheating and lying -- yes, the christian god is given all of these characteristics, and isn't it a wretched mess to be offered to men in this twentieth century? The beginning of wisdom, the beginning of humanism, the beginning of progress is the rejection of this absurd, extravagantly impossible myth of a god. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. -- Barry Goldwater %% A group of women who valued motherhood, but valued it on their own timetable, began to make a new claim, one that had never surfaced in the abortion debate before this, that abortion was a woman's right. Most significantly, they argued that this right to abortion was essential to their right to equality -- the right to be treated as individuals rather than as potential mothers. -- Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984) %% A hacker does for love what others would not do for money. %% 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 humanist or an atheist can't tell you to go to hell but a christian can. %% A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire and say, 'if god really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.' -- Mikhail Bakunin, "God and the State", 1874 %% A just policy is one which you would accept without knowing which side of it you'd be on. -- John Rawls' Theory of Justice, paraphrased %% A known infidel cannot get very rich, for the reason that the christians are so forgiving and loving that they boycott him. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. %% A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel. -- Robert Frost %% A little madness now and then is relished by the wisest men. -- Willy Wonka %% A lot of christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back, he ever wants to see a fucking cross? Kind of like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on, you know. -- Bill Hicks %% A lot of this fetishizing comes from civilians who've never worn the uniform, but who get excited with the idea of (others) Kicking Ass, and who believe that the military is some kind of high religious order to be obeyed and revered above all else. -- "Red State Son: Freedom Granted, Freedom Won", http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2006/01/freedom-granted-freedom-won.html %% A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate. The priest said, "Imitate our father in heaven, learn to be like him." The man studied his bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations. He tricked his wife into falling downstairs, and she broke her back and became a paralytic for life; he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him in the almshouse; he inoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb, and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him. Then he reported to the priest, who said that that was no way to imitate his father in heaven. The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% A man got up [after one of Huxley's 'sermons'] and said 'they had never heard anything like that in Norwich before'. Never 'did Science seem so vast and mere creeds so little'. -- Adrian Desmond, "Huxley", p. 366 %% A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. -- James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, "Ulysses" %% A man who believes that he eats his god we do not call mad; yet, a man who says he is Jesus christ, we call mad. -- Claude A. Helvetius (1715-1771) %% A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them. -- http://xkcd.com/c154.html %% A miracle is the badge and brand of fraud . . . No intelligent, honest man ever pretended to perform a miracle, and never will. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "About the holy bible", 1894 %% A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson %% A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.... A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits. -- Edsger Dijkstra %% A non-vegetarian anti-abortionist is a contradiction in terms. -- Phyllis Schlafly %% A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space. -- Gloria Steinem %% A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. -- Dwight David Eisenhower %% A person who is more than casually interested in computers should be well schooled in machine language, since it is a fundamental part of a computer. -- Donald Erwin Knuth %% A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks - rocks about 2 inches in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was. So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was. The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. "Now," said the professor, "I want you to recognize that this is your life. The rocks are the important things - your family, your partner, your health, and your children; anything that is so important to you that if it were lost, you would be devastated. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, and your car. The sand is everything else. The small stuff. If you put the sand into the jar first, there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your energy and your time on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. TAKE YOUR PARTNER OUT DANCING. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal. Take care of the rocks first - the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand. %% A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were. -- Jean de La Bruy re (1645-1696) %% A political man can have as his aim the realization of freedom, but he has no means to realize it other than through violence. -- Jean Paul Sartre %% A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend. -- J. William Fulbright %% A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with -- even if he drank. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% A religion is sometime a source of happiness, and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong. The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak certainty of reason - but one cannot have both. -- Robert Anson Heinlein, from "Friday" %% A religion that has a personal god, outside of humanity, to worship and to please, is quite apt to get appointed an official to regulate the people, and particularly to execute punishment adequate to the offense committed against an infinite ruler of the universe. Humanity so likes authority, it seems sometimes as if it gloated upon the sufferings of its fellows. -- Lucy Colman %% A scientific law is not something the scientist cannot break; it is a statement of an observation made so many times that any hope of seeing a counterexample is vanishingly small. If several impartial observers see a glass of water spontaneously boil, or an apple fly upward off a tree on a windless day, then we will need to go back to the drawing board and figure out where our model of the world has failed. Until it fails, I'll use the model we have; faith has nothing to do with it. -- Tom Flood, Sherman Oaks, Calif., Nov. 24, 2007 (response to an article conflating faith with science) %% A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1831 %% A serious public debate about the validity of astrology? A serious believer in the white House? Two of them? Give me a break. What stifled my laughter is that the image fits. Reagan has always exhibited a fey indifference toward science. Facts, like numbers, roll off his back. And we've all come to accept it. This time it was stargazing that became a serious issue . . . Not that long ago, it was Reagan's support of creationism . . . creationists actually got equal time with evolutionists. The public was supposed to be open-minded to the claims of paleontologists and fundamentalists, as if the two were scientific colleagues . . . It has been clear for a long time that the president is averse to science . . . In general, these attitudes fall onto friendly American turf . . . But at the outer edges, this skepticism about science easily turns into a kind of naive acceptance of nonscience, or even nonsense. The same people who doubt experts can also believe any quackery, from the benefits of laetrile to eye of newt to the movement of planets. We lose the capacity to make rational -- scientific -- judgments. It's all the same. -- Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe Newspaper Company-Washington Post Writers Group %% A sober, devout man will interpret "god's will" soberly and devoutly. A fanatic, with bloodshot mind, will interpret "god's will" fanatically. Men of extreme, illogical views will interpret "god's will" in eccentric fashion. Kindly, charitable, generous men will interpret "god's will" according to their character. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision. -- Edward Gibbons, _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ %% A sublime religion inevitably generates a strong feeling of guilt. There is an unavoidable contrast between loftiness of profession and imperfection of practice. And, as one would expect, the feeling of guilt promotes hate and brazenness. Thus it seems that the more sublime the faith the more virulent the hatred it breeds. -- Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer" %% A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author. -- S. C. Johnson %% A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." %% A think tank's resident experts carry titles such as "senior fellow" or "adjunct scholar," but this does not necessarily mean that they even possess an academic degree in their area of claimed expertise. Outside funding can corrupt the integrity of academic institutions. The same corrupting influences affect think tanks, only more so. -- sourcewatch.org article on so called "think tanks" %% A troll is someone who, finding that no-one likes them, decides to pretend that it's on purpose. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. -- George Bernard Shaw %% A truly great man will neither trample on a worm nor sneak to an emperor. -- Benjamin Franklin %% A universe with a god would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a god is bound to look different. -- Richard Dawkins %% A very pious friend of mine, having heard that I had said the world was full of imperfections, asked me if the report was true. Upon being informed that it was, he expressed great surprise that any one could be guilty of such presumption. he said that, in his judgement, it was impossible to point out an imperfection "Be kind enough," said he, "to name even one improvement that you could make, if you had the power." "Well," said I, "I would make good health catching, instead of disease." The truth is, it is impossible to harmonize all the ills, and pains, and agonies of this world with the idea that we were created by, and are watched over and protected by an infinitely wise, powerful and beneficent god, who is superior to and independent of nature. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% A violent man will die a violent death. -- Lao Tsu %% A warning for those of you lazy self absorbed and/or just plain inattentive parents: All the censorship in the world won't make up for bad parenting if your child is more influenced by our music than by Mommy & Daddy, both you and your offspring have much bigger problems than our lyrics. So before you go hauling us or any other artist into court, look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself if you did the best you could, because if you're considering taking us to court, you didn't. -- warning on "You'll Rebel To Anything" album by Mindless Self Indulgence %% A weed is a plant whose virtues are only waiting to be discovered. -- Zen Proverb %% A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges. A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant. Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum. Software rots if not used. These are great mysteries. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" %% A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. -- David Hume, "An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding" %% A wise person makes his own decisions, a weak one obeys public opinion. -- Chinese proverb %% A witty saying proves nothing. -- Voltaire %% A world filled with wonder a cold fathomless sky a man's life so meager he can but wonder why he cries out to heaven, its truth to reveal the answer only silence for god isn't real Go ask the starving millions under Stalin's cruel reign go ask the child with cancer who eases her pain and go to your churches if that's how you feel but don't ask me to follow for god isn't real He forms in his image a weak and foolish man speaks to him in symbols that few understand for a life of devotion the death blow he deals we owe him only hatred but god isn't real Go tell the executioner of the power he can't defy go tell his shackled victim of the mercy on high and go to your churches go beg, pray and kneel but don't ask me to follow for god isn't real No - no matter how he should be - god isn't real. -- Robbie Fulks, "God Isn't Real" from his album - Let's Kill Saturday Night (1998) %% A world where most men prefer sex with little children to sex with grown women, mostly allegedly christian parents secretly engage in bloody satanic rituals and every third person has suffered anal, genital and other harassments by demonic dwarfs from outer space makes as much sense - and just as little sense - as a world where the universe is ruled by the ghost of a crucified jew and George Bush had rational reasons (which no one can now remember) for bombing Iraq again two days before leaving the White House. -- Prof. T.F.X. Finnegan, Trinity College, Dublin %% ATHEIST HALL CONVERTED Berlin churches Establish Bureau to Win Back Worshippers Wireless to the New York Times. BERLIN, May 13. - In Freethinkers Hall, which before the Nazi resurgence was the national headquarters of the German Freethinkers League, the Berlin Protestant church authorities have opened a bureau for advice to the public in church matters. Its chief object is to win back former churchgoers and assist those who have not previously belonged to any religious congregation in obtaining church membership. The German Freethinkers League, which was swept away by the national revolution, was the largest of such organizations in Germany. It had about 500,000 members . . . -- New York Times, May 14, 1993, page 2, on Hitler's outlawing of atheistic and freethinking groups in Germany in the Spring of 1933, after the Enabling Act authorizing Hitler to rule by decree %% Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the state. -- Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please (1988) %% About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt ax. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. -- Edsger Dijkstra %% According to the Bible, God was ignorant, a ruthless liar and cheat; he broke his pledges, changed his mind so often that he grew weary of repenting. He was a murderer of children, ordered his people to slay, rape, steal, and lie and commit every foul and filthy abomination in human power. In fact, the more I read the Bible the less I find in it that is either credible or admirable. -- Rupert Hughes, "Why I Quit Going to Church," 1924 %% According to the theologians, god prepared this globe expressly for the habitation of his loved children, and yet he filled the forests with ferocious beasts; placed serpents in every path; stuffed the world with earthquakes, and adorned its surface with mountains of flame. Notwithstanding all this, we are told that the world is perfect; that it was created by a perfect being, and is therefore necessarily perfect. The next moment, these same persons will tell us that the world was cursed; covered with brambles, thistles and thorns, and that man was doomed to disease and death, simply because our poor, dear mother ate an apple contrary to the command of an arbitrary god. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% According to this account the promise of the devil was fulfilled to the very letter, Adam and Eve did not die, and they did become as gods, knowing good and evil. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Actions speak louder than words, so try practicing what you preach, before you preach. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% Actually, the only distribution of [GNU/]Linux I've ever used that passed the rootshell test out of the box (hit rootshell at the time the dist is released and see if you can break the OS with scripts from there) is Debian. -- seen on the Linux security-audit mailing list %% Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% Adults were treated as adults rather than as overgrown children hell-bent on enshrining their own arrested development. -- "The Day the Movies Died" (http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris?currentPage=all) %% You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. -- Norman Douglas %% Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. -- From the movie "Fight Club", based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk %% Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. -- Sinclair Lewis %% Advertising is the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket. -- George Orwell %% Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. %% Advocating the expansion of the powers of the state is treason to mankind . . . -- P.J. O'Rourke %% After all, any religion that can get numerous christians to ignore a simple and direct command from Jesus in the name of "context" obviously is going to have a hard time with teaching better morality to everybody else. Maybe this explains the widespread explosion of religion in America and the widespread rise in hatefulness, racism, right winged savagery, and widespread lack of honesty. -- William Barwell, wbarwell@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM %% After all, any religion that can get numerous christians to ignore a simple and direct command from Jesus in the name of "context" obviously there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. -- Noam Chomsky %% After all, the principle objection which a thinking man has to religion is that religion is not true -- and is not even sane. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% After each war there is a little less democracy to save. -- Brooks Atkinson %% After studying Apple's new source code license, the APSL, I have concluded that it falls short of being a free software license. It has three fatal flaws, any of which would be sufficient to make the software less than free. Apple has released an updated version, 1.1, of the APSL but it remains unacceptable. They have changed the termination clause into a ``suspension'' clause, but it still has the same kind of bad effects. Disrespect for privacy The APSL does not allow you to make a modified version and use it for your own private purposes, without publishing your changes. Central control Anyone who releases (or even uses, other than for R&D) a modified version is required to notify one specific organization, which happens to be Apple. Possibility of revocation at any time The termination clause says that Apple can revoke this license, and forbid you to keep using all or some part of the software, any time someone makes an accusation of patent or copyright infringement. In this way, if Apple declines to fight a questionable patent (or one whose applicability to the code at hand is questionable), you will not be able to have your own day in court to fight it, because you would have to fight Apple's copyright as well. Such a termination clause is especially bad for users outside the US, since it makes them indirectly vulnerable to the insane US patent system and the incompetent US patent office, which ordinarily could not touch them in their own countries. Any one of these flaws makes a license unacceptable. If these three flaws were solved, the APSL would be a free software license with three major practical problems, reminiscent of the NPL: * It is not a true copyleft, because it allows linking with other files which may be entirely proprietary. * It is unfair, since it requires you to give Apple rights to your changes which Apple will not give you for its code. * It is incompatible with the GPL. Of course, the major difference between the NPL and the APSL is that the NPL *is* a free software license. These problems are significant in the case of the NPL because the NPL has no fatal flaws. Would that the same were true of the APSL. At a fundamental level, the APSL makes a claim that, if it became accepted, would stretch copyright powers in a dangerous way: it claims to be able to set conditions for simply *running* the software. As I understand it, copyright law in the US does not permit this, except when encryption or a license manager is used to enforce the conditions. It would be terribly ironic if a failed attempt at making a free software license resulted in an extension of the effective range of copyright power. Aside from this, we must remember that only part of MacOS is being released under the APSL. Even if the fatal flaws and practical problems of the APSL were fixed, even if it were changed into a very good free software license, that would do no good for the other parts of MacOS whose source code is not being released at all. We must not judge all of a company by just part of what they do. Overall, I think that Apple's action is an example of the effects of the year-old "open source" movement: of its plan to appeal to business with the purely materialistic goal of faster development, while putting aside the deeper issues of freedom, community, cooperation, and what kind of society we want to live in. Apple has grasped perfectly the concept with which "open source" is promoted, which is "show users the source and they will help you fix bugs". What Apple has not grasped -- or has dismissed -- is the spirit of free software, which is that we form a community to cooperate on the commons of software. -- Richard Matthew Stallman on Apple's "open source" license %% After watching my newly-retired dad spend two weeks learning how to make a new folder, it became obvious that "intuitive" mostly means "what the writer or speaker of intuitive likes". -- Bruce Ediger, in comp.os.linux.misc, on X the intuitiveness of a [Apple] Mac interface. %% Agnostic, n. A person who feels superior to atheists by merit of his ignorance of the rules of logic and evidence. -- Chaz Bufe, The American heretic's Dictionary %% Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, from Cardiff, "What Great Men Think of Religion" %% Air conditioning is fat peoples' revenge on skinny people. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil. -- Lp.org %% All bibles are man-made. -- Thomas Alva Edison %% All children are atheists - they have no idea of god. -- Paul-Henri, baron d'Holbach / 1723-1789 %% All data is illegal - all you need is the appropriate one time pad. -- AMAN, 25 September 1998 %% All generalizations are false, including this one. -- Mark Twain %% All great truths begin as blasphemies. -- George Bernard Shaw %% All laws which can be violated without doing any one any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of men that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts the more toward those very objects; for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden . . . He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it. -- Baruch Spinoza %% All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree. -- James Madison in The Federalist %% All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse. -- John Quincy Adams %% All of which goes to show that humans protecting animals from extinction is just as natural a part of the cycle of life as humans killing animals until they're extinct. Yes, animals kill and eat each other in the natural world – that's always the ethical justification for hunting anything and everything we can get a hook, bullet, or pointy stick in or a net, noose, cage, or spring-loaded clamp around. But the revulsion felt by those ecotourists on seeing the slaughter of a whale they'd come out to appreciate for its awe-inspiring beauty was not an artificial reaction, and had it not been for that kind of revulsion, there wouldn't even be a Japanese whaling industry today to revolt people. -- "The Moment of Truth: Watch That Whale" (http://www.popmatters.com/pm/columns/article/49098/watch-that-whale/) %% All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. -- Noam Chomsky %% All over the world, religious adherents are using the old arguments of postmodernism to try to discredit science wherever it contradicts their beliefs. They are not engaging in scientific debate, but in meta-debates, using methods from literary criticism to paint science as mere opinion and orthodoxy. They are not talking about evidence. They are arguing that evidence itself is irrelevant. And they are not talking to scientists, who have already heard all their arguments and refuted them soundly. They are talking to people without any scientific knowledge, preferrably as young as they can get them. From the sound of some of the responses on this post, they've been talking to a lot of the people here. The goal is political. They can't refute science, but if they get enough votes, they can outlaw it. -- comment by Thangodin (177516) on http://slashdot.org on "Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional" %% All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences. -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% All religions issue bibles against satan, and say the most injurious things against him, but we never hear his side. -- Mark Twain %% 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 personality of their intellectual powers. -- Mikhail A. Bakunin, "God and the State" (Dieu et l'etat) 1874, from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief %% All temporal or human authority proceeds directly from spiritual authority. But authority is the negation of liberty. 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 A. Bakunin, Oeuvres, Vol. I, p. 283 %% All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be skeptical, or at least cautious; and not to admit of any hypothesis, whatsoever; much less, of any which is supported by no appearance of probability. -- David Hume %% All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; -- J.R.R. Tolkien %% All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the bible is simply and purely of human invention -- of barbarian invention -- is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the coiled form of superstition -- then read the holy bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such atrocity. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% All the apologists are quick to argue that, "The only reason the bad guys target Windoze is because it's popular." What bullshit that is. Vista has what market share now? Less than Mac or Linux I'm sure and everyone knows that it's going to stay that way for years. Yet there's already a market for exploits. What this should tell you is that the value of an exploit it's ability to work, regardless of market share. The bad guys know that M$ security sucks and that the holes they buy today will be good for months if not years to come. No one bothers with GNU/Linux exploits because the GNU/Linux market is fragmented and quick healing. Linux exploits don't take down every distribution but just about every distribution is quick to fix problems. GNU/Linux exploits, relative to Windoze, don't work or last long. -- comment by twitter (104583) on http://slashdot.org %% All the languages that is but C, because all C ever said was "bite me". -- "The Parable of the Languages" %% All the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable, grew, blossomed and bore fruit in this one word, hell. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Great Infidels", 1881 %% All the professors in all the religious colleges in this country rolled into one, would not equal Charles Darwin. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Fifth Interview on Rev. Talmadge, 1882 %% All theological tendencies, whether catholic, protestant, or deist, really serve to prolong and aggravate our moral [chaos], because they hinder the diffusion of that social sympathy and breadth of view without which we can never attain fixity of principle and regularity of life. -- August Comte, from "General View of Positivism," a published speech %% All thinking men are atheists. -- Ernest hemingway %% All this big deal about white collar crime -- what's WRONG with white collar crime? Who enjoys his job today? You? Me? Anybody? The only satisfying part of any job is coffee break, lunch hour and quitting time. Years ago there was at least the hope of improvement -- eventual promotion -- more important jobs to come. Once you can be sold the myth that you may make president of the company you'll hardly ever steal stamps. But nobody believes he's going to be president anymore. The more people change jobs the more they realize that there is a direct connection between working for a living and total stupefying boredom. So why NOT take revenge? You're not going to find ME knocking a guy because he pads an expense account and his home stationery carries the company emblem. Take away crime from the white collar worker and you will rob him of his last vestige of job interest. -- J. Feiffer %% All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers . . . Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born. -- Francois Fenelon %% All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them. -- Emma Goldman %% All women have been sexually abused by the bible teachings, and institutions set on its fundamentalist interpretations. There would be no need for the women's movement if the church and bible hadn't abused them. -- Father Leo Booth %% Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality. All proffered samples of learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to common tests. It is the essence of all dogmatic faiths to hold that any such "show-down" is sacrilegious and perverse. The characteristic of religion, from their point of view, is that it is intellectually secret, not public; peculiarly revealed, not generally known; authoritatively declared, not communicated and tested in ordinary ways . . . It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists, there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics where the method of free inquiry has made its way. The "religious" would be the last to be willing that either the history or the content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit. -- John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher, from "Democracy in the Schools", 1908 %% Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist. Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat. Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter. Als sie die Juden holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Jude. Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte. -- Martin Niemöller, Der Weg ins Freie, (F.M. Hellbach, Stuttgart, 1946) When the Nazis arrested the communists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I said nothing; after all, I was not a social democrat. When they arrested the trade unionists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a trade unionist. When they arrested the jews, I said nothing; after all, I was not a jew. When they arrested me, there was no longer anyone who could protest. -- translated by Bob Berkovitz (rbbrook@worldnet.att.net). %% Although it is said that faith can move mountains, experience has shown that dynamite works better. %% Although the United States is seen as a world of opportunity, the reality may be different. Some studies have shown that it is easier for poorer children to rise through society in many European countries than in America. There is a particular fear about the engine of American meritocracy, its education system. Only 3% of students at top colleges come from the poorest quarter of the population. Poor children are trapped in dismal schools, while richer parents spend ever more cash on tutoring their offspring. -- "The Rights and Wrongs of the American Model", article in The Economist, June 15th 2006 %% Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism. -- Isaac Asimov, "On Religiosity", Free Inquiry %% Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- Mark Twain %% America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% America never was, is not now, and very likely never will be a christian nation. -- Cal Thomas %% America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. -- Abraham Lincoln %% America's problem isn't that we suffer from a lack of faith, but from a saturation of it. -- James L. Hartley %% Among the innumerable reasons to scorn the creationists' "argument from design" is that no intelligent, let alone loving, creator could possibly have "designed" the male reproductive system in its current form. We, the paragon of animals, the Mister Monster, have always been acutely aware that our own boss, this tiny megalomaniacal tyrant, might fail to turn up. Erections were less wondrous works of the almighty and more like cops: often there when you emphatically didn't require them and sometimes absent when you did. I once knew a woman who recounted a sexual episode with one of the totally famous studs of our time. "And how was it?" I inquired diffidently. "Oh," she replied with an air, "a bit like trying to get an oyster into a parking meter." Or, as Amis puts it elsewhere in "Money," 'They're very difficult. They're not at all easy. That's why they're called hard-ons.' -- Christopher Hitchens in Salon Magazine, 5/11/98 %% Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it. -- G.K. Chesterton %% An algorithm must be seen to be believed. -- Donald Erwin Knuth %% An all-powerful being would have the power to punish a sinner, by any means he might choose to employ. However, the scriptures not only attribute to god a horrible vengefulness but also suggest that god is incredibly stupid. It would be stupid if an individual, intent on punishing a sinner or group of them, expended his destructive energy not only on those who it might be said deserved such punishment but also on enormous numbers of innocent people who simply had the bad luck to be in the physical proximity of evildoers. To argue that god works in this way is to put him precisely on the same moral plane as those modern terrorists who, to kill a particular individual or small group, will place a bomb on an airplane in the full knowledge that in addition to the five or six intended victims all the other occupants, in whom the terrorists have no particular interest, will be killed. -- Steve Allen, "More Steve Allen on the Bible Religion, & Morality" %% An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. -- Robert Anson Heinlein, "Beyond This Horizon", 1942 %% An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated. -- Madalyn Murray O'Hair %% An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. -- John Buchan (1875-1940) British author, statesman %% An encounter with a beautiful woman is good medicine for the well organized logical mind -- a little jolt never hurt. Note that the anarchists have been saying this for years about the A-bomb and civilization. -- Encyclopedia Apocryphia %% An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi %% An honest god is the noblest work of man . . . god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power . . . Most of the gods were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods" 1872 %% An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it. %% An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. -- G.K. Chesterton %% An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. -- Albert Camus %% An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. -- Benjamin Franklin %% An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience. -- Donald Robert Perry Marquis %% Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. -- Edward Abbey %% Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history . . . I should add, however, that I find myself in substantial agreement with people who consider themselves anarcho-capitalists on a whole range of issues; and for some years, was able to write only in their journals. And I also admire their commitment to rationality - which is rare - though I do not think they see the consequences of the doctrines they espouse, or their profound moral failings. -- Noam Chomsky in Z Net, Answers from Chomsky to eight questions on anarchism, 1996 %% Anarchy -- it's not the law, it's just a good idea. %% Anarchy . . . stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraints of government. -- Emma Goldman %% And I find it kind of funny I find it kind of sad The dreams in which I'm dying Are the best I've ever had I find it hard to tell you I find it hard to take When people run in circles It's a very, very Mad World -- Gary Jules' cover of Tears For Fears' "Mad World" %% And can you guess who else the feds are training their eagle eyes on? Quakers. Seriously. There's no joke here - I just want to point out that if they're watching the Quakers, they sure as fuck are watching you. -- from http://fuckthenewyorktimes.com %% And does the giant electronic brain fail? Gosh, apparently it does. After many years of research, WA is nowhere near achieving routine accuracy in guessing the tool you want to use from your unstructured natural-language input. No surprise. Not only is the Turing test kinda hard, even an actual human intelligence would have a tough time achieving reliability on this task. The task of "guess the application I want to use" is actually not even in the domain of artificial intelligence. AI is normally defined by the human standard. To work properly as a control interface, Wolfram's guessing algorithm actually requires divine intelligence. It is not sufficient for it to just think. It must actually read the user's mind. god can do this, but software can't. -- "Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces", Unqualified Reservations %% And it's not just faith itself: it's the idea that faith is a virtue and the less evidence there is, the more virtuous it is. You can actually quote, well, Tertullian for example: "It is certain because it is impossible." Sir Thomas Brown, actually seeking for more difficult things to believe, because things for which there is mere evidence are just too easy, and it's no test of his faith. In order to have a test of your faith, you must be asked to believe really daft things like the transubstantiation, you know, the blood of christ turning into wine, and stuff . . . That is so manifestly absurd that you've got to be a really great believer, in the class of the Electric Monk, in order to believe it . . . You're actually showing off your believing credentials by the ability to believe something like that . . . If it were an easy thing to believe, substantiated by facts, then it wouldn't be any great achievement. -- Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams %% And really, I don't know when you started to use [GNU/]Linux, but when I started (pre-1.0) we didn't have video drivers. We wrote them ourselves. We chose the freedom of [GNU/]Linux over the convenience of binary-only platforms with working drivers. It shames me that so many of the current generation of [GNU/]Linux users don't understand what the world before [GNU/]Linux was like. It was hell. Closed source binary-only drivers everywhere. Buggy code that you couldn't fix. [GNU/]Linux changed all that. Finally we have source and freedom and rights. Finally there's something to be proud of; an entirely open source operating system built through the sweat and tears of 1000s of volunteers. And you would sacrifice all that for slightly faster 3D graphics? I can't comprehend your state of mind. Your priorities are completely foreign to me. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% And the alcoholic bastard waved his finger at me His voice was filled with evangelical glee Sipping down his gin and tonics While preaching about the evils of narcotics And the evils of sex, and the wages of sin While he mentally fondles his next of kin . . . -- Danny Elfman, "Insanity" %% And the idea of conflicted superheroes is totally as fresh as when the comic book was published all those years ago. I mean, it's not like any other movie since then has explored the idea of guys in tights who are flawed and unsure of themselves. Certainly not Batman, Superman, The Incredibles, Spiderman, X-Men, Daredevil, The Punisher, Hancock and all the rest. Nope, Watchmen is the first movie ever to do it. In the extreme, superserious detail it needs. -- "Jimmy Critic" reviews "Watchmen", http://bigempire.com/filthy/watchmen.html %% And this David! He was such a villain as I should never dare use in the most melodramatic novel. His crimes are peculiarly despicable and versatile, from his earliest exploits to his later sex-manias, including the foul treatment of a soldier whose wife he desired, and his habit of warming his chill frame with a fresh girl every night. He was a traitor, an indefatigable liar, he drove women children through burning brick kilns or tore them to pieces with harrows, he sawed them in two and on his death-bed left instructions to kill a devoted man whom he had sworn to protect. -- Rupert Hughes, "Why I Quit Going to Church," 1924 %% And we are called upon to worship such a god; to get upon our knees and tell him that he is good, that he is merciful, that he is just, that he is love. We are asked to stifle every noble sentiment of the soul, and to trample under foot all the sweet charities of the heart. Because we refuse to stultify ourselves -- refuse to become liars -- we are denounced, hated, traduced and ostracized here, and this same god threatens to torment us in eternal fire the moment death allows him to fiercely clutch our naked helpless souls. Let the people hate, let the god threaten -- we will educate them, and we will despise and defy the god. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% And when you know you can't relate To one more shining face Your heart breaks No one cares And when you know you can't go on Cause everything is wrong Your heart breaks But no one's there -- The Offspring, "Amazed" %% Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000; 'legal drugs': 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana, 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war? -- William A. Turnbow %% Another meme of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. -- Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene" %% Another philosopher suggests that saying prayers is equivalent to believing that the universe is governed by a being who changes his mind if you ask him to. -- Steve Allen, "Steve Allen On the bible, Religion and Morality," 1990 %% Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love -- that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really? How do you make them? In the US the only mechanism for forcing people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn't been invoked for over 30 years. -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn't engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn't write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn't use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we'd reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed. -- Bruce Schneier %% Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven't ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and *then* rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can't be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged. -- Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism, Skeptical Enquirer, Vol. 12, pg. 46 %% Any belief in creators or purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith. -- William S. Burroughs %% Any fool can write a program that the computer can understand. It takes a good programmer to write a program that other people can understand. -- Martin Fowler %% Any idiot can believe in Jesus H. christ. To truly understand all that confusion in the gospels takes a real contortionist scholar. -- Franz Bibfeldt, German theologian %% Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction. -- Albert Einstein %% Any man can work when every stroke of his hand brings down the fruit rattling from the tree to the ground; but to labor in season and out of season, under every discouragement, by the power of truth -- that requires a heroism which is transcendent. -- Henry Ward Beecher %% Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad. -- Leo Rosten, on William Claude Dukenfield %% Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world. To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy. -- Alan Kay, "Computer Software", Scientific American, September 1984 %% Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from an insane asylum. -- Hott of the World, on http://slashdot.org %% Any sufficiently advanced hobby is indistinguishable from work. --unknown %% Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from god. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke, "Clarke's Third Law" from "Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible" %% Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. %% Anyone here who does not think that the scientific method works, throw out your computer now. And your car, all your appliances, hell, you should probably burn your house, because all of these things, the way they're made, the materials they are made of, are possible because of science. You probably would not be alive without the medicine and food that scientific advances have made possible. Think of the number of people who just died in the Asian Tsunami who would have lived if there had been an early warning system. Ignorance kills. -- comment by Thangodin (177516) on http://slashdot.org on "Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional" %% Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything . . . just give him time to rationalize it. -- Robert Anson Heinlein, "JOB: A Comedy of Justice" %% Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love" %% Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people. -- Eleanor Roosevelt %% Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like road kill to me. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. -- P.J. O'Rourke %% Applaud, friends, the comedy is over. -- Beethoven's sarcastic remarks after a priest's last rites as he lay dying in 1827; the priest had been summoned by religious friends. Fellow composer Joseph Haydn considered Beethoven an atheist. As quoted in "2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt", by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996 %% As I argued in "Beloved Son", a book about my son Brian and the subject of religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction in the methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless conversions -- to anything -- less likely. Brian now realizes this and has, after eleven years, left the sect he was associated with. The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy -- and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational -- the powers of reason are surprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind. -- Steve Allen, comedian, from an essay in the book "The Courage of Conviction", edited by Philip Berman %% As a cryptography and computer security expert, I have never understood the current fuss about the open source software movement. In the cryptography world, we consider open source necessary for good security; we have for decades. Public security is always more secure than proprietary security. It's true for cryptographic algorithms, security protocols, and security source code. For us, open source isn't just a business model; it's smart engineering practice. -- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999 %% As a general rule of thumb, never trust anybody who's been in therapy for more than 15 percent of their life span. The words "I am sorry" and "I am wrong" will have totally disappeared from their vocabulary. They will stab you, shoot you, break things in your apartment, say horrible things to your friends and family, and then justify this abhorrent behavior by saying: "Sure, I put your dog in the microwave. But I feel *better* for doing it." -- Bruce Feirstein, "Nice Guys Sleep Alone" %% As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else -- even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it. -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. -- Tacitus, Annales 3:27 %% As an unbeliever, I ask leave to plead that humanity has been a real gainer from scepticism, and that the gradual and growing rejection of christianity - like the rejection of the faiths which preceded it - has in fact added, and will add, to man's happiness and well-being. -- Charles Bradlaugh, "Humanity's Gain from Unbelief," 1889 %% 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 %% As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein %% As for christ -- well, he has been most outrageously belied. His followers, like those of many scientists and literary men, have so garbled his words and conduct that many of them no longer apply to present life. Christ was a wonderful psychologist. He was an infidel of his day because he rebelled against the prevailing religions and government. I am a lover of christ as a man, and his work and all things that help humanity, but nevertheless just as he was an infidel then, I am an infidel today. -- Luther Burbank quoted by Edgar Waite %% As in 1925, creationists are not battling for religion. They have been disowned by leading church men of all persuasions, for they debase religion even more than they misconstrue science. They are a motley collection to be sure, but their core of practical support lies with the evangelical right, and creationism is a mere stalking horse or subsidiary issue in a political program . . . The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the 'liberal' rhetoric of 'equal time'. -- Stephen J Gould %% As it happens, Josephus, who mentions John the baptist, does not mention Jesus. There is, to be sure, a paragraph in his history of the jews which is devoted to Jesus, but it interrupts the flow of the discourse and seems suspiciously like an afterthought. Scholars generally believe this to have been an insertion by some early christian editor who, scandalized that Josephus should talk of the period without mentioning the messiah, felt the insertion to be a pious act. -- Isaac Asimov, _Asimov's Guide To The bible_ ISBN 0-517-34582-X %% As long as man believes the bible to be infallible, that book is his master. The civilization of this century is not the child of faith, but of unbelief -- the result of free thought. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, "Intentions" %% As long as we cling to the conception of hell, god is not love in any human sense -- and least of all, love in the human sense raised to the highest potency of perfection. And if we renounce the belief in hell, then the notion that god gave his son to save those who believe in the incarnation and resurrection loses meaning. The significance of salvation depends on an alternative, and in traditional christianity this alternative is eternal torment. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% As long as woman regards the bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. The bible was not written by a woman. Within its leaves there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child", 1877 %% As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (1841) %% As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy. -- Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of Nations, 1942 %% As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -- Maurice Wilkes, designer of EDSAC, on programming, 1949 %% As soon as you are willing to discard observational data because it conflicts with religion, you are giving up any hope of ever really understanding the universe. As soon as you pick religion as the touchstone of reality, then we have to start discussing how one can demonstrate the correctness of one religion over another when different *religions* disagree. -- Wilson Heydt (whheydt@PacBell.COM) %% As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse, of christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister. A large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion, and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, Zeal, curiosity, and more earthly passions of malice and ambition kindled the flame of theological factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny, and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of the country. -- Edward Gibbons, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", 1781. (The Roman Empire fell about 100 years after it was converted to christianity.) %% As the years go by, I become more and more convinced that the best, and the wisest, is to fix our attention on the good, and the beautiful. -- Cathy Laughlin %% As to Jesus of Nazareth . . . I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. -- Benjamin Franklin %% As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" %% As with exercise, improvements beget improvements. If you run every day, you'll probably feel like running tomorrow. But if you skip running for a couple weeks, it will be an effort to drag yourself out. So it is with hacking: the more ideas you implement, the more ideas you'll have. You should make your system better at least in some small way every day or two. -- Paul Graham, "The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn" %% Asked whether Microsoft could threaten [GNU/]Linux, Torvalds said: "What can they do? What is the Microsoft threat? They certainly can't program around us. The only other thing they can do is marketing, and sure, let them try." %% Asking the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds. -- Founder of the EFF %% Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology, phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the notion that our lives are influenced individually by the movement of distant planets. This is the sawdust blarney of the carnival midway. -- James J. Kilpatrick, Universal Press Syndicate %% At some point, bits have to go into packets and routers need to make decisions on them. Changes at that level is what I want to hear about, not strategic company relationships. -- John Carmack %% At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the field on track. -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987 %% At times it may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good. -- Margaret Meade %% At what point did a basic understanding of the separation of church and state become a fucking war on religion? -- from http://fuckchristmas.org, to all the christian "victims" %% Atheism - your gain, no pain! -- Ron Barrier %% Atheism deprives superstition of its stand ground and compels theism to reason for its existence. -- George Jacob Holyoake, "Origin and Nature of Secularism" %% Atheism is a non-prophet organization. %% Atheism is justified: 1. If god exists, everything that exists is part of god's plan. 2. Atheists exist. 3. Atheists are part of god's plan. 4. Therefore, god wants atheists to exist. %% Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% Atheism is the world of reality, it is reason, it is freedom. Atheism is human concern, and intellectual honesty to a degree that the religious mind cannot begin to understand. And yet it is more than this. Atheism is not an old religion, it is not a new and coming religion, in fact it is not, and never has been, a religion at all. The definition of atheism is magnificent in its simplicity: atheism is merely the bed-rock of sanity in a world of madness. -- Atheism: An Affirmative View, by Emmett F. Fields %% Atheism keeps an open mind and does not flinch from rejecting the old, whenever it is a hurdle on the road towards a common humility. -- GORA, Indian atheist %% Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men . . . the master of superstition is the people; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reverse order. -- Francis Bacon "Of Superstition" %% Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds. -- Madalyn Murray O'Hair %% Atheists in foxholes, some say they are myths, Creations of the mind who just don't exist. Yet, they answered the call to defend, with great pride With reason their watchword, they bled and they died. -- Alice Shiver, "Atheists-in-Foxholes" monument, dedicated on July 4, 1999 %% Atheists would teach men to be moral now, not because god offers as an inducement reward by and by, but because in the virtuous act itself immediate good is insured to the doer and the circle surrounding him. -- Charles Bradlaugh, "A Plea for atheism", 1864 %% Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself -- of which every religion has more than its fair share. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, "enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades. -- "Triumph of the authoritarians" by John W. Dean, July 14, 2006 %% Babble about 'The wages of sin' serves to cover up 'the sin of wages'. We want rights, not rites -- sex, not sects. Only Eros and Eris belong in our pantheon. Surely the Nazarene necrophile has had his revenge by now. Remember, pain is just god's way of hurting you. -- Bob Black, "The Abolition of Work" %% Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live. -- Socrates %% Banning instruments rather than acts indicates a belief that man is not worthy of his own free will. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. -- ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson (July 6 2003) %% Basically, I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules, it's THEIR problem. I want people to know that in their bones, and I want it shouted out from the rooftops. I want people to wake up in a cold sweat every once in a while if they use binary-only modules. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% Basically, for years, the carefully crafted release schedules and marketing plans of huge media companies have been screwed up by a bunch of teenagers having an e-penis waving contest. -- a comment on http://slashdot.org on piracy and 0-day releases. %% Batman Begins is all about overreaching, trying to turn kid's stuff into grown up's stuff. Those dumbasses want to pretend to tell a poignant and powerful tale when what they have is a guy who dresses like a bat and fights bad guys in bad Mexican wrestling masks all fancied up with simplistic psychobabble. Batman is a god damn comic book for kids, something with mail order seven-foot ghosts, X-ray goggles, Sea Monkeys and 132 Army Men for $1.95. But it has been clung to by legions of fucking freaks who would rather drag their childhood obsessions into old age than grow up and move on. Try some books with more words and fewer pictures. -- The Filthy Critic reviews "Batman Begins" %% Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint. -- Mark Twain %% Be open to other people -- they may enrich your dream. %% Be self-reliant and your success is assured. %% Because I don't need to worry about finances I can ignore Microsoft and take over the (computing) world from the grassroots. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% Because Linux is not commercial -- because it is, in fact, free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate -- it does not have to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more reliable. When something goes wrong with Linux, the error is noticed and loudly discussed right away. Anyone with the requisite technical knowledge can go straight to the source code and point out the source of the error, which is then rapidly fixed by whichever hacker has carved out responsibility for that particular program. -- "In the Beginning was the Command Line", Neal Stephenson %% Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. > Why is top-posting such a bad thing? %% Because surely not everyone working on Japanese whaler hates whales, right? Many of them are suppressing their revulsion in order to put food on the table. That must be it. It's not a boatload of vicious whale-haters. It's a boatload of men and women afraid of unemployment in a Japan that has betrayed the devotion of its workforce, a Japan in which death from overwork is a huge problem, and widespread introversion, youth crime, and suicide are the results of a loss of faith in the promised affluence that was only ever available to a few, in any case; only for the few who could survive the school class rankings, the tests, the grueling hours, hyper-intense competition, and still have enough energy to muster filial loyalty to something as faithless and unstable as a capitalist enterprise. Here's a culture that gave the world Zen Buddhism, calligraphic art, sushi, and the bonsai tree – and the miniature bonsai tree! – all endeavors intended to enrich the soul. Yet the same culture has demanded its people turn away from that enrichment, march in lockstep whether to war or to work, and trample their souls underfoot. -- "The Moment of Truth: Watch That Whale" http://www.popmatters.com/pm/columns/article/49098/watch-that-whale %% Because the primary purpose of the Creationism Act is to endorse a particular religious belief, the Act furthers religion in violation of the Establishment Clause . . . The pre-eminent purpose of the Louisiana Legislature was clearly to advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind . . . The Act violates the Establishment Clause because it seeks to employ the symbolic and financial support of government to achieve a religious purpose. -- US Supreme Court, Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987 %% Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug superstition to their breasts. -- Isaac Asimov, when asked why he fights religion with no hope for victory %% Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding the cretins cloning and feeding and I don't even own a TV. -- Harvey Danger, "Flagpole Sitta" %% Before you embark upon a journey of revenge, you should first dig two graves. %% Behind most "well meaning" laws designed to protect children, is a facist who simply wants to limit your freedom. -- comment by Pharmboy (216950) on http://slashdot.org %% Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" -- which is but a manner of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention;" but the wise man saith, "Put all your eggs in the one basket and -- WATCH THAT BASKET." -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" %% Being unable to reason is not a positive character trait outside religion. -- Dewey Henize %% Being wrong about something does not mean the other side is right. %% Belief in gods and belief in ghosts is identical. God is taken as a more respectable word than ghost, but it means no more. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. -- Edward Abbey %% Belief is not a voluntary thing. A man believes or disbelieves in spite of himself. They tell us that to believe is the safe way; but I say, the safe way is to be honest. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why I Am a Freethinker", 1881 %% Believers are interested in fulfilling emotional and spiritual needs, not intellectual needs. In some cases one might as well try to use reason on a dog. For many people god is primarily a warm feeling. How can one argue with a warm feeling? Arguing with someone who places reason below faith and biblical authority is blowing against the wind. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% Believing that the bible is the divinely inspired word of god, certain human beings are prepared to suspend not only reason but even common sense about any and all passages found within, no matter how vile or bloodthirsty. -- Steve Allen, "More Steve Allen on the Bible Religion, & Morality" %% Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence. -- Evil, from "Time Bandits" %% Bertrand Russell viewed faith as, on the whole, contemptible. If religious persons were honest and rational, they would not be religious -- with that I agree. But I'm not certain that it's always the fault of the believer that he cannot abandon his absurd fairytales and fables. I often view the religious person not with scorn, but with pity -- with the same pity that one would regard a heroin addict or a delusional psychotic. There comes an odd sinking in my stomach when someone confesses to me his faith, as if he'd just told me he was ill with a terminal disease. -- J. S. Burke, "Why Religion Persists" %% Besides, when people dedicate so much time and energy to open source software, it's really not surprising that when faced with a corporate behemoth aiming to destroy everything they've worked so hard for, they might get a little emotional about it. It's easy to turn up your nose and write it off as fanaticism, but I'll take "built with pride" over "built for a paycheck" any day. It delivers better quality product. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau %% Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald Erwin Knuth %% Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -- Commissioner Previn Lal, UN Declaration of Human Rights, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri %% Beyond the truths that have been demonstrated is the horizon of the Probable, and in the world of the Probable every man has the right to guess for himself. Beyond the region of the Probable is the Possible, and beyond the Possible is the Impossible, and beyond the Impossible are the religions of this world. My idea is this: Any man who acts in view of the Improbable or of the Impossible -- that is to say, of the Supernatural -- is a superstitious man. Any man who believes that he can add to the happiness of the Infinite, by depriving himself of innocent pleasure, is superstitious. Any man who imagines that he can make some god happy, by making himself miserable, is superstitious. Any one who thinks he can gain happiness in another world, by raising hell with his fellow-men in this, is simply superstitious. Any man who believes in a being of infinite wisdom and goodness, and yet believes that that being has peopled a world with failures, is superstitious. Any man who believes that an infinitely wise and good god would take pains to make a man, intending at the time that the man should be eternally damned, is absurdly superstitious. In other words, he who believes that there is, or that there can be, any other religious duty than to increase the happiness of mankind, in this world, now and here, is superstitious. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Thirteen Club Dinner, New York, December 13, 1886 %% Bill Gates brought computing to the masses, pity they weren't ready for it. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Birthers are routinely outraged at suggestions that blatant racism is at the heart of their disquiet with Obama's landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election. So it's really worth saying it to them, every time. -- seen on http://slashdot.org, 2011-05-03 %% Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Second Interview on Rev. Talmadge, 1882, in Robert Green Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 5, p. 49 %% Blind faith can justify anything. If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die - on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith. -- Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene" %% Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure way against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is freedom. The surest path to wisdom is liberal education. -- Alfred Whitney Griswold %% Briefly stated, the findings are that when presented with an array of data or a sequence of events in which they are instructed to discover an underlying order, subjects show strong tendencies to perceive order and causality in random arrays, to perceive a pattern or correlation which seems a priori intuitively correct even when the actual correlation in the data is counterintuitive, to jump to conclusions about the correct hypothesis, to seek and to use only positive or confirmatory evidence, to construe evidence liberally as confirmatory, to fail to generate or to assess alternative hypotheses, and having thus managed to expose themselves only to confirmatory instances, to be fallaciously confident of the validity of their judgments (Jahoda, 1969; Einhorn and Hogarth, 1978). In the analyzing of past events, these tendencies are exacerbated by failure to appreciate the pitfalls of post hoc analyses. -- A. Benjamin %% Bruno Bauer, a biblical student and professor at a Berlin University, openly wrote in 1840 that Jesus was a creation of several Roman aristocrats. Ernest Renan, a former Jesuit student, put forth the same view in his book The Life of Jesus. Meanwhile, others who have studied and researched the Jesus story emphatically disavow the historical reality of the biblical Jesus. -- Dr. Wally F. Dean, "The Mania of Religion", 1995, p. 119 %% 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 in "The Atheist", by Gordy Slack, Salon.com, 28 April 2005 %% Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no other endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure. -- Harvard Lampoon, "Doon" (paraphrase) %% But for most Americans, rich and poor, the packaged version is still innately superior, and this is tangible evidence of the triumph of marketing. For us, a personal view of a field of sunflowers is quite ordinary, but a painting of that same view can fetch millions. Even the paintings of sunflowers rejected by the artist, then used by his maid as rags to clean up his studio, are prized beyond any imaginable real-life scene of sunflowers. Why? Simple: the real scene cannot be packaged and marketed - it can never be "more" than an individual experience. -- "Consumer Angst", http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/consumerangst.html %% But here steps in satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge. -- Bakunin, "God and the State" (1874) %% But honest men do not pretend to know; they are candid and sincere; they love the truth; they admit their ignorance, and they say, "We do not know." -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Superstition", 1898 %% But in what sense can [the United States] be called a christian nation? Not in the sense that christianity is the established religion or the people are compelled in any manner to support it. On the contrary, the Constitution specifically provides that 'congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' Neither is it christian in the sense that all its citizens are either in fact or in name christians. On the contrary, all religions have free scope within its borders. Numbers of our people profess other religions, and many reject all. Nor is it christian in the sense that a profession of christianity is a condition of holding office or otherwise engaging in public service, or essential to recognition either politically or socially. In fact, the government as a legal organization is independent of all religions. -- Justice David Brewer, "The United States: A christian Nation", 1905. Brewer is famous for his remarks in the non-legally binding Obiter Dictum from the 1892 holy Trinity church v. U.S. decision which states that "this is a christian nation", frequently cited as "proof" by groups seeking to amend the Constitution to endorse christianity. Brewer wrote this to clarify his position regarding the law. From "Why the christian Right Is Wrong about Separation of church & State." by Robert Boston, pg. 84-85 %% But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership. -- Bruce Schneier %% But people . . . don't even know what atheism is. It's not a negation of anything. You don't have to negate what no one can prove exists. No, atheism is a very positive affirmation of man's ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems. I'm thrilled to feel that I can rely on myself totally and absolutely; that my children are being brought up so that when they meet a problem they can't cop out by foisting it off on god. Madalyn Murray's going to solve her own problems, and nobody's going to intervene. It's about time the world got up off its knees and looked at itself in the mirror and said: "Well, we are men. Let's start acting like it." -- Madalyn Murray O'Hair %% But there is a kind of faith, as we all well know, that is an essential ingredient in the lives of all human beings. This faith is of a different sort, not faith in (or in the existence of) a pathologically jealous supreme being who would have us all wasting our valuable time in endless, meaningless rituals "glorifying his name." Nor is it faith in a mythological hell in which we will all fry for eternity who do not genuflect to this demeaning concept of the utter dependence of the human species. Alan Watts says in 'The Book,' "Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown." What we need is faith in the boundless reach of an open mind. Having an open mind does not mean that we do not have firm convictions, but that we are not afraid of new ideas. Persons with firm convictions, well founded, need new ideas from time to time, against which they can constantly test their convictions in a changing world, perhaps to alter them or perhaps to make their convictions even more firm. If we are confident of the truth and validity of our convictions, whatever they may be, we have nothing to fear. We shall not serve our convictions, whatever they may be, by self-deception. Convictions that can be defended only by disregarding facts, lying to oneself and others, are not worth keeping. -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% But there's no sense crying over every mistake, You just keep on trying till you run out of cake. -- from "Still Alive" as sung by GLaDOS from Portal %% But what this scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also. -- George Orwell, 9 November, 1945 %% But why are Paul's commands not followed to-day? Why are not the words, sister, mother, daughter, wife, only names for degradation and dishonor? Because men have grown more honorable than their religion, and the strong arm of the law, supported by the stronger arm of public sentiment, demands greater justice than St. Paul ever dreamed of. Because men are growing grand enough to recongize the fact that right is not masculine only, and that justice knows no sex. And because the church no longer makes the laws. Saints have been retired from the legal profession. I can't recall the name of a single one who is practicing law now. Have any of you ever met a saint at the bar? Women are indebted to-day for their emancipation from a position of hopeless degradation, not to their religion nor to jehovah, but to the justice and honor of the men who have defied his commands. That she does not crouch to-day where St. Paul tried to bind her, she owes to the men who are grand and brave enough to ignore St. Paul, and rise superior to his god. -- Helen H. Gardener %% Buy land. They've stopped making it. -- Mark Twain %% By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline. -- Thomas Jefferson %% By invading Iraq, the president has greatly undermined the war on terrorism. -- Richard A. Clarke, former National Security Council Special Advisor (24 March 2004) %% By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond the winning. -- Lao Tsu %% By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars. -- Barry Goldwater, 1981 %% By simple common sense I don't believe in god, in none. -- Charlie Chaplin, in "Manual of a Perfect Atheist" by Rius %% By the efforts of these infidels, the name of god was left out of the Constitution of the United States. They knew that if an infinite being was put in, no room would be left for the people. They knew that if any church was made the mistress of the state, that mistress, like all others, would corrupt, weaken, and destroy. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Great Infidels" 1881, in Robert Green Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 3, p. 382 %% By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing . . . kill yourself. No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself. Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are satan's little helpers, Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself. Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke . . . " there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags! "Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research - huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet! "Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill's very bright to do that." God, I'm just caught in a fucking web! "Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market - look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar . . . " How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don't you? -- Bill Hicks %% Calling EMACS an editor is like calling the Earth a hunk of dirt. -- Chris DiBona, "Open Sources" %% Calling OSX secure is like calling the 2nd fattest girl in the bar "skinny". -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color. -- Don Hirschberg %% Calvin founded a little theocracy, modeled after the old testament, and succeeded in erecting the most detestable government that ever existed, except the one from which it was copied. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Heretics and Heresies" Robert Green Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 226 %% Campus sidewalks never exist as the straightest line between two points. -- M. M. Johnston %% Can a good man mock at the children of deformity? Will he deride the misshapen? Your jehovah deformed some of his own children, and then held them up to scorn and hatred. These divine mistakes -- these blunders of the infinite -- were not allowed to enter the temple erected in honor of him who had dishonored them. Does a kind father mock his deformed child? What would you think of a mother who would deride and taunt her misshapen babe? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Response to Wm. E. Gladstone on his letter "Regarding Col. Ingersoll on christianity; Some Remarks on his Reply to Dr. Field", 1888 %% Can god fill teeth? -- Jello Biafra %% Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes. -- "A People's History of the United States", 1995 edition, chapter 23 by Howard Zinn %% Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all. -- John Maynard Keynes %% Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't make eight cats pull a sled through the snow. %% Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are totally in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences. -- Susan B. Anthony (1873) %% Celibacy is the essence of vulgarity. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Rome or Reason?", Reply to Cardinal Manning, 1888 %% Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. -- Mark Twain %% Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. -- Potter Stewart %% Censorship, like charity, should begin at home: but unlike charity, it should end there. -- Claire Booth Luce %% Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. -- Richard Dawkins %% Certainly the affirmative pursuit of one's convictions about the ultimate mystery of the universe and man's relation to it is placed beyond the reach of law. Government may not interfere with organized or individual expressions of belief or disbelief. Propagation of belief -- or even of disbelief -- in the supernatural is protected, whether in church or chapel, mosque or synagogue, tabernacle or meeting-house. -- Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court justice, majority decision, Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, 1940 %% Chastity is its own punishment. %% Chastity: The most unnatural of the sexual perversions. -- Aldous Leonard Huxley %% Childbirth is _not_ a miracle. Life is _not_ sacred. When you have twenty thousand nomads huddled between two rivers in the Middle East and that's it for Homo sapiens, when one in five children is a live birth, one in ten living past the age of ten, then childbirth is a miracle and life is sacred. When the average age of a grandmother in Philadelphia's housing projects is twenty-five, to call childbirth a miracle is at least a tasteless joke and at worst a true obscenity. -- Dave Sim %% Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next. -- Franklin P. Jones %% Christ according to the faith, is the second person in the trinity, the father being the first and the holy ghost the third. Each of these three persons is god. Christ is his own father and his own son. The holy ghost is neither father nor son, but both. The son was begotten by the father, but existed before he was begotten -- just the same before as after. Christ is just as old as his father, and the father is just as young as his son. The holy ghost proceeded from the father and son, but was an equal to the father and son before he proceeded, that is to say before he existed, but he is of the same age as the other two. Nothing ever was, nothing ever can be more perfectly idiotic and absurd than the dogma of the trinity. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Christ came, and christianity arose . . . But originating in judaism, which knew woman only as a being bereft of all rights, and biased by the biblical conception which saw in her the source of all evil, christianity preached contempt for women. -- August Bebel, "Woman and Socialism", 1893 %% Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them? -- Jules Feiffer %% Christ rode on an ass, but now asses ride on christ. -- Heine %% Christ said nothing about the Western hemisphere because he did not know it existed. He did not know the shape of the earth. He was not a scientist -- never even hinted at any science -- never told anybody to investigate, to think. His idea was that this life should be spent in preparing for the next. For all of the evils of this life, and the next, faith was his remedy. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Christ: An idea that was born at least 5,000 years ahead of its time. %% Christian biblical theology must recognize that its articulation of anti-judaism in the new testament . . . generated the unspeakable sufferings of the Holocaust. -- Dr. E. Florenza (Prof. of new testament Studies) & Dr. D. Tracy (Prof. of Philosophical Theology), "The Holocaust as Interruption" (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, Ltd., 1984). %% Christian humility is preached by the clergy, but practiced only by the lower classes. %% Christian science repudiates the evidences of the senses and rests upon the supremacy of god. Christian healing . . . places no faith in hygiene or drugs; it reposes all faith in mind, in spiritual power divinely directed. -- Mary Baker Eddy, on christian science "healing" %% Christian theology has taught men that they should submit with unintelligent resignation to the worst real evils of life and waste their time in consideration of imaginary evils in "the life to come." -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Christian, n.: One who believes that the new testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The devil's Dictionary" %% Christianity could not content itself with building up its own altar; it was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the heathen altars. Only from this fanatical intolerance could its apodictic faith take form; this intolerance is, in fact, its absolute presupposition. -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 5 %% Christianity demands entire subordination to its edicts. Until the majority of the people are emancipated from authority over their minds, we are not safe. -- Lucy Colman, abolitionist, in her autobiography, "Reminiscences" (1891), p. 7, from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief %% Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the church; the Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of christian literature and ritual; the Greek mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the Mass. Other pagan cultures contributed to the syncretist result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the Last Judgement, and a personal immortality of reward and punishment; from Egypt the adoration of the Mother and Child, and the mystic theosophy that made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the christian creed; there, too, christian monasticism would find its exemplars and its source. From Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the resurrection drama of Adonis; from Thrace, perhaps the cult of Dionysus, the dying and saving god. From Persia came millenarianism, the "ages of the world," the "final conflagration," the dualism of satan and god, of Darkness and Light; already in the Forth gospel christ is the "Light shining in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out." The Mithraic ritual so closely resembled the eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass that christian fathers charged the devil with inventing these similarities to mislead frail minds. Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world. -- Will and Ariel Durant, _The Story of Civilization_ %% Christianity does not preach the gospels to offer man a guide to salvation. It uses the gospels as a weapon in the ideological conquest of man. -- Simon Ewins %% Christianity has lent itself with amazing facility to cruel distortion . . . and has brought an infinity of anguish to innumerable souls on this earth. -- Joseph Conrad (Korzeniowski), Polish-born English author (1857-1924) %% Christianity has such a contemptible opinion of human nature that it does not believe a man can tell the truth unless frightened by a belief in god. No lower opinion of the human race has ever been expressed. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Christianity is like tying a rubber hose around your common sense and shooting up with god. -- Jello Biafra %% Christianity is not a religion; it's an industry. %% Christianity is one of several jewish heresies. -- Eric Hoffer %% Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason. -- Mikhail A. Bakunin, "God and the State", from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief %% Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814 %% Christianity preaches that love is divine and points to Jesus as the incarnation of love: but a buddhist, and not only a buddhist, might well say that the sacrifice of a few hours' crucifixion followed by everlasting bliss at the right hand of god in heaven, while millions are suffering eternal tortures in hell, is hardly the best possible symbol of love and self-sacrifice. The boss's son who works briefly at lower jobs before he joins his father at the head of the company would hardly reconcile the workers to their fate if they should be tormented bitterly without relief. Of course, some christians have felt this strongly and it has troubled them deeply, but the dominate note in the new testament and ever since has been one of astounding callousness. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% Christianity teaches that all offenses can be forgiven. Every church unconsciously allows people to commit crimes on credit. On the other hand, what is called infidelity says: There is no being in the universe who rewards, and there is no being who punishes -- every act has its consequences. If the act is good, the consequences are good; if the act is bad, the consequences are bad; and these consequences must be borne by the actor. It says to every human being: You must reap what you sow. There is no reward, there is no punishment, but there are consequences, and these consequences are the invisible and implacable police of nature. They cannot be avoided. They cannot be bribed. No power can awe them, and there is not gold enough in the world to make them pause. Even a god cannot induce them to release for one instant their victim. This great truth is, in my judgment, the gospel of morality. If all men knew that they must inevitably bear the consequences of their own actions -- if they absolutely knew that they could not injure another without injuring themselves, the world, in my judgment, would be far better than it is. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, January 9, 1891, answering the critics of his "Christmas Sermon" printed in the Evening Telegraph on December 19, 1891 %% Christianity, from its inception, has conceived itself as an enemy of reason and worldly wisdom; it has exerted itself to impede the development of reason, belittled the achievements of reason, and gloated over the setbacks of reason. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% Christianity: An invisible and all-knowing friend of mine made our male ancestor out of dirt, and made our female ancestor out of his rib, but our ancestors were tempted by a snake which was actually an enemy of my invisible friend and they ate a forbidden apple, so now all of us go to burn forever after we die unless we believe that my friend's son's blood is on us and in us and that this son died and rose zombie-like from the dead and floated up to heaven and sent his ghost to live inside of us. He is coming soon! -- Biblical Errancy list %% Christians believe that the most wonderful thing that can happen to them is to go to heaven, but few of them are in a hurry to make the trip. %% Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is -- not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness. We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes Of Moses", 1879 %% Christians, it is needless to say, utterly detest each other. They slander each other constantly with the vilest forms of abuse and cannot come to any sort of agreement in their teaching. Each sect brands its own, fills the head of its own with deceitful nonsense, and makes perfect little pigs of those it wins over to its side. -- Celsus (2nd Century C.E.) %% Christmas: it's the only religious holiday that's also a federal holiday. That way, Christians can go to their services, and everyone else can sit at home and reflect on the true meaning of the separation of church and state. -- Samantha Bee on The Daily Show %% Church tax exemption means that we all drop our money in the collection boxes, whether we go to church or not and whether we are interested in the church or not. It is systematic and complete robbery, from which none of us escapes. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% Cigarette, n.: A fire at one end, a fool at the other, and a bit of tobacco in between. %% Cinderella [Science] . . . lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken of the pair of shrews [Theology and Philosophy] who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror, but also with abundant goodness and beauty . . . ; and she learns . . . that the foundation of morality is to [be] done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence. -- Thomas Henry Huxley %% Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. -- Adam Smith %% Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. -- Alfred North Whitehead %% Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviors by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively . . . -- Sigmund Freud, 1927 %% Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities. -- Mark Twain %% Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. -- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943) %% Clarke's Conclusion: Never let your sense of morals interfere with doing the right thing. %% Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am) -- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce, "The devil's Dictionary" %% Commerce makes friends, religion makes enemies; the one enriches, and the other impoverishes; the one thrives best where the truth is told, the other where falsehoods are believed. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "A Wooden god", letter to the Chicago Times, written at Washington, D.C., March 27, 1890 %% Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. -- Albert Einstein %% Commonly, those who have professed the strongest motives of love of a god have demonstrated the deepest hatred toward human joy and liberty. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Competitive fury is not always anger. It is the true missionary's courage and zeal in facing the possibility that one's best may not be enough. -- Gene Scott %% Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives? -- Alan Kay, "Computer Software", Scientific American, September 1984 %% Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. [...] Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others. -- Emma Goldman, Patriotism: a menace to liberty %% Conformity is the refuge of the unimaginative. %% Confronted with the universe, with fields of space sown thick with stars, with all there is of life, the wise man, being asked the origin and destiny of all, replies: "I do not know. These questions are beyond the powers of my mind." The wise man is thoughtful and modest. he clings to facts. Beyond his intellectual horizon he does not pretend to see. he does not mistake hope for evidence or desire for demonstration. He is honest. He neither deceives himself nor others. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Foundations of Faith", 1895 %% Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. -- First Amendment, Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution %% Conservative, n.: One who admires radicals centuries after they're dead. -- Leo C. Rosten %% Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The devil's Dictionary" %% Consider the idea of god. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent 'mutation.' In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that 'survival value' here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. There are some of the reasons why the idea of god is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture. -- Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene" %% Consider the justice of the god of St. Augustine-and by no means only St. Augustine. All men deserve damnation, but god elects a few for salvation. They do not deserve this: the grace of god would not be gratia if it were not gratis. Yet the damned cannot complain that god is unjust, for no man receives a worse lot than he deserves, only some receive a better lot, and this shows god's infinite mercy. No student would be in doubt for a moment what to think of the justice of a teacher who gave a test that everybody failed and then nevertheless gave a few of his students "excellent," justifying his procedure along the lines suggested by Augustine. This is precisely what we mean by injustice. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% Consider: the city of New Orleans was recently destroyed by hurricane Katrina. At least a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and over a million have been displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate god. But what was god doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: these poor people spent their lives in the company of an imaginary friend. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a "person" in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employs a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis. Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath. -- "The Corporation" %% Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is user friendly. It just happens to be very selective about who it decides to make friends with. %% Contrary to the fantasies of the fundamentalists, there was no deathbed conversion, no last minute refuge taken in a comforting vision of a heaven or an afterlife. For Carl, what mattered most was what was true, not merely what would make us feel better. Even at this moment when anyone would be forgiven for turning away from the reality of our situation, Carl was unflinching. As we looked deeply into each other's eyes, it was with a shared conviction that our wondrous life together was ending forever. -- "Billions and Billions: Thoughts On Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium", the last book by Carl Sagan; Epilogue by his wife, Ann Druyan %% Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. -- Brian Kernighan %% Convergence? Only when it suits. To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham. -- Richard Dawkins, "Snake Oil and holy Water," in Forbes magazine, Oct. 4, 1999 %% Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius. %% Copyright is not property, it is merely a temporary loan from the public domain. %% Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. -- Ambrose Bierce %% Corporations care very much about maintaining the myth that government is necessarily ineffective, except when it is spending money on the military-industrial complex, building prisons, or providing infrastructural support for the business sector. -- Michael Lerner, The Politics of Meaning %% Correction does much, but encouragement does more. -- Goethe %% Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism. -- Walter Lippmann %% Countries with high levels of atheism also are the most charitable in terms of giving foreign aid to the developing world. The dubious link between christian literalism and christian values is also belied by other indices of charity. Consider the ratio in salaries between top-tier CEOs and their average employee: in Britain it is 24 to 1; France 15 to 1; Sweden 13 to 1; in the United States, where 83% of the population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead, it is 475 to 1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to squeeze easily through the eye of a needle. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear -- not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea! -- incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of god, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea -- and put him at the head of the procession. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" %% Creating computer software is always a demanding and painstaking process -- an exercise in logic, clear expression, and almost fanatical attention to detail. It requires intelligence, dedication, and an enormous amount of hard work. But, a certain amount of unpredictable and often unrepeatable inspiration is what usually makes the difference between adequacy and excellence. %% Creation "science" has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise? -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Skeptical Inquirer", Vol. 12, page 186 %% Creation 'scientists' must be aware that the informed workers in literary interpretation and in physical and biological sciences regard their stance as irresponsible, and that in the scholarly world as well as in the schools they are doing irreparable damage to the christian cause. -- Prof. Ken Campbell, Australian National University, in St. Mark's Review 137 (Autumn, 1989) (Anglican) %% Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack" %% Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. -- Isaac Asimov %% Credulity is not a crime for the individual -- but it is clearly a crime as regards the race. Just look at the actual consequences of credulity. For years men believed in the foul superstition of witchcraft and many poor people suffered for this foolish belief. There was a general belief in angels and demons, flying familiarly, yet skittishly through the air, and that belief caused untold distress and pain and tragedy. The most holy catholic church (and, after it, the various Protestant sects) enforced the dogma that heresy was terribly sinful and punishable by death. Imagine -- but all you need do is to recount -- the suffering entailed by that belief. When one surveys the causes and consequences of credulity, it is apparent that this easy believer in the impossible, this readiness toward false and fanatical notions, has been indeed a most serious and major crime against humanity. The social life in any age, it may be said, is about what its extent of credulity guarantees. In an extremely credulous age, social life will be cruel and dark and treacherous. in a skeptical age, social life will be more humane. We assert that the philosophy of humanity -- that the best interests of the human race -- demand a strong statement and a repeated, enlightening statement of atheism. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Critical thinking is the examination and test of propositions of any kind which are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to reality or not. The critical faculty is a product of education and training. It is a mental habit and power. It is a prime condition of human welfare that men and women should be trained in it. It is our only guarantee against delusion, deception, superstition, and misapprehension of ourselves and our earthly circumstances. -- William Graham Sumner %% Critics have found in the narrative a veneer of erudition that cloaks nothing more than a James Bond-style romp, albeit a highly addictive one. His publisher has described it as 'a thriller for people who don't like thrillers'. One newspaper put it thus: 'It is terribly written, its characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is excruciating in places and, a bit like a computer manual, everything is overstated and repeated - but it is impossible to put the bloody thing down.' -- from an article on Dan Brown, talking about his book "The Da Vinci Code" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/dec/12/fiction.usa %% Cryptography has been espousing open source ideals for decades, although we call it "using public algorithms and protocols." The idea is simple: cryptography is hard to do right, and the only way to know if something was done right is to be able to examine it. -- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999 %% Culture is powerfully conservative. It enforces obedience to authority, the authority of parents, of history, of custom, of superstition. -- Richard Bernstein, "Dictatorship of Virtue" %% Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation. -- Johnny Hart %% Cynic, n.: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Cynic, n.: Experienced. %% Cynic, n.: One who looks through rose-colored glasses with a jaundiced eye. %% Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down. -- The Cypherpunk Manifesto %% DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom.' -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous. We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence. -- Daniel Gilbert, on his "most dangerous idea" %% Daniel Murphy gives us a passage from freethinker Robert Green Ingersoll, one that also answers those who assert that I'm saying that humans who need myth to sustain them should be left without hope. here is an excerpt: Then they say to me: "What do you propose? You have torn this down, what do you propose to give us in place of it?" I have not torn the good down. I have only endeavored to trample out the ignorant, cruel fires of hell. I do not tear away the passage: "god will be merciful to the merciful." I do not destroy the promise: "If you will forgive others, god will forgive you." I would not for anything blot out the faintest star that shines in the horizon of human despair, nor in the sky of human hope, but I will do what I can to get that infinite shadow out of the heart of man. "What do you propose in place of this?" Well, in the first place, I propose good fellowship good friends all around. No matter what we believe, shake hands and let it go. That is your opinion, this is mine: let us be friends. Science makes friends; religion and superstition, make enemies. They say: "Belief is important." I say: No, actions are important. Judge by deed, not by creed. Good fellowship, good friends, sincere men and women, mutual forbearance, born of mutual respect . . . I do not believe in forgiveness as it is preached by the church. We do not need the forgiveness of god, but of each other and of ourselves. If I rob Mr. Smith and god forgives me, how does that help Smith? If I, by slander, cover some poor girl with the leprosy of some imputed crime, and she withers away like a blighted flower and afterward I get the forgiveness of god, how does that help her? If there is another world, we have got to settle with the people we have wronged in this. No bankrupt court there. Every cent must be paid . . . That is what I believe in. And if it goes hard with me, I will stand it, and I will cling to my logic, and I will bear it like a man. And I believe, too, in the gospel of Liberty, in giving to others what we claim for ourselves. I believe there is room everywhere for thought, and the more liberty you give away, the more you will have. In liberty, extravagance is economy. Let us be just. Let us be generous to each other . . . "Ah! but," they say, "it will not do. You must believe." I say, No. My gospel of health will bring life. My gospel of intelligence, my gospel of good living, my gospel of good-fellowship will cover the world with happy homes. My doctrine will put carpets upon your floors, pictures upon your walls. My doctrine will put books upon your shelves, ideas in your minds. My doctrine will rid the world of the abnormal monsters born of ignorance and superstition. My doctrine will give us health, wealth and happiness. That is what I want. That is what I believe in. Give us intelligence. In a little while a man will find that he cannot steal without robbing himself. he will find that he cannot murder without assassinating his own joy. he will find that every crime is a mistake . . . "Oh," they say to me, "but you take away immortality." I do not. If we are immortal it is a fact in nature, and we are not indebted to priests for it, nor to bibles for it, and it cannot be destroyed by unbelief. As long as we love we will hope to live, and when the one dies that we love, we will say: "Oh, that we could meet again," and whether we do or not, it will not be the work of theology. It will be a fact in nature. I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell. One world at a time is my doctrine. It is said in this testament, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," and I say: Sufficient unto each world is the evil thereof. And suppose after all that death does end all. Next to eternal joy, next to being forever with those we love and those who have loved us, next to that, is to be wrapped in the dreamless drapery of eternal peace. Next to eternal life is eternal sleep. Upon the shadowy shore of death the sea of trouble casts no wave. Eyes that have been curtained by the everlasting dark, will never know again the burning touch of tears. Lips touched by eternal silence will never speak again the broken words of grief. hearts of dust do not break. The dead do not weep. Within the tomb no veiled and weeping sorrow sits, and in the rayless gloom is crouched no shuddering fear. I had rather think of those I have loved, and lost, as having returned to earth, as having become a part of the elemental wealth of the world. I would rather think of them as unconscious dust, I would rather dream of them as gurgling in the streams, floating in the clouds, bursting in the foam of light upon the shores of worlds, I would rather think of them as the lost visions of a forgotten night, than to have even the faintest fear that their naked souls have been clutched by an orthodox god. I will leave my dead where nature leaves them. Whatever flower of hope springs up in my heart I will cherish, I will give it breath of sighs and rain of tears. But I cannot believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. I would rather that every god would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony. I have made up my mind that if there is a god, he will be merciful to the merciful. Upon that rock I stand. That he will not torture the forgiving. Upon that rock I stand. That every man should be true to himself, and that there is no world, no star, in which honesty is a crime. Upon that rock I stand. The honest man, the good woman, the happy child, have nothing to fear, either in this world or the world to come. Upon that rock I stand. Good rocks upon which to stand, in my opinion. Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) was a US freethinker/politician/lawyer/orator whose work is still useful to read and consider. Look him up. %% Debian [GNU/]Linux is a solid, comprehensive product, and a genuine pleasure to use. It is also great to become involved with the Debian collective, whose friendliness and spirit recalls the early days of the Internet and its sense of openness and global cooperation. %% December 25th is the birthday, not of christ, but of Mithra, the invincible sun. Isis of many names has acquired a new one as the madonna. -- William R. Inge %% Delay is preferable to error. -- Thomas Jefferson %% Demand creates its own supply. -- Keynes's law %% Democracy becomes a government of bullies, tempered by editors. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. -- George Bernard Shaw %% Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. -- G.B. Shaw %% Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. -- Henry Louis Mencken, "Little Book in C major", 1916 %% Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% Democracy, n.: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic . . . negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy. -- U. S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25 (1928-1932), since withdrawn. %% Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the [psychological] activity of man. -- Sigmund Freud, New York Times Magazine, 6 May 1956 %% Despite its suffix, skepticism is not an "ism" in the sense of a belief or dogma. It is simply an approach to the problem of telling what is counterfeit and what is genuine. And a recognition of how costly it may be to fail to do so. To be a skeptic is to cultivate "street smarts" in the battle for control of one's own mind, one's own money, one's own allegiances. To be a skeptic, in short, is to refuse to be a victim. -- Robert S. DeBear, "An Agenda for Reason, Realism, and Responsibility," New York Skeptic (newsletter of the New York Area Skeptics, Inc.), Spring 1988 %% Despite the suppression of thought, as humankind became more sophisticated in its knowledge of the workings of nature, it was only natural that some people began to question the efficacy of the priests and their magical rituals. Indeed, as people became aware of natural causes, they began to question the very existence of the gods themselves. The priests' answer to this skepticism was twofold: invoking the power of the state to exterminate dangerous freethought, and concurrently developing even more complex, serpentine, theological logic. Many philosophers were not taken in by this specious reasoning. They demonstrated that, fundamentally, all theology and metaphysics is pseudolearning, a semantic sleight of hand to give the appearance that superstitious beliefs have an intellectual, rational foundation. They further showed that, by definition, god, if he existed, would be unknowable. Yet theology--bolstered by the semantic alchemy of metaphysics -- attempted to discuss god as if he could be discovered by reason or experience. -- Joseph L. Daleiden, "The Final Superstition: A Critical Evaluation of Judeo-Christian Legacy", p.385 %% Did you know America ranks the lowest in education but the highest in drug use? It's nice to be number one, but we can fix that. All we need to do is start the war on education. If it's anywhere near as successful as our war on drugs, in no time we'll all be hooked on phonics. -- Leighann Lord %% Digg is what would happen to SlashDot if Fark invaded. -- signature seen on http://slashdot.org %% Digital computers are themselves more complex than most things people build: They have very large numbers of states. This makes conceiving, describing, and testing them hard. Software systems have orders-of-magnitude more states than computers do. -- Fred Brooks, Jr. %% Disclaimer: Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.) %% Dissatisfied with oneself, one becomes a seeker. Difficulty becomes a challenge and delight; critical thinking, a way of life. -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. -- Thomas Jefferson %% Do away with miracles, and the superhuman character of christ is destroyed. He becomes what he really was -- a man. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. -- George Bernard Shaw %% Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed reserves, tell you - using his stockholders' money to pay the postage for his personal opinions - that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry. -- FDR %% Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads. -- John Galt, in Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ %% Do unto another what you would have him do unto you, and do not do unto another what you would not have him do unto you. Thou needest this law alone. It is the foundation of all the rest. -- Confucious' version of the "Golden Rule", predating the christian version by [at least] 500 years %% Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. -- Aleister Crowley %% Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' -- Alan Cox %% Does a good farmer neglect a crop he has planted? Does a good teacher overlook even the most humble student? Does a good father allow a single child to starve? Does a good programmer refuse to maintain his code? -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" %% Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others. -- Mikhail Bakunin, "God and the State" %% Does it really matter whether they use a mouse or a keyboard or a fender from a Chrysler to administer your systems, as long as they're able to get tasks done in an effective manner? -- Chris McDonough, "Countering The No-Support Argument for Linux and Other Open Source Software Offerings" %% Don't be concerned, it will not harm you, It's only me pursuing something I'm not sure of, Across my dreams, with neptive wonder, I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love. %% Don't bother arguing with a [Microsoft] Windows User. The same people that tell you that a [Microsoft] Windows program is as good as a [GNU/]Linux program would also tell you it's better to wipe your ass with your bare friggin hand instead of toilet paper. I can hear them now -- "It might not work as well, it might piss you off, it might be a whole lot messier . . . but it's easier to learn, even a child can do it . . . and it's much more colorful!" -- Brian J.S. Miller %% Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. -- Mark Twain %% Don't take our word for it. Read the bible itself. Read the statements of preachers. And you will understand that god is the most desperate character, the worst villain in all fiction. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Don't talk to me about atrocities; all war is an atrocity. -- Field-Marshall Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener %% Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It's almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions. And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they're accessible to others is unquestioned, or it's not America. -- Dwight David Eisenhower %% Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. -- Voltaire %% Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric system. -- P.J. O'Rourke %% During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of christianity has been upon trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity,; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution. -- James Madison %% Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. -- James Bryant Conant %% Each nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. Each god was intensely patriotic, and detested all nations but his own. All these gods demanded praise, flattery, and worship. Most of them were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume. All these gods have insisted upon having a vast number of priests, and the priests have always insisted upon being supported by the people, and the principal business of these priests has been to boast about their god, and to insist that he could easily vanquish all the other gods put together. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Each of these cults correspond to one of the two antagonists in the age of Reformation. In the realm of the Apple Macintosh, as in catholic Europe, worshipers peer devoutly into screens filled with "icons." All is sound and imagery and Appledom. Even words look like decorative filigree in exotic typeface. The greatest icon of all, the inviolable Apple itself, stands in the dominate position at the upper-left corner of the screen. A central corporate headquarters decrees the form of all rites and practices. Infallible doctrine issues from one executive officer whose selection occurs in a sealed board room. Should anyone in his curia question his powers, the offender is excommunicated into outer darkness. The expelled heretic founds a new company, mutters obscurely of the coming age and the next computer, then disappears into silence, taking his stockholders with him. The mother company forbids financial competition as sternly as it stifles ideological competition; if you want to use computer programs that conform to Apple's orthodoxy, you must buy a computer made and sold by Apple itself. -- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988 %% Each war is another lost world. -- Leonid S. Sukhorukov %% Eat a big plate of jambalya, head off to the can, and meditate on this, "defecating is more productive than praying." -- Todd Adamson %% Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life. -- Paul Graham, "The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn" %% Economies of scale: The notion that bigger is better. In particular, that if you want a certain amount of computer power, it is much better to buy one biggie than a bunch of smallies. Accepted as an article of faith by people who love big machines and all that complexity. Rejected as an article of faith by those who love small machines and all those limitations. %% Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten. -- B.F. Skinner %% Education must be founded upon knowledge, not upon faith; and religion itself should be taught in the public schools only as religious history . . . -- Friederich Buchner, "Man in the Past, Present, and Future" %% Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because god is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. -- Fred Brooks, Jr. %% Either adjust the punishment so that criminals who commit the crime at hand must remain in prison for a longer amount of time if you're not satisfied with the current punishment, or leave it the same if you are, but either way, when you release them from imprisonment say they've paid their dues. Don't mix public life with punishment. It is, in the final analysis, harmful to society at all levels. -- comment by fyngyrz (762201) on http://slashdot.org about infinite punishment of criminals %% Either god wants to abolish evil, and cannot; Or he can, but does not want to; Or he cannot and does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. But, if god both can and wants to abolish evil, Then how come evil [is] in the world? -- Epicurus, 350-?270 BC %% Emacs is the world's best text editor. It's not just the best for editing program source; it's the best for any kind of text-editing. -- Steve Yegge, "Effective Emacs", http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs %% End user freedom is our passion. Apple is about giving you an incredibly polished experience - exactly how they want you to have it. The end user really has no freedom. They cannot change the device if they don't like the way Apple choose to make things. OpenMoko is the anti-iPhone. -- "OpenMoko: An iPhone Alternative for Developers?" article http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2152759,00.asp %% Eric Stevens Raymond: I want to live in a world where software doesn't suck. Richard Matthew Stallman: Any software that isn't free sucks. Linus Benedict Torvalds: I'm interested in free beer. Richard Matthew Stallman: That's okay, as long as I don't have to drink it. I don't like beer. -- LinuxWorld Expo panel, 4 March 1999 %% Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. -- Thomas Jefferson %% Even God has been turned into the cosmic wetnurse, who will rapture us up, clean our nappies, and dry our tears. ID promises us the fantasy of every child; that we are the center of the universe, that it's really all for us. Since you're saved by faith alone, you don't have to do jack, just show up at the mega-church for the show and listen to a postmodernist drivel which is equal parts fairy tale and new-age glurge. You gotta hand it to them, they know their market. Why stop at frying your pancreas with candy, when you can get diabetes of the soul too? -- Thangodin (177516) on http://slashdot.org on an article on immaturity in adults %% Even a religion like christianity purportedly created to champion the poor and downtrodden was later taken over by the rich and powerful for their own benefit. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% Even if we put all these nagging thoughts [four embarrassing questions about astrology] aside for a moment, one overriding question remains to be asked. Why would the positions of celestial objects at the moment of birth have an effect on our characters, lives, or destinies? What force or influence, what sort of energy would travel from the planets and stars to all human beings and affect our development or fate? No amount of scientific-sounding jargon or computerized calculations by astrologers can disguise this central problem with astrology -- we can find no evidence of a mechanism by which celestial objects can influence us in so specific and personal a way . . . Some astrologers argue that there may be a still unknown force that represents the astrological influence . . . If so, astrological predictions -- like those of any scientific field -- should be easily tested . . . Astrologers always claim to be just a little too busy to carry out such careful tests of their efficacy, so in the last two decades scientists and statisticians have generously done such testing for them. There have been dozens of well-designed tests all around the world, and astrology has failed every one of them . . . I propose that we let those beckoning lights in the sky awaken our interest in the real (and fascinating) universe beyond our planet, and not let them keep us tied to an ancient fantasy left over from a time when we huddled by the firelight, afraid of the night. -- Andrew Fraknoi, Executive Officer, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, "Why Astrology Believers Should Feel Embarrassed," San Jose Mercury News, May 8, 1988 %% Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi %% Even if you are pro-choice, no one likes to see a dead fetus. -- Vilma Valdez, Education Director Planned Parenthood of Greater Miami, The Miami Herald, 10/24/1992 %% Even if you can deceive people about a product through misleading statements, sooner or later the product will speak for itself. -- Hajime Karatsu %% Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to? -- Clarence Darrow %% Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point by point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That's libertarians for you -- anarchists who want police protection from their slaves! -- Coyote, in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars" %% Even many of those who claim to believe in immortality still tell themselves and others that neither side of the question is susceptible of proof. Just what can these hopeful ones believe that the word "proof" involves? The evidence against the persistence of personal consciousness is as strong as the the evidence for gravitation, and much more obvious. It is as convincing and unassailable as the proof of the destruction of wood or coal by fire. If it is not certain that death ends personal identity and memory, then almost nothing that man accepts as true is susceptible as proof. -- Clarence Darrow, "The Myth of Immortality" %% Even the clearest and most perfect circumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" %% Even worse, it doesn't do any good to have a bunch of random people examine the code; the only way to tell good cryptography from bad cryptography is to have it examined by experts. Analyzing cryptography is hard, and there are very few people in the world who can do it competently. Before an algorithm can really be considered secure, it needs to be examined by many experts over the course of years. -- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999 %% Every fact is an enemy of the church. Every fact is a heretic. Every demonstration is an infidel. Everything that ever really happened testifies against the supernatural. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "orthodoxy", 1884 %% Every friend of freedom . . . must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. -- "An Open Letter to [Drug Czar] Bill Bennett," The Wall Street Journal (September 7, 1989) by Milton Friedman %% Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. -- Dwight David Eisenhower, April 16, 1953 %% Every injustice that has ever been fastened upon women in a christian country has been "authorized by the bible" and riveted and perpetuated by the pulpit. -- Helen H. Gardner %% Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him to use him as a mere means to some external purpose. -- Immanuel Kant %% Every man thinks god is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is. -- Jean Anouilh (1910-87) French dramatist, playwright %% Every minister likes to consider himself as a brave shepherd leading the lambs through green pastures and defending them at night from Infidel wolves. All this he does for a certain share of the wool. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work. %% Every pulpit is a pillory, in which stands a hired culprit, defending the justice of his own imprisonment. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality" 1873 %% Every reasonable person knows that there are good people who believe in gods and good people who don't believe in gods. Like most atheists, I do not rape, murder, or steal, I know right from wrong and don't need to follow a set of superstitious beliefs to live a moral life. The idea that only a religious person can be a good person is utterly ridiculous. In fact, perhaps it is the atheists who are the truly good people; we try to do what is right not for the selfish reason of fear of some afterlife punishment but because we know it is the right thing to do. -- Peter Dubral, Highland Park, NJ, from The Greater Philadelphia Story, Newsletter of The Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia %% Every religion seems like a fantasy to outsiders, but as holy truth to those of the faith. -- Isaac Asimov, in essay "Is Fantasy Forever", 1982, reprinted in his essay collection "The Tyrannosaurus Prescription" %% Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. "How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?" I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either. -- Bruce Schneier, Cryptogram 15 Aug 2001 %% Every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right. -- Ani DiFranco %% Everybody Loves Eric, I'm not even talking to you because you aren't even here! -- Jason Marino %% Everybody's life is a tragedy but the life of an atheist seems especially tragic. When the atheist dies he realizes that his whole life was in vain, that he entered a world that reeked with the stench of religion and leaves it still holding his nose. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% Everyone *knows* cats are on a higher level of existence. These silly humans are just to big-headed to admit their inferiority. Just think what a nicer world this would be if it were controlled by cats. You wouldn't see cats having waste disposal problems. They're neat. They don't have sexual hangups. A cat gets horny, it does something about it. They keep reasonable hours. You *never* see a cat up before noon. They know how to relax. Ever heard of a cat with an ulcer? What are the chances of a cat starting a nuclear war? Pretty neglible. It's not that they can't, they just know that there are much better things to do with ones time. Like lie in the sun and sleep. Or go exploring the world. %% Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers. %% Everyone is an agnostic - no one knows if god exists or not. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion. -- Harlan Ellison %% Everything is a drug; it depends on the dose. -- Paracelsus %% Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- Albert Einstein %% Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom. -- Albert Einstein %% Evil is that which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% Evolution is as much a fact as the earth turning on its axis and going around the sun. At one time this was called the Copernican theory; but, when evidence for a theory becomes so overwhelming that no informed person can doubt it, it is customary for scientists to call it a fact. That all present life descended from earlier forms, over vast stretches of geologic time, is as firmly established as Copernican cosmology. Biologists differ only with respect to theories about how the process operates. -- Martin Gardner, "Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 128-131 %% Evolution should be one of the first things you learn at school . . . and what do they [children] get instead? Sacred hearts and incense. Shallow, empty religion. -- Sunday Telegraph (UK) interview with Richard Dawkins, Sept. 26, 1999 %% Excusing bad programming is a shooting offense, no matter _what_ the circumstances. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds, to the linux-kernel list %% Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you. -- Aldous Huxley %% Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you. -- Aldous Huxley %% Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of hercules. -- Huxley %% Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. There are many examples of outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies, but they prevailed with irrefutable data. More often, egregious findings that contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts. I have argued that accepting psychic powers, reincarnation, "cosmic consciousness," and the like, would entail fundamental revisions of the foundations of neuroscience. Before abandoning materialist theories of mind that have paid handsome dividends, we should insist on better evidence for psi phenomena than presently exists, especially when neurology and psychology themselves offer more plausible alternatives. -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Consciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171 %% FSMLabs Motto: The difficult we do today; the impossible takes a little longer. %% Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -- Aldous Leonard Huxley, "Proper Studies" %% Failure seems to be the trademark of Nature. Why? Nature has no design, no intelligence. Nature produces without purpose, sustains without intention and destroys without thought. Man has a little intelligence, and he should use it. Intelligence is the only lever capable of raising mankind. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "What Is Religion?", his last public address, delivered before the American Free Religious association, Boston, June 2, 1899 %% Faith - the ability to believe the ridiculous for the sublime. -- Rich Bennett %% Faith in god and seventy-five cents will get you a cup of coffee. -- Wayne Aiken %% Faith in immortality, like belief in god, leaves unanswered the ancient question: is god unable to prevent suffering, and thus not omnipotent? or is he able and not willing it and thus not merciful? and is he just? -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% Faith in the sense that religionists use the term, it turns out, is equivalent to the loss of confidence of the individuals of the human species to achieve their goals on their own. This seems to be borne out by the adherence to religion among the poor, the spread of religion in times of depression and conflict, and the greater success of all religions to proselytize among deprived populations wherever they may be. It may also explain the lack of initiative clearly evident among the fanatically religious who see little point in struggling for a better world when they are only nonentities in a vast system of omnipotent forces and obscure agencies beyond their abilities to understand or control. Men who are liberated from all such folderol are able to work with serenity and unshakable confidence in their own abilities to achieve. -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% 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 former evangelist, author, critic %% Faith is deciding to allow yourself to believe something your intellect would otherwise cause you to reject -- otherwise there's no need for faith. %% Faith is essentially intolerant . . . essentially because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one's cause is also god's cause. -- Ludwig Feuerbach %% Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb. -- Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene" %% Faith is the antithesis of proof. -- NY State Supreme Court Justice Edward J. Greenfield, 1995 %% 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 %% Faith is to the human what sand is to the ostrich. %% Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% Faith will survive all superstitions, compelling men to think in terms of their own destiny and the responsibility they themselves have in forging that destiny. No one explains how declarations that are manufactured out of whole cloth, that have absolutely no predictive content and therefore no demonstrable connection with our lives as we live them day by day, are supposed to serve as a guide for planning our future. What such declarations do is to condition every nervous system that takes them seriously that it is perfectly sane to ignore the world in which we live, and to live instead in a world of pure fantasy. The man who is willing to accept the doctrine of christian faith is one who is willing to relinquish all hope of knowing the truth. He accepts all, doubts never, vegetates. He is a slave, a hollow shell into which others can pour all manner of stupidities. Having a conscience, being honest, are empty phrases for him, as he has relinquished his own right to think and is acting only because others are acting through him. He refuses to be honest with himself, no longer talks things over with himself, no longer meditates, contemplates; he only absorbs like a sponge, without discrimination. If he has convictions, they are metamorphized and petrified lies, and not even his own lies but those of colleagues, priests, and politicians who want to use him. If to accept blindly, without the play of reason, is faith, it follows then that what the world needs is not more faith, but more people who think with their own heads and not with the heads of others. -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% Faith, as the theologians and other mystics use the term, is the capacity to accept as "true" declarations that have no predictive content. It is their way of asking us to believe something for no other reason than because they say it is so. In quoting the Council of Trent, "he who is gifted with heavenly knowledge of faith is free from an inquisitive curiosity." Walter Lippmann in 'A Preface to Morals' adds: "These words are rasping to our modern ears, but there is no occasion to doubt that the men who uttered them had made a shrewd appraisal of average human nature." -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. -- Ambrose Bierce, The devil's Dictionary, 1911 %% Faith, n: That quality which enables us to believe what we know to be untrue. %% Faith: An attitude fostered by individuals in high places in order to ensure the subservience of those in their charge. %% Faith: not wanting to know what is true. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions. -- G.K. Chesterton %% Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion. -- Mark Twain %% Fantastic doctrines (like christianity or islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward. -- Edward Abbey %% Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power. -- Benito Mussolini %% Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% Fear paralyzes the brain. Progress is born of courage. Fear believes -- courage doubts. Fear falls upon the earth and prays -- courage stands erect and thinks. Fear retreats -- courage advances. Fear is barbarism -- courage is civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion -- courage is science. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Ghosts", 1877 %% Fear prophets . . . and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. -- Umberto Eco %% Few christians would be in doubt what to think of a father tortured his children for forty-eight hours because they did not agree with him or did not obey him; and if he had a great many children and had given only a few of them a single chance while offering the vast majority no opportunity at all to know his will, most people would consider this the epitome of an inhuman lack of love and justice. The god of traditional christianity, however, outdoes even this analogy by relegating the mass of mankind to eternal torment. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted, and heaven crammed with these phantoms. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinion. -- Albert Einstein, from "Aphorisms for Leo Baeck; Opinions of Albert Einstein" %% Fiat money is the cause of inflation, and the amount which people lose in purchasing power is exactly the amount which was taken from them and transferred to their governments by this process. -- G. Edward Griffin, "The Creature from Jekyll Island" %% Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along. -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987 %% First as to speech. That privilege rests upon the premise that there is no proposition so uniformly acknowledged that it may not be lawfully challenged, questioned, and debated. It need not rest upon the further premise that there are no propositions that are not open to doubt; it is enough, even if there are, that in the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy. Hence it has been again and again unconditionally proclaimed that there are no limits to the privilege so far as words seek to affect only the hearers' beliefs and not their conduct. The trouble is that conduct is almost always based upon some belief, and that to change the hearer's belief will generally to some extent change his conduct, and may even evoke conduct that the law forbids. -- cf. Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, University of Chicago Press, 1952; The Art and Craft of Judging: The Decisions of Judge Learned Hand, edited and annotated by hershel Shanks, The MacMillian Company, 1968. %% First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win! -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi %% First: having to use means to achieve ends is one of the features that distinguishes limited power from omnipotence. Second: the uneconomic use of unpleasant means to achieve doubtful ends with frequent failures clearly points to limited power rather than omnipotence. -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% Five rules for eternal misery: (1) Always try to exhort others to look upon you favorably. (2) Make lots of assumptions about situations and be sure to treat these assumptions as though they are reality. (3) Then treat each new situation as though it's a crisis. (4) Live in the past and future only (become obsessed with how much better things might have been or how much worse things might become). (5) Occasionally stomp on yourself for being so stupid as to follow the first four rules. %% Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. -- Perlis's Programming Proverb #58, SIGPLAN Notices, Sept. 1982 %% Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings. -- George F. Will, "Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball" %% For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said, "Think!" The many have said, "Believe!" -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% For centuries men have fought in the most unusual and devious ways to prove the existence of a god. But evidently a god, if there were a god, has been hiding out. He has never been discovered or proved. One would think a god, if any, should have revealed himself unmistakably. Isn't this non-appearance of a god (the non-appearance of a god in the shape of a single bit of evidence for his existence) a pretty strong, sufficient proof of non-existence? -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% For christianity, the world must be regarded as the "creation" of a kind of Superman, a person possessing all the human excellences to an infinite degree and none of the human weaknesses, Who has made man in his image, a feeble, mortal, foolish copy of himself. In creating the universe, god acts as a sort of playwright-cum-legislator-cum-judge-cum-executioner. -- Kurt E. M. Baier, "The Meaning of Life" %% For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure? . . . here, too, we can learn by the example of the catholic church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas . . . it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith. -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 2 Chapter 5 %% For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. -- George Orwell, "1984" %% For in a Republic, who is 'the country?' Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant - merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. -- Mark Twain %% For instance, I can't purchase liquor on Sunday; heck, in some places, I can't even shop. My money declares my (completely non-existent) trust in your deity. The country's very oath invokes the christian god. The pledge of allegiance, something I don't otherwise have a problem with, is now layered with christian sentiments that literally poison my otherwise highly patriotic willingness to give of myself. The expectation in the courtroom is that I swear to god; if I don't, I am literally putting my future at risk. My own taxes are being directly funneled into "faith-based initiatives." I have to bear the tax burden for religions I find abhorrent, intolerable or simply ridiculous, while they get a (nearly) free ride for property taxes (believe me, I'm in a position to know the facts on this one all too well, I bought an ex-church to live in, the first year we paid the (delayed) assessment for the church, which was $500; the second year, we paid almost five times that as "regular" folks.) There is more, but by now you should be getting the flavor of why I think the legal and political system has been co-opted by christians. -- comment on http://slashdot.org by fyngyrz (762201) on separation of church and state %% For many centuries the sword and cross were allies. Together they attacked the rights of man. They defended each other. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Voltaire", 1894, Sec. I %% For many people, part of growing up is killing off the virus of faith with a good strong dose of rational thinking. But if an individual doesn't succeed in shaking it off, his mind is stuck in a permanent state of infancy, and there is a real danger that he will infect the next generation. -- "The Root of All Evil?", Richard Dawkins %% For many, faith is a suitable substitute for knowledge, as death is for a difficult life. %% For me, [Ayn Rand's] philosophy reduces itself to: "I'm on board; pull up the lifeline." -- from Roger Ebert's review of "Atlas Shrugged: The Movie" %% For moral reasons I am an atheist - for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally. -- From Peter Engel, "An Interview With Stanislaw Lem": The Missouri Review, Volume VII, Number 2 (1984) %% 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, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% For my part I would as soon be descended from a baboon . . . as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies . . . treats his wives like slaves . . . and is haunted by the grossest superstitions. -- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man" %% For my part I would not kill my wife, even if commanded to do so by the real god of this universe. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses", 1879 %% For myself, I do not believe in any revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities. -- Charles Darwin %% For myself, I flee the bible as a viper, and revolt at the touch of a christian. -- George Jacob Holyoake, from "The history of the Last trial by Jury for atheism," 1851 %% For narrowness and sectarianism, there is no equal to the lord Jesus christ. -- "The Southern Baptist Convention and Freemasonry" by James L. Holly, Page 40 %% For over a century, popular struggles in the democracies have used the nation-state to temper raw capitalism. The power of voters has offset the power of capital. But as national barriers have come down in the name of freer commerce, so has the capacity of governments to manage capitalism in a broad public interest. So the real issue is not 'trade' but democratic governance. -- Robert Kuttner %% For some reason the concept of sacrificing accuracy to increase efficiency seems inherently wrong. %% For ten centuries christianity, armed with the omnipotence of the church and State and opposed by no competition, was able to deprave, debase, and falsify the mind of Europe. It had no competitors, because outside the church there was neither thinkers nor educated persons. It alone taught, it alone spoke and wrote, it alone taught. -- Mikhail Bakunin, "Church and State", 1872, p. 78 %% For the first time we have a weapon that nobody has used for thirty years. This gives me great hope for the human race. -- Harlan Ellison %% For they starve the frightened little child Till it weeps both night and day: And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool, And gibe the old and grey, And some grow mad, and all grow bad, And none a word may say. Each narrow cell in which we dwell Is a foul and dark latrine, And the fetid breath of living Death Chokes up each grated screen, And all, but Lust, is turned to dust In Humanity's machine. And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword. -- Oscar Wilde %% For those engaged in an impartial investigation, a man's faith creates no presumption whatsoever of a higher probability; on the contrary, it is more suspicious than a less emotional belief. It raises the question whether there is considerable, albeit not compelling, evidence, or whether "faith" is but a noble word for wishful thinking. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% For too long we've been told about "us" and "them." Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that "they" are the problem, not "us." But there can be no "them" in America. There's only us. -- Bill Clinton %% Forget that Western medical science was the first to ever determine the cause of a certain disease -- no, it's better to try Chinese medicine, or homeopathy, or chiropractic, or strenuous prayer, because science never did anything for anyone (apparently). Take the Ivermectin, for example: it's 100% Western medicine, so in theory it should be just as damnable as the standard prescription cure, but somehow the fact that doctors won't prescribe it seems to "prove" that it works better. People would rather buy Ivermectin on the gray market than take the treatment that 9/10 of the doctors in the United States could name in 10 seconds. -- comment on http://slashdot.org by PCM2 (4486) on homeopathy %% Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature! -- G.B. Shaw %% Fortunately, the responsibility for providing evidence is on the part of the person making the claim, not the critic. It is not the responsibility of UFO skeptics to prove that a UFO has never existed, nor is it the responsibility of paranormal-health-claims skeptics to prove that crystals or colored lights never healed anyone. The skeptic's role is to point out claims that are not adequately supported by acceptable evidence and to provide plausible alternative explanations that are more in keeping with the accepted body of scientific evidence. -- Thomas L. creed, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 2, pg. 215 %% Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan "Adoption, not abortion," although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% Free Software doesn't have "end users." That's kind of the point. -- Mark Pilgrim, "Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you", http://web.archive.org/web/20110929174833/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point %% My Zen teacher once told me that, when people try to do you harm, you should thank them for giving you the opportunity to forgive them. In this case it’s even simpler, because there’s nothing to forgive, just explain. She’s redistributing the work that I explicitly made redistributable. She’s kind of the point. -- Mark Pilgrim, "Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you", http://web.archive.org/web/20110929174833/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point %% Free markets select for winning solutions. -- Eric Stevens Raymond %% Free yourself from negative influence. Negative thoughts are the old habits that gnaw at the roots of the soul. -- Moses Shongo, (Seneca) %% Freedom is not when the people fear the government, it's the other way around. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Freedom is nothing else but the chance to do better. -- Camus %% Freedom is still the most radical idea of all. -- Nathaniel Branden %% Freedom is the distance between church and state. -- John Boston %% Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you. -- Jean-Paul Sartre %% Freedom of religion is simply a horrible concept. People should have freedom of belief, and freedom of expression. Whether or not what you choose to believe in or advocate is called a religion by anyone should be irrelevant. Similarly, the reasonable practice of religion (for example, by gathering for collective worship) is generally covered by other established freedoms, such as movement and association. This being the case, the expression "freedom of religion" is usually used as an excuse, an implicit claim to more rights than someone else has, or to have one's own wishes valued more highly than another's. Following a certain religion does not earn you those rights, any more than someone following a different religion (or no religion) has those rights at your expense. One can readily extend this argument to anti-discrimination legislation. Why should it be necessary to prohibit discrimination on explicit criteria? If something is important enough to protect in this way, why not simply require that any decision be made based only on information relevant to the matter at hand? -- comment on http://slashdot.org by Anonymous Brave Guy (457657) %% Freethinker n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. %% Freethinkers who accompany their statement of unbelief with a "wistful regret" . . . express their unbelief in so mournful a manner as to furnish some little support to the religious theorist. But the fully-fledged atheist will not live up to the character. Instead of weeping, he laughs. Instead of being miserable, he is happy. Instead of regretting the loss of his old faith, he unblushingly declares his joy of having got rid of it. Instead of being grateful for the sympathy of the christian, he confounds his impertinence and expresses his sympathy with the deluded believer by seeking to convince him of the error of his ways. -- Chapman Cohen %% From a religious view, putting the (Ten Commandments) in a courtroom is idolatry. It constructs a god, not the god of Israel or Jesus christ, but a god that is useful to us, because it gives us the illusion that we really do have this deep agreement, when we don't. -- Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, in ABC news article "Display This!" 4-30-98 %% From the earliest christian times, the church has defended itself against exposure of its fraudulent nature by persecuting scientists, torturing dissidents, censoring literature, burning blasphemers, brainstuffing the laity--in every way possible keeping the populace steeped in ignorance, terrorized by fear and subjugated to the church. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% From the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and people. These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature, they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences, which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly, acknowledged to be the foundations of right action. History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions. These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature; they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear, however, that supernaturalists have attained to any agreement about these matters, or that history indicates a widening of the influence of supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary, the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity. -- T H Huxley %% From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. -- George Orwell, "1984" %% From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% From time to time, as we all know, a sect appears in our midst announcing that the world will very soon come to an end. Generally, by some slight confusion or miscalculation, it is the sect that comes to an end. -- G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) %% Fundamentalist christianity is on the rise among the electorate of the world's only super power, right up to and including the President. If you believe the surveys, 45 percent of Americans, that's about 135 million people, believe the universe is less than ten thousand years old. -- "The Root of All Evil?", Richard Dawkins %% Fundamentalist, n. One in whom something is fundamentally wrong - most commonly lack of reasoning ability and vicious intolerance toward those not sharing the fundamentalist's delusions. Thus, fundamentalists are especially intolerant of those able to draw obvious conclusions from observed facts, those who refuse to seek shelter in comforting falsehoods, and those who wish to lead their own lives. Members of the fundamentalist subspecies known as "Slack-Jawed Drooling Idiots" have been known to give so much of their income to "electronic churches" that they subsist on Alpo at the end of the month. In herds, fundamentalists are about as useful to society as wandering bands of baboons brandishing machetes. -- Charles Bufe "The American heretic's Dictionary" %% Furious activity is no substitute for understanding. -- H.H. Williams %% GNU/Linux: For those that don't want to be held hostage by an 800lb. gorilla. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% GPL advocates do not care if GPL'd software can be made to work in a proprietary business model. It's not our problem. There's no god-given right for proprietary software vendors to make money; they have to compete. And if the rules of the marketplace suddenly change and make it difficult for them, well -- tough. Adapt or die. -- David F. Skoll, "AdTI on Open Source" %% Galbraith's Law of Human Nature: Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof. %% Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous. -- David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739) %% Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. -- Thomas Alva Edison %% George Orwell was an optimist. %% Gilles de Rais supposedly sodomized, mutilated, and murdered more than 700 children. At his trial he told of his usual procedure of sexually assaulting boys, cutting open their chests and burying his face in their lungs, and opening their abdomens and handling their intestines. He also confessed to necrophilia with the dismembered bodies and to attempted intercourse with a fetus he cut out of a pregnant woman. At his trial de Rais REPENTED, and the bishop of Nantes WAS FORCED TO RECEIVE HIM BACK INTO THE CHURCH. -- _Bodies_Under_Siege_ p.9-10 %% Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life. -- Terry Pratchett %% 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. %% Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge! -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 also quoted in Noyes, "Views of Religion" %% Give the church a place in the Constitution, let her touch once more the sword of power, and the priceless fruit of all ages will turn to ashes on the lips of men. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality", 1873, in Robert Green Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 203, and from letter to Houston Post, Aug. 17, 1866 %% Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. -- P.J. O'Rourke %% Go around the world, and where you find the least superstition, there you will find the best men, the best women, the best children. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company. -- Mark Twain %% Go watch MTV or MTV2 for a while. Tell me you instantly want to go out and buy the albums groups are hawking. The music is either pablum for the teen masses, a la Britney Spears, pseudo-intellectual neo-sensitive grunge like Creed, or mindless, repetitive breakbeats with women singing, 'ooh, ooh baby' underneath it. Not inspiring, is it? -- by InterruptDescriptor, in a comment on http://slashdot.org/ %% God cannot send to eternal pain a man who has done something toward improving the condition of his fellow-man. If he can, I had rather go to hell than to heaven and keep company with such a god. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% God explaining the doctrine of free will: In order not to impair human liberty, I will be ignorant of what I know, I will thicken upon my eyes the veils I have pierced, and in my blind clear-sightedness I will let myself be surprised by what I have foreseen. -- Anatole France %% God is an atheist. %% God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon ignorance and hope. -- Steve Allen, "More Steve Allen, on the bible, Religion & Morality" %% God is the explanation for the unexplainable which explains nothing because it explains everything without distinction -- he is the night of theory, nonetheless making everything clear to the mind by removing any measure of darkness and extinguishing the light of discriminating comprehension -- the not-knowing which solves all doubts by repudiating them, which knows everything because it knows nothing in particular and because all things which impress reason are nothing to religion, lose their identity and are nil in god's eye. The night is the mother of religion. -- Feuerbach, "Das Wesen des Christenthums" (19th century, Germany) %% God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters. -- Henry Louis Mencken, "Minority Report" %% God knows, I'm not the thing I should be, Nor am I even the thing I could be, But twenty times I rather would be An atheist clean, Than under gospel colors hid be Just a screen. -- Robert Burns, "Epistle to the Rev. John McMath" %% God made his only son die on the cross to avenge his own anger against a man and woman four thousand years dead. Besides, the garbage disposal was sending radio signals through his head and it seemed like a really good idea at the time. -- Charles Fiterman %% God requireth not a uniformity of religion. -- Roger Williams %% God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That sir, is not free will. It would be akin to a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath and cry out for his imprisonment/execution. When god says the same we call him "loving" and build churches in his honor. -- William C. Easttom II, skeptic@icon.net %% God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of the human race. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Why I Am An Agnostic", 1876 %% God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from god; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like god because they have been figured out. -- Richard Phillips Feynman %% Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. -- Chapman Cohen %% Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Going into politics is as fatal to a gentleman as going into a bordello is fatal to a virgin. -- Henry Louis Mencken, "A Carnival of Buncombe" %% Gold, n.: A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold hasn't done anything to them. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?" -- Steve McConnell %% Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. -- Frank Herbert, "Children of Dune" %% Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. -- attributed to Plato %% Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Don't overdo it. -- Lao Tsu %% Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage. -- John Updike, "Couples" %% Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves. -- Ronald Reagan %% Graduating seniors, parents and friends . . . Let me begin by reassuring you that my remarks today will stand up to the most stringent requirements of the new appropriateness. The intra-college sensitivity advisory committee has vetted the text of even trace amounts of subconscious racism, sexism and classism. Moreover, a faculty panel of deconstructionists have reconfigured the rhetorical components within a post-structuralist framework, so as to expunge any offensive elements of western rationalism and linear logic. Finally, all references flowing from a white, male, eurocentric perspective have been eliminated, as have any other ruminations deemed denigrating to the political consensus of the moment. Thank you and good luck. -- Doonesbury, the University Chancellor's graduation speech. %% Grain grows best in shit. -- Ursula K. LeGuin %% Granted, [Microsoft Windows 95]'s look wasn't all that new either - Apple tried to sue Microsoft for copying the [Apple] Macintosh UI / trash can icon, until Microsoft pointed out that Apple got many of its [Apple] Mac ideas (including the trash can icon) from Xerox PARC Place. Xerox is probably still wondering why everyone is interested in their trash cans. -- Danny Thorpe, Borland Delphi R&R %% Graphical User Interfaces are the interpretive dance of the computer world. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% Great acts are made up of small deeds. -- Lao Tsu %% Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too. I'm not claiming I write great software, but I know that when it comes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way. It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names. -- Paul Graham, "Hackers and Painters," 2003 %% Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. -- Albert Einstein %% Great truths don't need daily reinforcement. They are either self evident or emerge as truths on their own when we stray from them. You can draw your own conclusions from the fact that most major religions reinforce on a weekly basis. -- istartedi, on http://slashdot %% Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. -- Philip Greenspun %% Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitabley ruined. -- Patrick Henry, Virginia's U.S. Constitution ratification convention, June 5,1788 %% Guru, n.: A person in T-shirt and sandals who took an elevator ride with a senior vice-president and is ultimately responsible for the phone call you are about to receive from your boss. %% Hackers have relatively little ability to identify emotionally with other people. This may be because hackers generally aren't much like "other people". Unsurprisingly, hackers also tend towards self-absorption, intellectual arrogance, and impatience with people and tasks perceived to be wasting their time. . . . The sort of person who routinely uses phrases like "incompletely socialized" usually thinks hackers are. Hackers regard such people with contempt when they notice them at all. -- Eric Stevens Raymond, "The Jargon File" %% Happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Eulogy at the grave of his brother, Eben %% Hard Core Hackers Motto: The difficult we do today; the impossible takes a little longer. %% Has the great art and mystery of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene and low down, and its salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment. -- Henry Louis Mencken, "A Carnival of Buncombe" %% Hate the sin and love the sinner. -- Mahatma Gandhi %% Have the courage to take your own thoughts seriously, for they will shape you. -- Albert Einstein %% Have you ever loved someone so much that you'd do anything he or she asked? No questions asked: she calls after many years and says "help me rob a bank." And you say "Okay." If it were regular old love, you'd ask questions like "which bank?", "who's driving?" and "again?" -- The Filthy Critic, review of "Before Sunset" %% Having a baby and giving it up for adoption, as pro-life people advocate, is not seen by most pro-choice people as a moral solution to the abortion problem. To transform a fetus into a baby and then send it out into a world where the parents can have no assurance that it will be well-loved and cared for is, for pro-choice people, the height of moral irresponsibility. -- Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984) %% Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving "normally." -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72" %% He hadn't a single redeeming vice. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book. -- Benjamin Franklin %% 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, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, December 23, 1791 %% He who begins by loving christianity more than truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than christianity, and end in loving himself better than all. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet, critic. Aids to Reflection, "Moral and Religious Aphorisms," aph. 25 (1825; repr. in Works, vol. 1, ed. by Professor Shedd, 1853) %% He who commends the brutalities of the past, sows the seeds of future crimes. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Ingersoll-Gladstone debate, response to Wm. Gladstone, 1888 %% He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool. -- Albert Camus %% He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. -- Friedrich Nietzsche %% He who endeavors to control the mind by force is a tyrant, and he who submits is a slave. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses" %% He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much a master of the world as he who is ready to die. -- Giacomo Leopardi %% He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened. -- Lao Tsu %% He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough. -- Lao Tsu %% He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know. -- Lao Tsu %% He who lets the world or his portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs his faculties. -- John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" %% He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. %% He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody . . . -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813 %% He who sacrifices functionality for ease of use loses both and deserves neither. %% He who slings mud generally loses ground. -- Adlai Stevenson %% Heaven: The Coney Island of the christian imagination. -- Elbert Hubbard, "The Notebook", 1927 %% Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Hence, Bush was not talking about science - not in any real sense, anyway. Intelligent design is a theological construct, a faith-based attempt to gussy up creationism in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets cannot be experimentally verified - or, most important, falsified. That it enjoys a certain public cachet is irrelevant; a higher percentage of Americans believes that a government conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy than believes in intelligent design, but there is no great effort abroad in the land to include that conspiracy theory in sixth-grade history texts. Bush wasn't talking about science. He was talking about the political utility of putting saddles on the dinosaurs and breaking Ganesh's theological monopoly over the elephant paddock. -- Charles Pierce in "Esquire", 2005-11-01 %% Here in the Great U.S. and A. we're seeing a level (by percentage, yes) of poverty that would have made the victims of the Great Depression nod in recognition. It's not about having enough to eat, it's about having anything like a hope that your children may do better than you. Racism, sexism, religious fanatisim are all nothing compared to the daily damage done by the twisted notions of Ronald Reagan Free Market Radicals, who use all sorts of fancy theory to rationalize watching their fellow man go needy. I used to think it was about greed. That it was pure desire for self-engorgement that drove these miserable characters. But the longer I watch the parade of pigs, generation after generation of bottomless pits that grasp upon some academic lickspittle like Milton Friedman in order to feel a little better about themselves, the more I'm starting to think that it's something much uglier than simple greed. I'm starting to believe they really need, in a deep, dark part of their being, they need to see other people suffer. It's not enough for them to win - they have to see someone else lose. Then they'll stand up on their little self-made pedestals and talk about this great, Christian Country that we live in. -- comment by PopeRatzo (965947) on http://slashdot.org %% Here is my final point. About drugs, about alcohol, about pornography and smoking and everything else. What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, say, think, who I fuck, what I take into my body - as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet? -- Bill Hicks %% Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first. -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% Here's another question I've been pondering- What is all this shit about Angels? Have you heard this? 3 out of 4 people belive in Angels. Are you FUCKING STUPID? Has everybody lost their mind? You know what I think it is? I think it's a massive, collective, psychotic chemical flashback for all the drugs smoked, swallowed, shot, and absorbed rectally by all Americans from 1960 to 1990. 30 years of street drugs will get you some fucking Angels my friend! What about Goblins, huh? Doesn't anybody belive in Goblins? You never hear about this . . . Except on Halloween and then it's all negative shit. And what about Zombies? You never hear from Zombies! That's the trouble with Zombies, they're unreliable! I say if you're going to go for the Angel bullshit you might as well go for the Zombie package as well . . . -- George Carlin, "You are all Diseased" %% Here's the deal, folks. You do a commercial - you're off the artistic roll call, forever. End of story. Okay? You're another whore at the captialist gang bang and if you do a commercial, there's a price on your head. Everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink. -- Bill Hicks %% Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. -- Jack Kerouac %% Here's what Wall-E does really well: it reminds me that it's not that fucking hard to make a great movie. All you need is to want to make one. Okay, there are incompetent boobs who want that but compromise their vision too many times, or just don't have a vision or imagination to begin with. People who do have ideas, though, and surround themselves with the tools and support to bring those ideas to life, can go about as far as they want. -- The Filthy Critic reviews "Wall-E" %% Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Heretics and Heresies", 1874 %% Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought. -- Graham Greene, 1981 %% Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Heretics and Heresies" %% Hey, doncha think the REAL reason JC hasn't returned is those crosses you wear? Think. How would JFK feel if you wore little rifles on your lapels? -- Bill Hicks, comedian %% History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose. -- Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813. %% History affords us many instances of the ruin of states . . . the ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy . . . An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy . . . -- Benjamin Franklin %% History aside, the almost universal opinion that one's own religious convictions are the reasoned outcome of a dispassionate evaluation of all the major alternatives is almost demonstrably false for humanity in general. If that really were the genesis of most people's convictions, then one would expect the major faiths to be distributed more or less randomly or evenly over the globe. But in fact they show a very strong tendency to cluster . . . which illustrates what we all suspected anyway: that social forces are the primary determinants of religious belief for people in general. To decide scientific questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy would therefore be to put social forces in place of empirical evidence . . . -- Paul Churchland,"_Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind_" %% History has taught us: never underestimate the amount of money, time, and effort someone will expend to thwart a security system. It's always better to assume the worst. Assume your adversaries are better than they are. Assume science and technology will soon be able to do things they cannot yet. Give yourself a margin for error. Give yourself more security than you need today. When the unexpected happens, you'll be glad you did. -- Bruce Schneier %% History reveals that the church and the State as a pair of indispensable Molochs. they protect their worshipping subjects, only to enslave and destroy them. -- Aldous Huxley, Themes in Variations, 1950 %% History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another . . . Truly the imago state of man seems to be terribly distant, but every moult is a step gained. -- Charles Darwin, from "Origin of the Species" %% History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban %% Honest investigation is utterly impossible within the pale of any church, for the reason, that if you think the church is right you will not investigate, and if you think it wrong, the church will investigate you. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality", 1873 %% Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people. -- F.M. Hubbard %% Hope is a waking dream. -- Aristotle %% Hot on the heels of its magnanimous pardoning of Galileo, the Vatican has now moved with even more lightning speed to recognize the truth of Darwinism. -- Richard Dawkins %% How can a preacher talk with a straight face about political graft? he is, himself, profiting by one of the most notorious political grafts in this country. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares 'god wills it thus.' Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. -- Napoleon Bonaparte %% How come BSD is allowed to get away with expecting a modicum of intelligence from its users? -- signature seen on http://slashdot.org %% How do I type "for i in *.dvi do xdvi i done" in a GUI? -- Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of interfaces. %% How do you explain science that may conflict with personal beliefs? "Welcome to wrongville, population: You. I'll give you a free bus ticket out, but if you don't want to ride, please feel free to go to the edge of a cliff and disbelieve in gravity". -- comment on http://slashdot.org by pla (258480) %% How do you insult a lawyer? You might as well not even try. Consider: of all the highly trained and educated professions, law is the only one in which the prime lesson is that *winning* is more important than *truth*. Once someone has sunk to that level, what worse can you say about them? %% How do you power off this machine? -- Linus Benedict Torvalds, when upgrading linux.cs.helsinki.fi, and after using the machine for several months %% How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost? -- Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% How is property given? By restraining liberty; that is, by taking it away so far as necessary for the purpose. How is your house made yours? By debarring every one else from the liberty of entering it without your leave. -- Jeremy Bentham %% How long, O how long will mankind worship a book? How long will they grovel in the dust before the ignorant legends of the barbaric past? How long, O how long will they pursue phantoms in a darkness deeper than death? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Heretics and Heresies", 1874 %% How many conservatives, who talk constantly about restoring America's christian heritage, have you heard mention that Washington, John Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and most of the other founding fathers, as well as Lincoln, were not christians? It was Washington who insisted that no reference to god appear in the Constitution. "The government of the United States," he declared, "is not in any sense founded on the christian religion." Jefferson produced a life of Jesus (still in print) from which he removed all the miracles to let the heart of Jesus' teachings shine forth. Not one of the first seven presidents professed the christian faith. -- Martin Gardner, Foreword to "Steve Allen on the bible, Religion, & Morality" %% How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not a matter of education, poverty or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is this: A person can be so well educated that he can build a nuclear bomb while still believing that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% How touching when the learned and wise crawl back in cribs and ask to hear the rhymes and fables once again! How charming in these hard and scientific times to see old age in Superstition's lap, with eager lips upon her withered breast! -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Christian Religion" Part III, The Ingersoll - Black Debate, 1881 %% How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. -- Thoreau %% How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, _Essays_ %% However, an even simpler rebuttal to the argument that atheism doesn't exist is that the same argument could be made that theism doesn't exist. In other words, one can just as easily say that all people naturally, inherently, do not hold any beliefs in deities, but, rather, are simply taught such beliefs. Therefore, theism cannot be a true statement of belief, but is simply a form of denial. With theism defined out of existence, theists must necessarily be deluding themselves rather than honestly believing. -- from "Criticism of atheism" on http://wikipedia.org %% However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus christ, or god, or allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of god's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C," and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some god-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism." -- Senator Barry Goldwater, from the Congressional Record, September 16, 1981 %% Human beings cannot be morally responsible to god. If we blame a person for an evil act, we thereby imply that he was to some extent evil prior to his action. For to say that a person is responsible for an evil action is to say he caused it because he was evil. But how did he become evil? If he made himself evil, then this would be an evil act and would -- if he were responsible for it -- imply that he was already evil. It follows that the evil of a person must precede the act of making himself evil. Therefore this individual cannot ultimately be the responsible source of his own evil. Then who is? It cannot be satan, for the same argument would apply to him. It must be god, for he created everything. Therefore god is ultimately responsible for all evil. -- B. C. Johnson, "The atheist Debater's Handbook" %% Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told -- and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. -- Michael Crichton in "The Lost World" %% Human love is generous and noble. The love of god is selfish, because man does not love god for god's sake, but for his own. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Rome or Reason, A Reply to Cardinal Manning", 1888 %% Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition. -- Isaac Asimov %% Humanity's first sin was faith; the first virtue was doubt. %% Humans can find a pattern in just about anything, and we must find such a pattern if we are to comprehend things. Mightn't people be mistaking this order imposed by the human mind for order caused by god? -- J J Hahn (hahn0009@gold.tc.umn.edu) on alt.atheism %% Hundreds of people have attempted to make some sort of 'superior man'. Nietzsche talked about the 'ubermensche', Paul wrote about people who were a new species, and not 'mere men'. But the people who tried to make this happen always wanted to associate it with some sort of hierarchical group: a state, a religion, a tribal or social grouping. They were wrong. The superior man is made by breaking away from those things; by throwing off all submission to authority and membership in group identities. -- Paul Rosenberg, A Lodging of Wayfaring Men %% Hungarian Notation is the tactical nuclear weapon of source code obfuscation techniques. -- "How to Write Unmaintainable Code", http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmainnaming.html %% I admit that I do not know whether there is any infinite personality or not, because I do not know that my mind is an absolute standard. But according to my mind, there is no such personality; and according to my mind, it is an infinite absurdity to suppose that there is such an infinite personality. But I do know something of human nature; I do know a little of the history of mankind; and I know enough to know that what is known as the christian faith, is not true. I am perfectly satisfied, beyond all doubt and beyond all peradventure, that all miracles are falsehoods. I know as well as I know that I live -- that others live -- that what you call your faith, is not true. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, unfinished article, reply to Rev. Lyman Abbott's article "Flaws in Ingersollism" printed in the North American Review, April 1890 %% I admit that X[Windows] is the second worst windowing system in the world, but all the others I've used are tied for first. -- Paul Tomblin %% I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the star-less night, -- blown and flared by passion's storm,-- and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Field-Ingersoll Debate, "A Reply to the Rev. Henry M. Field, D.D., 1887 %% I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London. -- Wernher von Braun %% I allow the world to live as it chooses, and I allow myself to live as I choose. %% I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! -- John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. %% I always find it funny when someone thinks a great way to steer blame away from a politician is to start listing names of people of the opposite party of the politician and say they did the same thing. As if I'm going to go "Oh, but I don't want my precious Democrats to be prosecuted! I'll let Bush slide!" Ha ha! As if! Send all the fuckers to jail. I'm against all criminals no matter what animal-themed political club they belong to. So yes, I agree completely, go after Bush and the political architects of the Big Dig. -- comment on http://slashdot.org by Chris Burke (6130) %% I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each — an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being - they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom. -- Mikhail Bakunin, "La Commune de Paris et la notion de l'état" (The Commune of Paris and the notion of the state) as quoted in Noam Chomsky: Notes on Anarchism (1970) %% I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biassed by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion. -- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man", p.645 %% I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. -- Richard Dawkins %% I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of. -- Clarence Darrow %% I am an anarchist not because I believe anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal. -- Rudolf Rocker %% 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, "Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to atheist" %% I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and by men who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in the belief, and perhaps in some respects, both. I hope it will not be irreverent of me to say that if it is probable that god would reveal his will to others on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me. -- Abraham Lincoln %% I am convinced that the truest act of courage is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. -- Cesar Chavez %% I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent christian on earth believes. -- Clarence Darrow, to William Jennings Bryan %% I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. -- Robert A. Heinlein %% I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves. -- Ernesto Che Guevara %% I am not convinced that they can write solid stable software. Proprietary software is already hobbled by it's secretive cathedral nature, but Microsoft seems to have a corner on incompetent programming as well. -- Chris DiBona, "Open Sources" %% I am not espousing atheism or any other religious stance. I am merely setting down a series of conclusions based upon the observations of case histories that are representative of literally thousands of others . . . they are, rather, typical cases seen every day in the offices of privately practicing psychiatrists and on the wards of most mental health facilities . . . The range of emotional difficulty in these patients varies from the existence of subtle disturbances to major ones in which at times the person does not know who he is but, rather, thinks that he is Jesus christ, the virgin Mary, or god. In each instance . . . tenacious religious beliefs can be an active thread interwoven into the tapestry of a disturbed thinking process . . . -- Eli S. Chese %% I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think the whole story is a sinister fairy tail; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case. -- Christopher Hitchens, "Letters to a Young Contrarian" (2001) %% I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the United States of America. %% I am not responsible for what other people think. I am responsible only for what I myself think, and I know what that is. No idea I've ever come up with has ever struck me as a divine revelation. Nothing I have ever observed leads me to think there is a god watching over me. -- Isaac Asimov, "Religiosity", from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine Jan. 1992 %% I am not so much for the freedom of religion as I am for the religion of freedom. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% I am sick and tired of war. It's glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. -- General William Tecumseh Sherman %% I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. -- Stephen Jay Gould %% I am told that I am in danger of hell; that for me to express my honest convictions is to excite the wrath of god. They inform me that unless I believe in a certain way, meaning their way, I am in danger of everlasting fire. There was a time when these threats whitened the faces of men with fear. That time has substantially passed away. For a hundred years hell has been gradually growing cool, the flames have been slowly dying out, the brimstone is nearly exhausted, the fires have been burning lower and lower, and the climate gradually changing. To such an extent has the change already been effected that if I were going there to-night I would take an overcoat and a box of matches. They say that the eternal future of man depends upon his belief. I deny it. A conclusion honestly arrived at by the brain cannot possibly be a crime; and the man who says it is, does not think so. The god who punishes it as a crime is simply an infamous tyrant. As for me, I would a thousand times rather go to perdition and suffer its torments with the brave, grand thinkers of the world, than go to heaven and keep the company of a god who would damn his children for an honest belief. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "My Reviewers Reviews", lecture in San Francisco, June 27, 1877, reply to attacks by clergymen for his lectures "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child", and "The Ghosts" %% I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. -- W.H. Auden %% I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe . . . Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. -- Daniel Webster, June 1, 1837 %% I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes -- a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me . . . I . . . hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical christianity of this land. -- Frederick Douglass, "After the Escape" %% I attribute this to the metaphorical "settling of the water". In the 90's people with absolutely no interest in computers, as well as those with no skill, started saturating the market to grab a quick buck. In the past few years, even those with skills have trouble finding employment, and most find themselves working helpdesk at a telemarketing firm, or as a webmaster/designer for a porn site. Those who are still here are the ones that do it more than just for the money . . . because it is what we were born to do. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% I beg of you not to pollute the soul of childhood, not to furrow the cheeks of mothers, by preaching a creed that should be shrieked in a mad-house. Do not make the cradle as terrible as the coffin. Preach, I pray you, the gospel of Intellectual Hospitality -- the liberty of thought and speech. Take from loving hearts the awful fear. Have mercy on your fellow-men. Do not drive to madness the mothers whose tears are falling on the pallid faces of those who died in unbelief. Pity the erring, wayward, suffering, weeping world. Do not proclaim as "tidings of great joy" that an Infinite Spider is weaving webs to catch the souls of men. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Field-Ingersoll Debate, "A Reply to the Rev. Henry M. Field, D.D., 1887 %% I beg, I implore, I beseech you, never to give another dollar to build a church in which that lie is preached. Never give another cent to send a missionary with his mouth stuffed with that falsehood to a foreign land. Why, they say, the heathen will go to heaven, any way, if you let them alone. What is the use of sending them to hell by enlightening them? Let them alone. The idea of going and telling a man a thing that if he does not believe, he will be damned, when the chances are ten to one that he will not believe it, is monstrous. -- Robert Green Ingersoll "Orthodoxy", 1884 %% I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be catholic) how to act, and no protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and 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. -- from John F. Kennedy's address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association September 12, 1960. %% I believe in honesty and truthfulness, not because I fear a god or a devil, but because I think it is the best way for people to live together. I believe in helping others because when we cooperate with our neighbors we make life easier for all. I believe in treating others as I want to be treated - but I certainly do not believe in turning the other cheek and the truth is I never knew any christians who did either. -- James Hervey Johnson %% I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Why Am I An agnostic?", 1896 %% I believe it is, as it always has been, easier to kill two infidels than to answer one. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "An Interview on Chief Justice Comegys", Brooklyn Eagle, 1881 %% I believe it is, as it always has been, easier to kill two infidels than to answer one. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "An Interview on Chief Justice Comegys", Brooklyn Eagle, 1881 %% I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency — love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes. -- Edward Luttwak %% I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience. -- Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87 %% I believe that religion is the belief in future life and in god. I don't believe in either. I don't believe in god as I don't believe in Mother Goose. -- Clarence Darrow, speech, Toronto, 1930, quoted in "Manual of a Perfect atheist" by Rius %% I believed then, and continue to believe now, that the benefits to our security and freedom of widely available cryptography far, far outweigh the inevitable damage that comes from its use by criminals and terrorists . . . I believed, and continue to believe, that the arguments against widely available cryptography, while certainly advanced by people of good will, did not hold up against the cold light of reason and were inconsistent with the most basic American values. -- Matt Blaze, AT&T Labs, Sept 2001 %% I call christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhanded, too underground and too petty -- I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination. -- George Norman Douglas, "South Wind" (1917) %% I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine. -- Charles Darwin %% I can't be expected to remember what every drug-addled yuppie hanger-on-er who wanted to get close to me during a football game twenty-five years ago digested. There were so many dope fiends milling about, I don't remember what some Yalie named Bush, whose father was a factotum in the Nixon Administration, was doing. But he strikes me as the sort of person I would have thrown out of the room. A rich, beer-drunk yahoo with a big allowance who passes out in your bathtub. -- Hunter S. Thompson on George W. Bush %% I can't help an occasional semi-shudder as I remember that millions of intelligent men think that I am barred from the face of god unless I change. But how can one pretend to believe what seems to him childish and devoid alike of historical and rational foundations? -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., book review by Holmes for Time %% I can't tell what the hell his code does, it's mostly comments. -- Adam Radford %% I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones. -- John Cage %% I cannot be angry at god, in whom I do not believe. -- Simone de Beauvoir, from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief %% I cannot conceive otherwise than that he, the infinite father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that he is even infinitely above it. -- Benjamin Franklin, from "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion", Nov. 20, 1728. %% I cannot follow you christians; for you try to crawl through your life upon your knees, while I stride through mine on my feet. -- Charles Bradlaugh %% I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent god would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. -- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man", p. 479 %% I certainly don't believe in the mythologies of our society, in heaven and hell, in god and angels, in satan and demons. I've thought of myself as an 'atheist,' but that simply described what I didn't believe in, not what I did. Gradually, though, I became aware there was a movement called 'humanism,' which used that name because, to put it most simply, humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe that if the ills are to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do the job. They disbelieve in the influence of the supernatural on either the good or the bad of society. -- Isaac Asimov, quoted in "2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt", by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996 %% I combat those only who, knowing nothing of the future, prophesy an eternity of pain - those who sow the seeds of fear in the hearts of men - those only who poison all the springs of life, and seat a skeleton at every feast. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Field-Ingersoll Debate, Letter to Dr. Field. 1887 %% I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. -- Stephen Roberts %% I credit that eight years of grammar school with nourishing me in a direction where I could trust myself and trust my instincts. They gave me the tools to reject my faith. They taught me to question and think for myself and to believe in my instincts to such an extent that I just said, 'This is a wonderful fairy tale they have going here, but it's not for me.' -- George Carlin, in the _New York Times_ 20 August 1995, pg. 17. he attended Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, but left during his sophomore year in 1952 and never went back to school. Before that he attended a catholic grammar school, Corpus Christi, which he called "an experimental school." %% I develop for [GNU/]Linux for a living, I used to develop for DOS. Going from DOS to [GNU/]Linux is like trading a glider for an F117. -- Lawrence Foard %% I dislike companies that have a we-are-the-high-priests-of-hardware-so-you'll-like-what-we-give-you attitude. I like commodity markets in which iron-and-silicon hawkers know that they exist to provide fast toys for software types like me to play with . . . -- Eric Stevens Raymond %% I distrust those people who know so well what god wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. -- Susan B. Anthony %% I do not 'work'. I have people who pay me to do my hobbies in a timely fashion. -- unknown %% I do not believe in god. My mind finds no grounds on which to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre of an almighty indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality, which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man's redeeming power; in man's remolding energy; in man's approaching triumph, through knowledge, love and work. -- Annie Besant (1847-1933) %% 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 %% I do not believe in the god of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. -- Albert Einstein, Personal memoir of William Miller, editor, Life, May 2, 1955 %% I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States. -- Thomas Alva Edison, "Do We Live Again?" %% I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. -- Isaac Asimov %% I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use. -- Galileo Galilei %% I do not find in orthodox christianity one redeeming feature. -- Thomas Jefferson %% I do not know what takes place in the invisible world called the brain, inhabited by the invisible something we call the mind. All that takes place there is invisible and soundless. This mind, hidden in this brain, masked by flesh, remains forever unseen, and the only evidence we can possibly have as to what occurs in that world, we obtain from the actions of the man, of the woman. By these actions we judge of the character, of the soul. So I make up my mind as to whether a man is good or bad, not by his theories, but by his actions. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Reply to Rev. J.M. King & Rev. Thomas Dixon, printed in the Evening Telegraph, regarding their response to his "Christmas Sermon" in the Evening Telegram, December 19, 1891 %% I do not patronize poor, ill educated, or disenfranchised people by exempting them from the same critical examination I feel free to direct toward the rest of society, however much I might champion the same minority or disadvantaged group in the forums of that society. -- James Moffitt %% I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy. -- Thomas Henry Huxley %% 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, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. -- Isaac Asimov %% 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 Carnegie (1835-1919) %% I don't know where Bin Laden is, and I don't care. -- George W. Bush, March 2002 %% I don't know whether god exists or not, but it makes no difference to me. It's not like he's passing out free money or anything. -- Townsperson in Estard, Dragon Warrior VII %% I don't know whether this world has a meaning which transcends it. But I do know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch - what resists me - that is what I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity, and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition? -- Albert Camus (1913-1960), "The Myth of Sisyphus" %% I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be. -- Abraham Lincoln %% I don't know why other people like it. I like it because computer processes that do stupid, self-destructive things in contravention of my direct instructions are a familiar concept from my job as a [Microsoft] Windows programmer. -- Rupert from http://slashdot.org on an article on the Sims %% I don't know why people ever, ever try to stop nerds from doing things. It's really the most incredible waste of time. -- Tycho of "Penny Arcade" %% I don't say anything stupid enough to get quoted. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% I don't think any of us can really predict exactly how copyright will work, but I do think that any model which fundamentally prevents people getting something they want is going to fail. We shouldn't be trying to prevent copying, just trying to make sure that the creator of the copyright gets something for his or her work when it happens. -- Douglas Adams, on an interview on http://slashdot.org %% I don't think government has the proper role in forcing a woman to have a child or forcing a woman not to have a child. And we've seen that around the world. This is something that should be privately decided with the family, woman, all the other private factors of it, but we should work toward preventing the necessity of abortion. -- Ralph Nader, Interview on ‘Meet the Press' May 7, 2000 %% I don't wanna shave my pants, don't wanna shave my pants! -- random Kurt Ferreira music (random Vandals song) %% I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind. -- George Bernard Shaw %% I fear nothing. I believe nothing. I am free. -- Nikos Kazantzakis %% I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. -- Pearl S. Buck %% I figure that if god actually does exist, he's big enough to understand an honest difference of opinion. -- Isaac Asimov %% I figure we've got to bash Bush for as long as the right-wingers bashed Clinton. As they haven't stopped yet, I can't really give you an estimate. The only thing Obama is fucking over is us liberals, who thought we were voting for one of us. -- comment by spun on http://slashdot.org %% I find it interesting to consider that other languages' feature sets have tended more towards the Lispy as time has gone on. -- Karl K. %% I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment. -- Gautama Buddha %% I go on working for the same reason a hen goes on laying eggs. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% I gradually came to disbelieve in christianity as a divine revelation . . . Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. -- Charles Darwin %% I had resources so I was able to get help . . . To all you 'born again' christians out there, I recommend some lithium; it helps. -- Larry Flynt on his conversion experience, on the Larry King Show, 1/10/97 %% I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. -- Dwight David Eisenhower %% I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. -- Abraham Lincoln %% I have always noticed that the people who have the smallest souls make the most fuss about getting them saved. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% I have as much authority as the pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it. -- George Carlin, "Brain Droppings" %% I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. -- Umberto Eco %% I have concluded, there is no war, in the history of man, that could not have been avoided by 15 minutes of honest diplomacy. -- Andrew Mutton %% I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were _really_ mad, or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that god is a cosmic hoaxer who has created that whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading mankind? -- Arthur C. Clarke, June 5, 1998, in the essay "Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids," pp 1532-3 %% I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them are trash. -- Sigmund Freud %% I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law. -- Aristotle %% I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman catholic nun. What chance has she? -- Richard Dawkins, "Viruses of the Mind" %% I have kindness and candor enough to say that Calvin and Edwards were both insane. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Why I Am An Agnostic", 1896 %% I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "A Wooden god" letter to the Chicago Times, March 27, 1890 %% I have never felt more free than when I hopped on a Shinkansen with little more than 30 minutes' notice, and traveled all the way across Japan in less than four hours -- all while reading a book. I have never felt less free than when paying for an auto loan, auto insurance, registration, maintenance and gasoline, just to make life in my home city possible. Latent taxation, poor public transportation and a national dependence on black goop sucked from beneath some of the most US-hostile countries on earth: you have a funny definition of freedom. -- Tim (686) on http://slashdot.org on transportation %% I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal god. -- Thomas Alva Edison, "Columbian Magazine" %% I have no confidence in any religion that can be demonstrated only to children. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Political interview %% I have no faith, very little hope, and as much charity as I can afford. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, in Cardiff, "What Great men think of Religion" %% I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men. -- Ataturk, quoted in "Andrew Mango's Biography of Ataturk" %% I have not the slightest confidence in 'spiritual manifestations.' -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% I have noticed all my life that many people think they have religion when they are troubled with dyspepsia. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child", 1877 %% I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out. -- Denis Diderot %% I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. -- Thomas Jefferson %% I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal god is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being. -- Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949, from article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997 %% I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt %% 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, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% I haven't lost my mind -- it's backed up on tape somewhere. %% I haven't lost my mind; I know exactly where I left it. %% I haven't rejected god, I've never met him. -- Trevor Hick on alt.atheism %% I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of this wisdom and honesty nevertheless? -- "Civil Disobedience", Henry David Thoreau %% I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing . . . -- Thomas Jefferson %% I honestly believe that the doctrine of hell was born in the glittering eyes of snakes that run in frightful coils watching for their prey. I believe it was born with the yelping, howling, growling and snarling of wild beasts . . . I despise it with every drop of my blood. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child" 1877 %% I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. -- Thomas Jefferson %% I know it all. I just can't remember it all at once. %% 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 know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you. -- "The Matrix", Neo %% I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes. -- Douglas MacArthur %% I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower %% I like your christ, I do not like your christians, Your christians are so unlike your christ. -- Mahatma Gandhi %% I lived smack in the middle of the DC Sniper. If you think I spent those days strolling down Wisconsin Avenue, whistling a merry tune and sniffing the flowers, blithely disregarding the danger in the Real World, then you're an ass. -- from a comment by American AC in Paris (230456) on http://slashdot.org on terrorism %% I looked into your eyes and saw, A world that does not exist. I looked into your eyes and saw, A world I wish I was in. I'll never find someone quite as touched as you, I'll never love someone quite the way that I Loved you. -- Vast, "Touched" %% I love talking about the Kennedy assassination. The reason I do is because I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated that our government could lie to us so blatantly, so obviously for so long, and we do absolutely nothing about it. I think that's interesting in what is ostensibly a democracy. Sarcasm - come on in. People say "Bill, quit talking about Kennedy man. It was a long time ago, just let it go, alright? It's a long time ago, just forget it." I'm like, alright, then don't bring up Jesus to me. -- Bill Hicks %% I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradictions to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbade myself the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as "certainly", "undoubtedly", etc. I adopted instead of them "I conceive", "I apprehend", or "I imagine" a thing to be so or so; or "so it appears to me at present". When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing him immediately some absurdity in his proposition. In answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appeared or seemed to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction. I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right. -- From the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin %% I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. -- Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87 %% I may despise what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. -- Voltaire %% I miss you more than I can bear, but we had our time together. I have to let you go. -- Cobb, "Inception" %% I must not FUD. FUD is the mind-killer. FUD is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face Microsoft's FUD. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye upon its path. Where the FUD has gone there will be nothing. Only Linux will remain. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. -- Frank Herbert, "Dune" %% I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, Letter to Charles Kingsley, 1860 %% I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell. -- Harry S. Truman %% I never let my schooling get in the way of my education. -- Mark Twain %% I never much liked [Apple] Macs. All the interesting stuff is hidden away. They made the base of the house open source, but all the rest of the stuff, the wiring, is their own stuff. I don't want that to happen with [GNU/]Linux. [Apple Mac OS X] doesn't give me the warm-and-fuzzies. I actually dislike Mach a lot. I think they made a lot of bad design choices. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds, on Apple and Mac OS X %% I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at. -- http://xkcd.com/874/ alt text %% I noticed that of all the prayers I used to offer to god, and all the prayers that I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answer at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want. Half the time I don't. Same as god 50/50. Same as the four leaf clover, the horse shoe, the rabbit's foot, and the wishing well. Same as the mojo man. Same as the voodoo lady who tells your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles. It's all the same; 50/50. So just pick your superstitions, sit back, make a wish and enjoy yourself. And for those of you that look to the bible for it's literary qualities and moral lessons; I got a couple other stories I might like to recommend for you. You might enjoy The Three Little Pigs. That's a good one. It has a nice happy ending. Then there's Little Red Riding Hood. Although it does have that one x-rated part where the Big-Bad-Wolf actually eats the grandmother. Which I didn't care for, by the way. And finally, I've always drawn a great deal of moral comfort from Humpty Dumpty. The part I liked best: . . . and all the king's horses, and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again. That's because there is no Humpty Dumpty, and there is no god. None. Not one. Never was. No god. -- George Carlin %% I object to doing things that computers can do. -- Olin Shivers %% I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programs a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature, to which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the almighty, always quote beautiful things, they always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think, too, of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old, and I reply and say, "Well, presumably the god you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful god with that action. -- David Attenborough %% I personally look forward to the day when the GOP has something to do with, you know, conservatism again. "Spend responsibly" rolls off the tounge better than "constant wanton abuse of power". Still, at least it was just violation of the basic agreement that forms the basis of our government and not, you know, a blowjob. Otherwise the nation might have to sit through another impeachment. -- seen on http://slashdot.org, 2005-12-16 %% I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy. -- Thomas Jefferson %% I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. -- Francis Bellamy (socialist), 1892 %% I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. -- Frederick Douglass, escaped slave %% I program, therefore I am. %% I read the other day an account of a meeting between John Knox and John Calvin. Imagine a dialogue between a pestilence and a famine! Imagine a conversation between a block and an ax! As I read their conversation it seemed to me as though John Knox and John Calvin were made for each other; that they fitted each other like the upper and lower jaws of a wild beast. They believed happiness was a crime; they looked upon laughter as blasphemy; and they did all they could to destroy every human feeling, and to fill the mind with the infinite gloom of predestination and eternal death. They taught the doctrine that god had a right to damn us because he made us. That is just the reason that he has not a right to damn us. There is some dust. Unconscious dust! What right has god to change that unconscious dust into a human being, when he knows that human being will sin; when he knows that human being will suffer eternal agony? Why not leave him in the unconscious dust? What right has an infinite god to add to the sum of human agony? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "What Must We Do To Be Saved", 1880 %% I realized that a psychological need for belief also resulted from childhood indoctrination, and that it had all the characteristics of addiction. -- Neal Cary, American atheists National Outreach Director %% I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. -- Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism. Article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997 %% I refuse to be in such a hurry that I squeeze the aesthetic value out of everything just to gain a few minutes of time—time which will then just be filled with more rushing and more mass-produced, soulless junk. In the drive to achieve instant gratification, we have spent a century trying to shorten the learning curve and eliminate the chance of error in every human activity. There is much good in this, but something has been lost in the process. The Galoots are the guardians of that which was almost lost: the challenge of trying to master a skill that can never be fully mastered, the creative freedom that comes from intimacy with a medium as complex as wood, the sense of self-sufficiency that comes with knowing that you can make a useful object with tools so simple that you can make the tools too, and the peaceful mediation of trying to bring eye, hand, and wood together into harmony through finesse and understanding rather than brute force. -- Quoted from Hohn (2005), The Romance with Rust, a Harper's article on tool collectors %% I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians . . . What is one more life thrown away in this sad and useless national tragedy? If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country. -- suicide protest note of American Malachi Ritscher %% I remember a time when I really thought people with important titles, important positions, and who made important decisions were people to be respected and listened to. Now it seems more and more evident the world is a global high school for super rich men with unlimited resources to fling poo at each other, and the only thing we little bitty humans can do is say . . . "Damn. It smells like shit in here." -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% I sat laughing snidely into my notebook until they showed me a PC running [GNU/]Linux . . . And did this PC choke? Did it stutter? Did it, even once, say that this program has performed an illegal operation and must be shut down? No. And this is just on the client. -- LAN Times %% I sat laughing snidely into my notebook until they showed me a PC running [GNU/]Linux. And oh! It was as though the heavens opened and god handed down a client-side OS so beautiful, so graceful, and so elegant that a million Microsoft developers couldn't have invented it even if they had a hundred years and a thousand crates of Jolt cola. -- LAN Times %% I say that religion is the belief in future life and in god. I don't believe in either. -- Clarence Darrow, interview, N.Y. Times, 19 April 1936 %% I say: kill all the advertisers. content will then come from two sources: individuals and communities who are truly passionate about their subject matter, and those with content that is actually worth paying for. I favor this for web, TV, radio - all of it. I want to just pay for my . . . content and get it free of all the time-wasting, soul-destroying, mind-manipulating, insulting, humiliating [stuff] that drips from the lobotomy scars in advertisers' foreheads. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% I see dumb people . . . they're everywhere . . . they walk around like everyone else . . . they don't even know that they're dumb. %% I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of christianity when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such blasphemous nonsense! -- Shaw, "The devil's Disciple" %% I see them on the corner Big black bible in hand Shoutin' at the people to hear the word of the lord, and it's this: "You're just a filthy sinner-man! You can't save yourself, but -- Jesus can! And then you too can be an angel with a sword -- Smite the unrighteous! Make Jesus your goal, Sell him your soul, Go throw your mind down the nearest hole." CHORUS: And the lord christ Jesus will Save you from the devil and sin, The lord Marx Lenin will Save you from the Chairman of the Board, The lord Smack Needle will Save you from the pains of life -- But who will come and save you from your lord? -- Leslie Fish, "Trinity" %% I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. -- Albert Camus %% I should say that when people talk about capitalism it's a bit of a joke. There's no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. That's right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. That's very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World. -- Noam Chomsky, Talk titled "Sovereignty and World Order" at Kansas State University, September 20, 1999 %% I simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to medieval conceptions of christianity, and which still lingers among us -- a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the whole normal evolution of society. -- Andrew D. White, author, first president of Cornell University, 1896 %% I sit surrounded by cartons of mail from people all over the planet who mourn Carl's loss. Many of them credit him with their awakenings. Some of them say that Carl's example has inspired them to work for science and reason against the forces of superstition and fundamentalism. These thoughts comfort me and lift me up out of my heartache. They allow me to feel, without resorting to the supernatural, that Carl lives. -- "Billions and Billions: Thoughts On Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium", the last book by Carl Sagan; Epilogue by his wife, Ann Druyan, February 14, 1997 %% I snicker at the neologism first for its insecure pretension - the literary equivalent of calling a garbage man a 'sanitation engineer' - and second because a 'graphic novel' is in fact the very thing it is ashamed to admit: a comic book, rather than a comic pamphlet or comic magazine. -- Daniel Raeburn, on "graphic novels" %% I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the christian-social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success. -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 6 %% I suggest a simple experiment. Everytime you hear the expression "the war on drugs," change it mentally to "the war on some drugs." -- Robert Anton Wilson %% I suspect that media elites offer virtually no analysis of the religious impulse or majoritarian religious beliefs mainly because they fear appearing impious or giving offense . . . What's striking about journalists and intellectuals today, liberal and conservative alike, is not their mythic Voltairian skepticism but their deference to belief and utter failure to criticize, much less satirize, America's romance with god. -- Wendy Kaminer, "Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety" %% I suspect that today if you asked people to justify their belief in god, the dominant reason would be scientific. 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 %% I take pessimism to a bold new level . . . like salad dressing! -- Kurt Ferreira %% I tell christians, If you had two children and one had to be bribed (heaven) and threatened (hell) to do what he was supposed to do, and the other one just did it because that's what he knew was the right thing to do, which would you consider the better person? -- Greg Irwin, President of the Humanist Association of Canada %% I think I think too much. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations. -- Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of scripture in Philosophical Controversies", which was condemned by the Inquisition %% I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: protestantism, catholicism, judaism, islam, hinduism, and buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is. -- Daniel C. Dennett, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" %% I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I mean there's only any point in believing something if it's true. -- Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams %% I thought "The Passion" was really perverse and really depraved. There's a lot of criticism against the film that it gives a bad picture of jews -- I think it gives a worse picture of christians. Holding this up as somehow emblematic of something central to our belief -- this preoccupation with both sin and blood sacrifice -- is just absolutely primitive. -- Rev. Mark Stanger, in an interview with Salon, on Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" %% I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that "It Just Works." By breaking it, you must know you're giving up the "Just Works" factor, so what's left? Rounded corners? -- "If wishes were iPhones, then beggars would call", http://web.archive.org/web/20071011001108/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/10/04/if-wishes-were-iphones %% I threw out all the bath water, and there was no baby there. -- Dan Barker, referring to the bible in a debate, 1989 %% I told the priest, don't count on any second coming. God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming. He had the balls to come, the gall to die and then forgive us. -- "Tomorrow, Wendy" Concrete Blonde %% I treasure this strange combination found in very few persons: a fierce desire for life as well as a lucid perception of the ultimate futility of the quest. -- Madeleine Gobeil %% I turned to speak to god About the world's despair; But to make bad matters worse I found god wasn't there. -- Robert Frost (1874-1963) %% I understand prayer quite well. It's a masturbatory exercise that gives catharsis to the pray-er and a placebo effect to the pray-ee, but only if the pray-ee knows he's being prayed for. -- John Hattan %% I use the word "humanist" to mean someone who believes that man is just as much a natural phenomenon as an animal or a plant; that his body, mind or soul were not supernaturally created but are products of evolution, and that he is not under the control or guidance of any supernatural being, but has to rely on himself and his own powers. -- Julian Huxley, "The Humanist Frame," 1961 %% I use to think I was Goth, but it turned out I was just really depressed. -- Ogre %% I used to be convinced that Microsoft shipped crap because they simply didn't give a flying fuck as long as the sheep kept buying their shit. Now, I'm convinced that Microsoft really does ship the best products they are capable of creating, and *that's* tragic. %% I used to get high on life but lately I've built up a resistance. %% I want no heaven for which I must give my reason; no happiness in exchange for my liberty, and no immortality that demands the surrender of my individuality. Better rot in the windowless tomb, to which there is no door but the red mouth of the pallid worm, than wear the jeweled collar of a god. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality", 1873 %% I want the answer by Wednesday or there will be blood on the walls! -- Dr. Jean-Louis Lassez, CS 221, Systems Organizations %% I want to do things like the pros do, but I don't want to have to think or put in any work aside from clicking a few buttons from time to time. The program should know what I want, and just do it. If all my conditions aren't met, I'll look elsewhere. I get bored easily, so I'll probably look elsewhere anyway. -- spot on summary of most people's approach to computers (seen on http://slashdot.org) %% I want you to know, when it comes to believing in god - I really tried. I really really tried. I tried to believe that there is a god who created each one of us in his own image and likeness, loves us very much and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize . . . something is FUCKED-UP. Something is WRONG here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is NOT good work. If this is the best god can do, I am NOT impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently run universe, this guy would have been out on his all-powerful-ass a long time ago. -- George Carlin %% I was attracted to anarchism as a young teenager, as soon as I began to think about the world beyond a pretty narrow range, and haven't seen much reason to revise those early attitudes since. I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. -- Noam Chomsky %% I was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about what god wants them to do to their fellows. -- Susan B. Anthony %% I was in the pub last night, and a guy asked me for a light for his cigarette. I suddenly realised that there was a demand here and money to be made, and so I agreed to light his cigarette for 10 pence, but I didn't actually give him a light, I sold him a license to burn his cigarette. My fire-license restricted him from giving the light to anybody else, after all, that fire was my property. He was drunk, and dismissing me as a loony, but accepted my fire (and by implication the licence which governed its use) anyway. Of course in a matter of minutes I noticed a friend of his asking him for a light and to my outrage he gave his cigarette to his friend and pirated my fire! I was furious, I started to make my way over to that side of the bar but to my added horror his friend then started to light other people's cigarettes left, right, and centre! Before long that whole side of the bar was enjoying MY fire without paying me anything. Enraged I went from person to person grabbing their cigarettes from their hands, throwing them to the ground, and stamping on them. Strangely the door staff exhibited no respect for my property rights as they threw me out the door. -- Ian Clarke in "Copyrighting fire!" %% I was over in Australia and everyone's like "Are you proud to be an American?" And I was like, "Um, I don't know, I didn't have a lot to do with it. You know, my parents fucked there, that's about all. You know, I was in the spirit realm at that time, going 'FUCK IN PARIS! FUCK IN PARIS!' but they couldn't hear me, because I didn't have a mouth. -- Bill Hicks %% I went into the British Army believing that if you want peace you must prepare for war. I believe now that if you prepare for war, you get war. -- Major-General Frederick B. Maurice %% I will bend like a reed in the wind. -- "Dune", Paul Atreides %% I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Ghosts", 1877 %% I wind up categorizing periods of my life by how rich my learning experiences were at the time. --John Carmack %% I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?' -- Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation %% I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% I would have all the professors in colleges, all the teachers in schools of every kind, including those in Sunday schools, agree that they would teach only what they know, that they would not palm off guesses as demonstrated truths. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Speech at Chicago Exposition Building, October 20, 1876 %% I would like to call your attention to . . . an evil that, if allowed to continue, will probably lead to great trouble . . . It is the accumulation of vast amounts of untaxed church property. -- Ulysses S. Grant %% I would like to convey the message that our system works. We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, or detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant, or deny him the right to counsel, or invoke any proceedings beyond those guaranteed by or contrary to the United States Constitution . . . We can deal with the threats to our national security without denying the accused fundamental constitutional protections. Despite the fact that Mr. Ressam is not an American citizen and despite the fact that he entered this country intent upon killing American citizens, he received an effective, vigorous defense, and the opportunity to have his guilt or innocence determined by a jury of 12 ordinary citizens. Most importantly, all of this occurred in the sunlight of a public trial. There were no secret proceedings, no indefinite detention, no denial of counsel. The tragedy of September 11th shook our sense of security and made us realize that we, too, are vulnerable to acts of terrorism. Unfortunately, some believe that this threat renders our Constitution obsolete. This is a Constitution for which men and women have died and continue to die and which has made us a model among nations. If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won. -- Judge John Coughenour, 2005-07-27 %% I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. -- Bertrand Russell %% I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood. -- George Carlin %% I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "What Must We Do To Be Saved", 1880 %% I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. -- Thomas Jefferson %% I would rather live with the woman I love in a world full of trouble, than to live in heaven with nobody but men. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child", 1877 %% I would rather wait for OpenMoko to become available for purchase than shell out high bucks for iPhone. Just like with any Apple product, it is like an awesome looking golden cage. I always preferred freedom to control my own digital devices than to be mostly dependent on one vendor for everything. -- "Forget iPhone, hail OpenMoko, the true revolution" article http://www.libervis.com/article/forget_iphone_hail_openmoko_the_true_revolution %% I would suggest the taxation of all property equally whether church or corporation. -- Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) %% I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner? -- Frank Zappa %% I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated Development That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you. -- Vance Petree, virginia Power %% I'd rather regret not having children than regret having them. -- Pro-Choice slogan %% I'll be okay. What choice do I have? -- Maria Elena Martinez %% I'll defend to the death your right to say that, but I never said I'd listen to it! -- Tom Galloway with apologies to Voltaire %% I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. 'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.' 'Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!' -- Bill Hicks %% I'm amazed at how many of the features of [Lisp] are just now appearing in more "modern" languages. -- Gary Klimowicz %% I'm beginning to think of tolerance and patience as frequently exploited security holes. -- kieran %% I'm completely in favor of the separation of church and state. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death. -- George Carlin %% I'm listening to The Current on CBC and they're interviewing the product manager for Google Maps about the Street View feature. The question: "Couldn't this technology be used by terrorists?" Let's go ahead and answer this oft-repeated question once and for all: of course it could. Practically any technology or information source that's useful to the general public would be useful to terrorists. Terrorists benefit every day from self-service gas stations, sliced bread, walk/don't walk signs, and pocket dictionaries. All these advances, and many more, have helped terrorists in their daily lives and in their evil plans. They also help the rest of us. There are very few technologies or infrastructure improvements that are useful to Good People that aren't also useful to Bad People. It would probably hamper the work of terrorists if we tore up the public roads, forbade the sale and transport of household cooking oil, and mandated inconsistent and illegible spelling in all print publications. It would also cause the rest of us a lot of inconvenience and harm. -- Evan Prodromou, 23 Prairial CCXV %% I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% I'm not an atheist. How can you not believe in something that doesn't exist? -- A. Whitney Brown %% I'm not in favor of the government mandating a prayer in school because our country was founded on the fact that no particular religious faith would have ascendance over or preferential treatment over any other. -- Jimmy Carter %% I'm not prejudiced, I hate everyone equally. %% I'm often asked the question, "Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments -- there are a lot of places out there, and use the word *billions*, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I'm asked, "Yeah, but what do you really think?" I say, "I just told you what I really think." "Yeah, but what's your gut feeling?" But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. -- Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87 %% I'm only happy when it rains You wanna hear about my new obsession? I'm riding high upon a deep depression I'm only happy when it rains -- Garbage, "Only Happy When it Rains" %% I'm pro-choice because I couldn't fully enjoy sex were I consumed with worry about the potential consequences. I'm pro-choice for all my friends who've had abortions and gone on to do great things, who are better women for being childless (for now). I'm pro-choice for the new moms and dads I know who were able to actively choose to become parents. I'm pro-choice for all those babies . . . born knowing they're 100 percent loved and wanted. -- Rachel Kramer Bussel, "I'm Pro-Choice and I Fuck", Village Voice, January 13, 2006 %% I'm sorry if the correct way of doing things offends you. %% I'm sorry that these starry-eyed neocons who looked at George Bush and saw a genius are disappointed that the rest of the country didn't support their vision. They were given more of a chance to prove themselves than dreamers and fools usually are --- and they failed on a grand scale. This is what the Bushites deserve and what they should expect for ram-rodding through a war without real public support and then screwing it up royally. The families of all these dead and wounded soldiers, unfortunately, didn't deserve this and neither did the poor Iraqis who didn't know they were going to be guinea pigs in a 7th grade neocon thought experiment based on cartoons and psycho-babble. Blaming the American people is an excellent political strategy, however, and I hope these conservatives keep it up. There's nothing that betrayed voters like more than to be called stupid, cowardly and traitorous. (I know I've been enjoying it for the last couple of decades.) I'm sure all those independents and moderates who now see through Bush and the Republicans are going to love it too. It really clarifies your thinking. This isn't the 1970's. They aren't going to get away with blaming the cowardly public this time. There are no hippies to hate ---- just millions of average, taxpaying, middle class Americans who know damned well when they've been lied to. And if they don't, there are many of us out here who will remind them. -- Digby, 11/30/2006 %% I'm starting to see why so many Lisp users seem so damn smug. -- Dave Fayram %% I'm successful because I'm lucky. The harder I work, the luckier I get. %% I'm telling you that the kernel is stable not because it's a kernel, but because I refuse to listen to arguments like this. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% I'm thankful I didn't believe in god, because it would have been another thing for me to conquer. -- Kim Goldman is quoted, in reference to her brother Ron Goldman's murder %% I'm up at 3:40 in the morning because i can't get back to sleep after waking up from a dream in which i was recompiling my kitten with #define DISABLE_SHARP_CLAWS and #define NO_TRACK_CAT_LITTER. -- Rob Earhart %% I've always suspected that the main point of "family values" and all of these exhortations to "think of the children" are just scare tactics to turn the world into the largest nursery in history, where you cannot even have an adult conversation, and where kids aren't even allowed to play unsupervised. Can you imagine a childhood where you have to make "play dates," where it is no longer possible to just walk anywhere? Thanks to media scaremongering, parents see the world as a frightening place with a child molestor or Satanic cult member lurking in every playground. The fact is, your kids are about a hundred times as likely to get killed by a car as they are to be kidnapped. But that doesn't sell soap. -- Thangodin (177516) on http://slashdot.org on an article on immaturity in adults %% I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to "god" are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate. -- George Carlin, "Brain Droppings" %% I've never understood how god could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith - it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe. -- Robert heinlein, Jubal Harshaw in "Stranger in a Strange Land" %% IBM Pollyanna Principle: Machines should work. People should think. %% If "he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword" holds true, then Jesus the carpenter met his end properly. After all, he was nailed to a piece of wood, wasn't he? %% If . . . we assume that there is no god, it follows that morality is even more important than if there is a deity. If god exists, his unlimited power can certainly redress imbalances in the scale of human justice. But if there is no god, then it is up to man to be as moral as he can. -- Steve Allen %% If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak. -- Phil Wayne %% If I had my life to live over, I'd try to make more mistakes next time. I would relax, I would limber up, I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I know of very few things I would take seriously. I would be crazier. I would climb more mountains, swim more rivers and watch more sunsets. I'd travel and see. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones. You see, I am one of those people who lives prophylactically and sensibly and sanely, hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I have had my moments and, if I had it to do over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead each day. I have been one of those people who never go anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a gargle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would go places and do things and travel lighter than I have. If I had my life to live over, I would start bare-footed earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would play hooky more. I probably wouldn't make such good grades, but I'd learn more. I would ride on more merry-go-rounds. I'd pick more daisies. %% If I have trouble installing [GNU/]Linux, something is wrong. Very wrong. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% If I should become an old lady, I'll consider buying an iPad. -- see on http://slashdot.org %% If I thought the jews killed god, I'd worship the jews. -- Bill Hicks %% If I were to mock religious belief as childish, if I were to suggest that worshiping a supernatural deity, convinced that it cares about your welfare, is like worrying about monsters in the closet who find you tasty enough to eat, if I were to describe god as our creation . . . I'd violate the norms of civility and religious correctness, I'd be excoriated as an example of the cynical, liberal elite responsible for America's moral decline. I'd be pitied for my spiritual blindness; some people would try to enlighten and convert me. I'd receive hate mail. Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles. But, while pedophilia may at least be characterized as a disease, atheism is a choice, a willful rejection of beliefs to which vast majorities of people cling. -- Wendy Kaminer, "The Last Taboo", in The New Republic (Oct. 14, 1996) %% If Jesus came back today, and saw what was going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up. -- Max Von Sydow's character in "Hannah and her Sisters" %% If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses -- Lenny Bruce %% If Jesus loves me, why doesn't he ever send me flowers? %% If a Martian were asked to pick the most efficient and humane economic systems on earth, it would certainly not choose the countries which rely most on markets. The United States is a stagnant economy in which real wages have been constant for more than a decade and the real income of the bottom 40 percent of the population declined. It is an inhumane society in which 11.5 percent of the population, some 32 million people, including 20 percent of all children, live in absolute poverty. It is the oldest democracy on earth but also one with the lowest voting rates among democracies and the highest per capita prison population in the world. The fastest developing countries in the world today are among those where the state pursues active industrial and trade policies; the few countries in the world in which almost no one is poor today are those in which the state has been engaged in massive social welfare and labor market policies. -- Adam Przeworski %% If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, then a liberal is a conservative who's just been arrested. %% If a maintenance programmer can't quote entire Monty Python movies from memory, he or she has no business being a programmer. -- from "How to Write Unmaintainable Code", https://www.mindprod.com/jgloss/unmainnaming.html %% If a man would follow, to-day, the teachings of the Old testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Third Interview on Rev. Talmadge, 1882 %% If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be. -- Thomas Jefferson %% If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that, too. -- W. Somerset Maugham %% If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it? -- Mel, a Real Programmer %% If a system is administered wisely, its users will be content. They enjoy hacking their code and don't waste time implementing labor-saving shell scripts. Since they dearly love their accounts, they aren't interested in other machines. There may be telnet, rlogin, and ftp, but these don't access any hosts. There may be an arsenal of cracks and malware, but nobody ever uses them. People enjoy reading their mail, take pleasure in being with their newsgroups, spend weekends working at their terminals, delight in the doings at the site. And even though the next system is so close that users can hear its key clicks and biff beeps, they are content to die of old age without ever having gone to see it. %% If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them. If slaves are freed, man must free them. If new truths are discovered, man must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are protected and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of man. The grand victories of the future must be won by man, and by man alone. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. -- "On Liberty", John Stuart Mill %% If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors, but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the difference? Even bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar - guided whaling vessels *work*! The achievements of theologians don't do anything, don't affect anything, don't mean anything. What makes anyone think that "theology" is a subject at all? -- Richard Dawkins, "The Emptiness of Theology", Op-Ed article in Free Inquiry, Spring 1998 %% If all the historic books of the bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost . . . I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of god, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Why Am I An agnostic?", 1889 %% If an average person on the subway turns to you, like an ancient mariner, and starts telling you her tale, you turn away or nod and hope she stops, not just because you fear she might be crazy. If she tells her tale on camera, you might listen. Watching strangers on television , even responding to them from a studio audience, we're disengaged -- voyeurs collaborating with exhibitionists in rituals of sham community. Never have so many known so much about people for whom they cared so little. -- Wendy Kaminer commenting on testimonial television in "I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional". %% If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm. -- Marcus Aurelius %% If assholes were redeemed by having children, there would be way fewer Britneys, Courtneys and Logans in our schools, no oversized SUVs idling in the no-parking zones outside, and no parents demanding "Intelligent Design" be taught in science class. -- The Filthy Critic, in a review of "Four Christmases" %% If atheism is a religion, then health is a disease! -- Clark Adams %% If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, Jolt Cola would be a Fortune-500 company. If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, you'd be able to buy a nice little colonial split-level at Babbages for $34.95. If programmers wrote programs the way builders build buildings, we'd still be using autocoder and running compile decks. -- Peter da Silva and Karl Lehenbauer, a different perspective %% If christ, in fact, said "I came not to bring peace but a sword," it is the only prophecy in the new testament that has been literally fulfilled. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why" 1881 %% If christianity was morality, Socrates would be the saviour. -- William Blake %% If churches want to play the game of politics, let them pay admission like everyone else. -- George Carlin %% If creativity is the field, copyright is the fence. -- John Oswald %% If drugs are so dangerous and so destructive, why do they need to chemically analyze your urine and hair for trace amounts to determine if you use them? -- Unknown %% If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced Patriots to prevent its ruin. -- Samuel Adams %% If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing. -- Bertrand Arthur William Russell %% If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. -- Voltaire, "Epitres, XCVI" %% If god dislikes gays so much, how come he picked Michaelangelo, a known homosexual, to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling while assigning Anita to go on TV and push orange juice? -- Greg R. Broderick %% If god is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, god does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose. -- Mikhail Bakunin, "God and the State", 1874 %% If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people? %% If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious. -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% If it stood alone it would be almost sufficient to plead as justification for heresy the approach towards equality and liberty for the utterance of all opinions achieved because of growing unbelief. -- Charles Bradlaugh, "Humanity's Gain from Unbelief," 1889 %% If judged only by the results that challenge the laws of probabilities, then the power of prayer is nil. -- Judith Hayes, U.S. freethinker, author %% If members of the early christian church ever came into contact with any christian living today, each side would, no doubt, condemn the other as heretical. -- J. S. Burke, "Why Religion Persists" %% If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. %% If men were equally at risk from this condition -- if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains -- then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% If one inquires why the American tradition is so strong against any connection of state and church, why it dreads even the rudiments of religious teaching in state-maintained schools, the immediate and superficial answer is not far to seek . . . The cause lay largely in the diversity and vitality of the various denominations, each fairly sure that, with a fair field and no favor, it could make its own way; and each animated by a jealous fear that, if any connection of state and church were permitted, some rival denomination would get an unfair advantage. -- John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher, from "Democracy in the Schools", 1908 %% If only christians go to heaven and all others go to hell, it seems to me that there will be a thousand times more misery in the next world than in this. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% If only more christians read their bibles there'd be less christians. -- Derek W. Clayton %% If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. -- Albert Einstein %% If priests had not been fond of mutton, lambs never would have been sacrificed to god. Nothing was ever carried to the temple that the priest could not use, and it always happened that god wanted what his agents liked. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "A Christmas Sermon" printed in Evening Telegraph, Dec. 19, 1891 %% If reason be a gift of heaven, and we can say as much of faith, heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind of Gresham's Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the human future. -- Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87 %% If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom. -- Robert Frost %% If soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army. -- Frederick the Great %% If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of humankind. -- Charles Bradlaugh, speech in London, September 25, 1881, from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief %% If that story [creation] was necessary to keep me out of hell and put me in heaven -- necessary for my life -- I wouldn't believe it because I couldn't believe it. -- Clarence Darrow %% If the account given in genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? he was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% If the answers to prayer are merely what god wills all along, then why pray? -- Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to atheist" %% If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect, they could make a world shine. -- Michael Jay Tucker %% If the bible proves that god exists then comic books prove the existence of Superman. -- Seen on the #atheism IRC %% If the book [the bible] and my brain are both the work of the same infinite god, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why", 1881 %% If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the onrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% If the future navigation system [for interactive networked services on the NII] looks like something from Microsoft, it will never work. -- Chairman of Walt Disney Television & Telecommunications %% If the government doesn't trust the people, why doesn't it dissolve them and elect a new people? %% If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not to me. -- Larry Flynt %% If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them. -- Baron d'Holbach, "Systeme de la Nature," p. 49 %% If the theists all shut up, the gods would be speechless. -- Robert Curry, on HolySmoke %% If then the question is put to me, would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, Reply to Bishop Wilberforce, who asked if he was descended form an ape on his mother's side or his father's side. %% If there is a god who has allowed the children to be oppressed in this world he certainly needs another life to reform the blunders he made in this. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% If there is a god who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender, it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child", 1877 %% If there is a god, atheism must strike him as less of an insult than religion. -- Edmond and Jules de Goncourt %% If there is a god, it is reasonably certain that he made the world, but it is by no means certain that he is the author of the bible. Why then should we not place greater confidence in Nature than in a book? And even if this god made not only the world but the book besides, it does not follow that the book is the best part of creation, and the only part that we will be eternally punished for denying. It seems to me that it is quite as important to know something of the solar system, something of the physical history of this globe, as it is to know the adventures of Jonah or the diet of Ezekiel. For my part, I would infinitely prefer to know all the results of scientific investigation, than to be inspired as Moses was. Supposing the bible to be true; why is it any worse or more wicked for Freethinkers to deny it, than for priests to deny the doctrine of evolution, or the dynamic theory of heat? Why should we be damned for laughing at Samson and his foxes, while others, holding the Nebular Hypothesis in utter contempt, go straight to heaven? It seems to me that a belief in the great truths of science are fully as essential to salvation, as the creed of any church. We are taught that a man may be perfectly acceptable to god even if he denies the rotundity of the earth, the Copernican system, the three laws of Kepler, the indestructibility of matter and the attraction of gravitation. And we are also taught that a man may be right upon all these questions, and yet, for failing to believe in the "scheme of salvation," be eternally lost. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses", 1879 %% If there is a god, there should be no slaves. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child", 1877 %% If there is a hell with fire and brimstone, one must conclude that it was constructed solely for the special delectation of god, that he enjoys watching human beings (or is it their souls?) fry. -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. -- Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus" %% If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. -- Robert H. Jackson, Supreme Court opinion (West virginia State Board of Education v Barnette, 319 U.S. 624{1943}) %% If there is only one creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is he playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? . . . Is he maneuvering to maximize David Attenborough's television ratings? -- Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden" %% If there's something people still won't do, it seems as if society just has to make do without. That's what happened with domestic servants. For millennia that was the canonical example of a job "someone had to do." And yet in the mid twentieth century servants practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just had to do without. -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% If they have access to OUR jobs, then give me access to THEIR cost of living. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% If thinking freely for yourself is a sure ticket to hell, then the conversations in heaven must be awfully boring. -- San Francisco's infamous Dr. Weirde %% If this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also his work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards he would to a certain extent be passing judgment on himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to him? -- Albert Einstein, "Out of My Later Years" %% If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers . . . Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. -- Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925 %% If we admit that some infinite being has controlled the destinies of persons and peoples, history becomes a most cruel and bloody farce. Age after age, the strong have trampled upon the weak; the crafty and heartless have ensnared and enslaved the simple and innocent, and nowhere, in all the annals of mankind, has any god succored the oppressed. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction. -- Judith Hayes %% If we are immortal, it is a fact of nature, and that fact does not depend on bibles, on christs, priest, or creeds. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force. -- Auberon Herbert %% If we concede to the state power and wisdom to single out 'duly constituted religious' bodies as exclusive alternatives for compulsory secular instruction, it would be logical to also uphold the power and wisdom to choose the true faith among those 'duly constituted.' We start down a rough road when we begin to mix compulsory public education with compulsory godliness. -- Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, dissenting opinion in Zorach v. Clauson (343 US 306 -- 1952) %% If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all. -- Noam Chomsky %% If we don't end war, war will end us. -- H. G. Wells %% If we encounter in a personality fear of divine punishment as the sole sanction for right doing, we can be sure we are dealing with a childish conscience, with a case of arrested development. -- Gordon W. Allport, "Becoming" %% If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men. -- Baron d'Holbach, "Systeme de la Nature" (1770) %% If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make believe. -- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop" %% If we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom. -- Samuel Adams %% If we take in hand any volume -- of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, -- let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. -- David Hume, "An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding" %% If we're going to end welfare, the rich should be the first to lose it. -- Mac Morgan %% If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves. -- Mark Twain %% If you are too busy to read, then you are too busy. %% If you behave as if the meaning of our life consisted in being able to work so many hours a day, you rake away from all sick people the right to live and the justification for their existence. -- Viktor Frankl, M.D., Ph.D. %% If you can't open it, you don't own it. -- "Make" magazine %% If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child? -- Pro-Choice slogan %% If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think. %% If you could reason with religious people there wouldn't be any religious people. -- Hugh Laurie %% If you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, then go home and burn all your records, all your tapes, and all your CDs because every one of those artists who have made brilliant music and enhanced your lives? RrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrEAL fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so fucking high, they let Ringo sing a few songs. -- Bill Hicks %% If you don't like obscenity, you don't like the truth. If you don't like the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. -- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried %% If you don't strike oil in twenty minutes, stop boring. -- Andrew Carnegie, on public speaking %% If you ever want to have a lot of fun, I recommend that you go off and program an embedded system. The salient characteristic of an embedded system is that it cannot be allowed to get into a state from which only direct intervention will suffice to remove it. An embedded system can't permanently trust anything it hears from the outside world. It must sniff around, adapt, consider, sniff around, and adapt again. I'm not talking about ordinary modular programming carefulness here. No. Programming an embedded system calls for undiluted raging maniacal paranoia. For example, our Ethernet front ends need to know what network number they are on so that they can address and route PUPs properly. How do you find out what your network number is? Easy, you ask a gateway. Gateways are required by definition to know their correct network numbers. Once you've got your network number, you start using it and before you can blink you've got it wired into fifteen different sockets spread all over creation. Now what happens when the panic-stricken operator realizes he was running the wrong version of the gateway which was giving out the wrong network number? Never supposed to happen. Tough. Supposing that your software discovers that the gateway is now giving out a different network number than before, what's it supposed to do about it? This is not discussed in the protocol document. Never supposed to happen. Tough. I think you get my drift. %% If you find the right job, you never work a day in your life. %% If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence. -- Richard Dawkins %% If you have someone that loves "all of God's creatures" then you should throw them in pond filled with mosquitoes and see how long it takes them to become a killing machine. Not very long I'd wager. In fact, mosquitoes are pretty good proof that there is no god. Why would a being of infinite good unleash such a horrible plague upon man? -- eldavojohn (898314) in a comment on http://slashdot.org on mosquitos %% If you laid all of our laws end to end, there would be no end. -- Mark Twain %% If you love god, burn a church. -- Jello Biafra %% If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. -- Samuel Adams %% If you permit yourself to read meanings into (rather than drawing meanings out of) the evidence, you can draw any conclusion you like. -- Michael Keith, "The Bar-Code Beast", The Skeptical Enquirer Vol 12 No 4 p 416 %% If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" %% If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers. -- Steve Allen, quoted in "2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt", by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996 %% If you pray hard enough, you can make water run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course! -- Robert A. Heinlein, "Expanded Universe" %% If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything. -- Mark Twain %% If you think I've given up on you you're crazy And if you think I don't love you well then you're just wrong In time you just might take to feeling better Time is the beauty, the road being long -- Blues Traveler, "Just Wait" %% If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school. -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% If you treat people right they will treat you right -- 90% of the time. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt %% If you truly turned yourself over to competent psychological help, they can lead you from your misguided attempts to butt into other people's lives using Jesus as your excuse for such rude behavior. -- James Doemer %% If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are. -- Zen Proverb %% If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die, here it is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know everyone is going to love, and that's what they're going to build, no matter what. -- Paul Graham, "The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn" %% If you want one year of prosperity, plant corn If you want ten years of prosperity, plant trees If you want one hundred years of prosperity, educate people -- Chinese Proverb %% If you want something to be private, then don't post it on the Internet. %% If you want the best things to happen in corporate life you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person. You don't get innovation as a democratic process. You almost get it as an anti-democratic process. Certainly you get it as an antithetical process, so you have to have an environment where the body of people are really amenable to change and can deal with the conflicts that arise out of change an innovation. -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 %% If you want to *reason* about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason- responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a *way of getting to the truth*, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. -- Daniel C. Dennett "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" %% If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other. -- Carl Schurz %% If you want to buy a computer to run Linux on, don't buy a Mac. -- Matthew Garrett, http://mjg59.livejournal.com/136710.html %% If you want to go faster, it's a problem to have your work tangled together with a large number of other people's. In a large group, your performance is not separately measurable -- and the rest of the group slows you down. -- Paul Graham, "How to Make Wealth" %% If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument. -- "Perl style guide", perlstyle(1) %% If you're happy, you're successful. %% If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem. -- Richard Bach, "Illusions" %% If your law requires a police state to enforce, your law is wrong. -- signature of Omnifarious on http://slashdot.org/ %% If your product seems finished, there are two possible explanations: (a) it is finished, or (b) you lack imagination. Experience suggests (b) is a thousand times more likely. -- Paul Graham, "The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn" %% Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Ignorance is the soil of the supernatural. The foundation of christianity has crumbled, has disappeared, and the entire fabric must fall. The natural is true. The miraculous is false. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Why Am I An agnostic?" Part 2, North American Review, March, 1890 %% Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein %% Imagine encouraging [a child] to participate in such 'twisted' rituals and worshiping of tortuous crucifixes and such like this from birth. No wonder we have so many hateful and sadistic people in our society. -- Brent Allsop 10-27-95 (news:alt.atheism) %% Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly and warn the people of Canada . . . -- Isaac Asimov, Canadian atheists Newsletter, 1994 %% Immorality, perversion, infidelity, cannibalism, etc., are unassailable by church and civic league if you dress them up in the togas and talliths of the Good Book. -- Ben Hecht (1893-1964), U.S. journalist, author, screenwriter. "A Child of the Century," bk. 5, "Sex in Hollywood" (1954), commenting on biblical epics solving "the fornication problem" in Hollywood %% In 1776 our fathers endeavored to retire the gods from politics. They declared that "all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." This was a contradiction of the then political ideas of the world; it was, as many believed, an act of pure blasphemy -- a renunciation of the deity . . . It was a notice to all churches and priests that thereafter mankind would govern and protect themselves. Politically it tore down every altar and denied the authority of every "sacred book" and appealed from the providence of god to the providence of man. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "God in the Constitution", originally published in _The Arena_ in Boston in January 1890. Taken from _The New Dresden Edition of the Works of Ingersoll_ New York City: The Ingersoll Publishers, Inc., 1900 %% In Nature there are neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. -- Hunter S. Thompson %% In a free society, diversity is not disorder. Debate is not strife. And dissent is not revolution. -- George W. Bush, 22 Feb 2002, Qinghua University, Beijing %% In a pluralistic society, no group, no matter how numerous or powerful, has a right to prescribe a set of beliefs or a code of ethics for all. -- Bishop James Armstrong, United Methodist Church, Address, Phoenix, Arizona February 4, 1975, from Menendez and Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom %% In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding. -- Albert Ellis, Ph.D %% In a society where women entered sexual intercourse willingly, where adequate contraception was a genuine social priority, there would be no 'abortion issue'. -- Adrienne Rich, feminist poet and author and advocate of legal abortion, in Of Woman Born, 1976 %% In all ages hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality", 1873 %% In an early class, one of the students asked me if I believed in god. I replied, 'I don't think so.' And then proceeded to wail on the theme, using material from this column of some weeks ago, in which I observed the perpetuation of insanity on this planet through the mediums of arabs-vs-jews, catholics-vs-protestants, southern baptists-vs-everyone. I said I felt if 'god created man in his *own* image, in the image of god created he them,' (Genesis 2:27, King James's italics, not mine) then *we* were god. And when Man (*my* cap, not King James's) in his most creative, his most loving, his most gentle and most human, then he is most god-like. The student said he would pray for my immortal soul. He also asked for my address, so he could send me some literature on the subject of god. I thanked him politely and told him I'd gotten all the literature I could handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas. -- Harlan Ellison, from "The Glass Teat", Article #29 %% In another area of human rights, many christian clergymen advocated slavery. Historian Larry hise notes in his book 'Pro-Slavery' that ministers 'wrote almost half of all defenses of slavery published in America.' he lists 275 men of the cloth who used the bible to prove that white people were entitled to own black people as work animals. -- James A. Haught, 'Holy Horrors', 1990 %% In arguing that current theories of brain function cast suspicion on ESP, psychokinesis, reincarnation, and so on, I am frequently challenged with the most popular of all neuro-mythologies -- the notion that we ordinarily use only 10 percent of our brains . . . This "cerebral spare tire" concept continues to nourish the clientele of pop psychologists" and their many recycling self-improvement schemes. As a metaphor for the fact that few of us fully exploit our talents, who could deny it? As a refuge for occultists seeking a neural basis of the miraculous, it leaves much to be desired. -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Consciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena", The Skeptical Enquirer, Vol. XII, No. 2, pg. 171 %% In biblical terms, my biggest sin is answering the fool. I debate creationists, evangelical 'scholars', and assorted theists who declare that _their_ version of the ontological argument works. -- J. S. Burke, Usenet post %% In charity there is no excess. -- Francis Bacon %% In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our . . . nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science. -- Richard Dawkins %% In christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% In coming months, politicians will flail about looking for freedoms to eliminate to 'curb the terrorist threat'. We must remember throughout that you cannot preserve freedom by eliminating it. -- Metzger, Wasabi Systems, Sept 2001 %% In dwelling, be close to the land. In meditation, delve deep into the heart. In dealing with others, be gentle and kind. In speech, be true. In work, be competent. In action, be careful of your timing. -- Lao Tsu %% In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. -- Thomas Jefferson %% In every single instance where churchmen placed themselves squarely athwart the path of science, as regards a particular knotty question, the religious forces were eventually defeated for the very sound reason that they were wrong. -- Steve Allen, "Steve Allen On the bible, Religion and Morality," 1990 %% In fact they recapitulate the story of christianity word for word, like the inevitable course of some unsightly disease: criminal ignorance, brutish stupidity, self-righteous bigotry, paranoid fear of outsiders. For the cultist, psychiatrists, the media, Government agencies have become satan incarnate. Like the fundamental christians, they have to be _right_. -- William S. Burroughs %% In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. -- Jean Paul Sartre %% In fact, the onus of proof would be on those who claim prayer works, particularly because it appears to be based on non-empirical claims, and so the proper default scientific position on prayer should be negative until proven. The reason it tends to be a strong negative is that so many religious claims have fallen through that the entire domain has a very poor reputation. Religious proofs predate modern science itself, and go all the way back to the early church. Their poor reputation is not a recent acquisition. What you are doing with this argument is sneaking the line of reasonableness closer to the religious side, to give the religious argument the edge and make the counter-argument look less reasonable. I know because I used to do it; I used to think that atheism was itself a positive assertion. If the correct scientific position really were neutral, then assuming a position of skepticism before proof would be dogmatic. But that's not how it works. -- Thangodin (177516) on http://slashdot.org %% In good speaking, should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is to speak? -- Plato %% In most countries selling harmful things like drugs is punishable. Then how come people can sell Microsoft software and go unpunished? -- hasku@rost.abo.fi, Hasse Skrifvars %% In my experience, those who loudest scream "Grow up!" are the ones who most need to do it. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% In my opinion, this rapid mastery of the production of software is to be explained not by the special ability of the Open Source programmers but by the fact that in our community the production of, say, web servers, operating systems, and applications is considered not the private affair of profit-making corporations, but something done for the community. In the business world the programmers produce to get wages, and are not concerned about anything else. With us programming is regarded as a public matter, a community matter, it is regarded as a matter of honor. -- Adapted from an interview with Joseph Stalin, communist %% In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why", 1881 %% In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice. %% In order to see christianity, one must forget almost all christians. -- Henri F. Amiel %% In order to succeed in any enterprise, one must be persistent and patient. Even if one has to run some risks, one must be brave and strong enough to meet and overcome vexing challenges to maintain a successful business in the long run. I cannot help saying that Americans lack this necessary challenging spirit today. -- Hajime Karatsu %% In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when they'd got the MacOS up and running -- probably even before they'd gotten it up and running -- was to re-create the Unix interface, so that they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time, I simply couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster even came out onto the market. -- "In the Beginning was the Command Line", Neal Stephenson %% In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. -- Galileo Galilei %% In respect to lock-making, there can scarcely be such a thing as dishonesty of intention: the inventor produces a lock which he honestly thinks will possess such and such qualities; and he declares his belief to the world. If others differ from him in opinion concerning those qualities, it is open to them to say so; and the discussion, truthfully conducted, must lead to public advantage: the discussion stimulates curiosity, and curiosity stimulates invention. Nothing but a partial and limited view of the question could lead to the opinion that harm can result: if there be harm, it will be much more than counterbalanced by good. -- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, published around 1850. %% In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they 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, 1987 CSICOP keynote address %% In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. -- Stephen J. Gould %% In short, the romantic idea that American soldiers fought and died to allow dissidents room to operate and breathe really doesn't hold up. -- "Red State Son: Freedom Granted, Freedom Won", http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2006/01/freedom-granted-freedom-won.html %% In some cases non-violence requires more militancy than violence. -- Cesar Chavez %% In some sects members are told to commit violent acts because the only way they can hasten redemption or achieve salvation is to eliminate the nonbelievers. -- Dr. Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University, Scotland %% In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in god and in personal immortality. -- Clarence Darrow, The Sign, May 1938 %% In the best case these two suggestions get combined: you tell visitors what your site is about by showing them. One of the standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is "show, don't tell." Don't say that a character's angry; have him grind his teeth, or break his pencil in half. Nothing will explain what your site does so well as using it. -- Paul Graham, "The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn" %% In the broad and final sense all institutions are educational in the sense that they operate to form the attitudes, dispositions, abilities and disabilities that constitute a concrete personality . . . Whether this educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non- democratic way becomes, therefore, a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself but for its final effect upon all the interests and activities of a society that is committed to the democratic way of life. -- John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher %% In the case of an unwanted pregnancy, the existential choice for a woman is not abortion vs. no abortion, but, as [Garrett Hardin] has pointed out, abortion vs. compulsory childbearing. If others can force her to be a mother . . . then she is coerced into putting her body at the disposal of the fetus as if she were an unclaimed natural resource or a chattel slave . . . Thus, the woman's most fundamental right of choice, the right to control her own body and happiness, is being abrogated. -- Sharon Presley and Robert Cooke , The Right to Abortion: A Libertarian Defense, Association of Libertarian Feminists %% In the church of a small town in the state of S. Paulo, Brazil, the statue of virgin Mary started to weep regularly. The news spread like fire and soon pilgrims from everywhere crowded the place, hoping for miracles. Researchers from the nearby university of Campinas took samples of the tears and compared them to the available water sources in the neighborhood. They turned out to have the same chemical composition as the water from a drawn well behind the church. Then the researchers sealed the statue inside a glass dome and the tears stopped for many days. When the weeping began anew, they noticed the seal had been broken. Their report stated clearly that the so-called miracle was a fraud, possibly to attract pilgrims to the region. The media asked a woman what she thought of the report and she replied: "I don't care for reports. The virgin wept. It's my faith that counts". -- Leo Fernandes %% In the course of its learning and assimilating the culture in which it will grow up, the child's nervous system gets programmed in a particular way with respect to the mysterious relation of symbols and things which will create its later life. When this programming reaches a certain point, the behavior of the child becomes patterned in ways that are difficult ever to change. Other ways of behaving not parallel to these patterns are rejected, sometimes subtly, subconsciously, at other times deliberately, violently. The child's total reaction, physiological as well as linguistic, to the world in which he grows up may be independently flexible or it may be as submissively rigid as it usually is for those molded in an orthodox, totalitarian religion. -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% In the face of entropy and nothingness, you kind of have to pretend it's not there if you want to keep writing good code. -- Karl Lehenbauer %% In the final analysis all theology, whether christian or otherwise, is a marvelous exercise in logic based on premises that are no more verifiable -- or reasonable -- than astrology, palmistry, or belief in the Easter Bunny. Theology pretends to search for truth, but no method could lead a person farther away from the truth than that intellectual charade. The purpose of theology is first and foremost to perpetuate the religious status quo. Religion, in turn, seeks to maintain the social stability necessary for its own preservation. -- Joseph L. Daleiden, "The Final Superstition: A Critical Evaluation of Judeo-christian Legacy", p.386 %% In the history of our poor world, no horror has been omitted, no infamy has been left undone by the believers in ghosts, -- by the worshipers of these fleshless phantoms. And yet these shadows were born of cowardice and malignity. They were painted by the pencil of fear upon the canvas of ignorance by that artist called superstition. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Ghosts", 1877 %% In the infancy of new religions, the wise and learned commonly esteem the matter too inconsiderable to deserve their attention or regard. And when afterwards they would willingly detect the cheat, in order to undeceive the deluded multitude, the season is now past, and the records and witnesses, which might clear up the matter, have perished beyond recovery. -- David Hume, "Of Miracles" %% In the landscape of spring, there is neither better nor worse. The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, some short. -- Zen Proverb %% In the long run we are all dead. -- John Maynard Keynes %% In the long run, a hierarchical society [is] only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. -- George Orwell, "1984" %% In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is only too palpable. -- Sigmund Freud %% In the management's temperate, considered, intellectual opinion, Microsoft sucks and we hate them. %% In the midst of all my bitching, you might have noticed that I never complain about politicians. I leave that to others. And there's no shortage of volunteers; everyone complains about politicians. Everyone says they suck. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky; they don't pass through a membrane from a separate reality. They come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, and American businesses. And they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do. Let's face it, we have very little to work with. Garbage in, garbage out. Ignorant citizens elect ignorant leaders, it's as simple as that. And term limits don't help. All you do is get a new bunch of ignorant leaders. So maybe it's not the politicians who suck; maybe it's something else. Like the public. That would be a nice realistic campaign slogan for somebody: "The public sucks. Elect me." Put the blame where it belongs: on the people. Because if everything is really the fault of politicians, where are all the bright, honest, intelligent Americans who are ready to step in and replace them? Where are these people hiding? The truth is, we don't have people like that. Everyone's at the mall, scratching his balls and buying sneakers with lights in them. And complaining about the politicians. For myself, I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way. On Election Day, I stay home. Two reasons: first of all, voting is meaningless; this country was bought and paid for a long time ago. That empty shit they shuffle around and repackage every four years doesn't mean a thing. Second, I don't vote, because I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. I know some people like to twist that around and say, "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain." But where's the logic in that? Think it through: If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and you screw things up, then you're responsible for what they've done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote - who, in fact, did not even leave the house on Election Day - am in no way responsible for what these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess you created. Which I had nothing to do with. Why can't people see that? Now, I realize last year you folks had another one of those really swell presidential elections you treasure so much. That was nice. I'm sure you had a good time, and I'm sure that everyone's life has now improved. But I'm happy to say that on Election Day I stayed home. And I did essentially what you did. The only difference is when I got finished masturbating I had something to show for it. -- George Carlin, on voting and politicians %% In the olden times the church, by violating the order of nature, proved the existence of her god. At that time miracles were performed with the most astonishing ease. They became so common that the church ordered her priests to desist. And now this same church -- the people having found some little sense -- admits, not only, that she cannot perform a miracle but insists that the absence of miracle, the steady, unbroken march of cause and effect, proves the existence of a power superior to nature. The fact is, however, that the indissoluble chain of cause and effect proves exactly the contrary. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% In the pre-internet dark age, there was a subculture of folks who would get their hands on books and pass them around and encourage people to read them for free, rather than buying their own copies. Much like today's ebook pirates, in terms of the what they did (with one or two minor differences). There was a closely-related subculture who would actually sell copies of books without paying the authors a penny in royalties, too. We have a technical term for such people: we call them "librarians" and "second-hand bookstore owners". -- "Why the commercial ebook market is broken", Charlie Stross %% In the presence of death I affirm and reaffirm the truth of all that I have said against the superstitions of the world. I would say that much on the subject with my last breath. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% In the search for truth, -- everything in nature seems to hide, -- man needs the assistance of all his faculties. All the senses should be awake. Humor should carry a torch, Wit should give its sudden light, Candor should hold the scales, Reason, the final arbiter, should put his royal stamp on every fact, and Memory, with a miser's care, should keep and guard the mental gold. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Response to Wm. E. Gladstone on his letter "Regarding Col. Ingersoll on christianity; Some Remarks on his Reply to Dr. Field", 1888 %% In the time it takes to have a meeting about something, you could all have done everything you needed to do to fix the situation and ensure it never happens ever again and still got some real work done. -- from a discussion about "Meetings are Bad for You" on http://slashdot.org %% In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt %% In the world of open source software, bug reports are useful information. Making them public is a service to other users, and improves the [software]. Making them public systematically is so important that highly intelligent people voluntarily put time and money into running bug databases. In the commercial [software] world, however, reporting a bug is a privilege that you have to pay lots of money for. But if you pay for it, it follows that the bug report must be kept confidential -- otherwise anyone could get the benefit of your ninety-five bucks! -- "In the Beginning was the Command Line", Neal Stephenson %% In the year 415, the woman scientist Hypatia, head of the legendary Alexandria library, was beaten to death by christian monks who considered her a pagan. The leader of the monks, Cyril, was canonized a saint. -- James A. Haught, Free Inquiry (Winter 1996/1997) %% In this climate -- with belief in guardian angels and creationism becoming commonplace -- making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion hall. But, by admitting that they're fighting a winning battle, advocates of renewed religiosity would lose the benefits of appearing besieged. Like liberal rights organizations that attract more money when conservative authoritarians are in power, religious groups inspire more believers when secularism is said to hold sway. -- Wendy Kaminer, "The Last Taboo", in The New Republic (Oct. 14, 1996) %% In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% In war, truth is the first casualty. -- Aeschylus %% Inadmissible: Not competent to be considered. Said of certain kinds of testimony which juries are supposed to be unfit to be entrusted with, and which judges, therefore, rule out, even of proceedings before themselves alone. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible because the person quoted was unsworn and is not before the court for examination; yet most momentous actions, military, political, commercial and of every other kind, are daily undertaken on hearsay evidence. There is no religion in the world that has any other basis than hearsay evidence. Revelation is hearsay evidence; that the scriptures are the word of god we have only the testimony of men long dead whose identity is not clearly established and who are not known to have been sworn in any sense. Under the rules of evidence as they now exist in this country, no single assertion in the bible has in its support any evidence admissible in a court of law . . . But as records of courts of justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value. -- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce %% Indeed, the first noble truth of buddhism, usually translated as `all life is suffering,' is more accurately rendered `life is filled with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness.' -- M.D. Epstein %% Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). --Ayn Rand %% Infidelity is liberty; all religion is slavery. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Thomas Paine", 1870 %% Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development. --"Code Complete", Microsoft Press %% Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world. -- Mary Shafer %% Inspiration is only necessary to give authority to that which is repugnant to human reason. Only that which never happened needs to be substantiated by miracles. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Instead of using public algorithms, the U.S. digital cellular companies decided to create their own proprietary cryptography. Over the past few years, different algorithms have been made public. (No, the cell phone industry didn't want them made public. What generally happens is that a cryptographer receives a confidential specification in a plain brown wrapper.) And once they have been made public, they have been broken. Now the U.S. cellular industry is considering public algorithms to replace their broken proprietary ones. -- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999 %% Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. -- Clay Shirky %% Integrity has no need for rules. -- Albert Camus %% Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it. -- John Dewey %% Intelligence is the only moral guide. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "What Would You Substitute For the bible as a Moral Guide?" %% Intelligence without character is a dangerous thing. -- Gloria Steinem %% Internet connection: $19.95 a month. Computer: $799.95. Modem: $149.95. Telephone line: $24.95 a month. Software: free. USENET transmission: hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Thinking before posting: priceless. Some things in life you can't buy. For everything else, there's Master Card. -- Graham Reed, in the Scary devil Monastery %% Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them. -- Steve Eley %% Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. -- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), English biologist and advocate of Darwin's natural selection theory %% Is a church too small and too poor to pay taxes? That means that not enough people want the church seriously enough to pay for its upkeep. Then, why should such a church exist? Why should atheists, agnostics and non-churchgoers be forced to maintain such a useless, unwanted church by granting it tax exemption? -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% Is anyone else tired of living in a parody of a real country? -- from http://fuckthenewyorktimes.com %% Is god fair? The christians say that god damns forever anyone who is skeptical about truth of bunkistic religion as revealed unto the holy haranguers. What this means is that a god, if any, punishes a man for using his reason. If there is a god in existence, reasons should be available for his existence. Assuming that such a precious thing as a man's eternal future depends on his belief in a god, then the materials for that belief should be overwhelming and not at all doubtful. Yet here is a man whose reason makes it impossible for him to believe in a god. he sees no evidence of such an entity. he finds all the arguments weak and worthless. He doubts and he denies. Then is a god fair in visiting upon such a skeptic the penalty for his inevitable intellectual attitude? The intelligent man refuses to believe fairy tales. Can a god blame him? If so, then a god is not as fair as an ordinarily decent man. And fairness, we think, is more important than piety. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Is it a small thing to quench the flames of hell with the holy tears of pity -- to unbind the martyr from the stake -- break all the chains -- put out the fires of civil war -- stay the sword of the fanatic, and tear the bloody hands of the church from the white throat of science? Is it a small thing to make men truly free -- to destroy the dogmas of ignorance, prejudice and power -- the poisoned fables of superstition, and drive from the beautiful face of the earth the fiend of fear? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Thomas Paine", 1870 %% Is it not wonderful that the creator of all worlds, infinite in power and wisdom, could not hold his own against the gods of wood and stone? Is it not strange that after he had appeared to his chosen people, delivered them from slavery, freed them by miracles, opened the sea for a path, led them by cloud and fire, and overthrown their pursuers, they still preferred a calf of their own making? (Exod. 32:1-8) " . . . a god who gave his entire time for 40 years to the work of converting three millions of people, and succeeded in getting only two men, and not a single woman, decent enough to enter the promised land? (Num. 14:29-30)" -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "A Few Reasons for Doubting the Inspiration of the bible" %% Is it possible that an infinite god created this world simply to be the dwelling-place of slaves and serfs? Simply for the purpose of raising orthodox christians? That he did a few miracles to astonish them? That all the evils of life are simply his punishments, and that he is finally going to turn heaven into a kind of religious museum filled with baptist barnacles, petrified presbyterians, and methodist mummies? -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Is there an intelligent man or woman now in the world who believes in the Garden of Eden story? If you find any man who believes it, strike his forehead and you will hear an echo. Something is for rent. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Orthodoxy", 1884 %% Is there beyond the silent night An endless day? Is death a door that leads to light? We cannot say. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Declaration of the Free %% 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 effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. -- Thomas Jefferson %% Isn't it conceivable to you that an intelligent person could harbor two opposing ideas in his mind? -- Adlai Ewing Stevenson, to reporters %% Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? -- Douglas Adams %% It (modern philosophy) certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which christianity has been historically associated. -- John Dewey %% It can therefore be said that, from the viewpoint of the doctrine of the faith, there are no difficulties in explaining the origin of man, in regard to the body, by means of the theory of evolution. -- pope John Paul II, April 16, 1986 %% It cannot be too often repeated, that truth scorns the assistance of miracle. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Christian Religion" Sec. III, The Ingersoll-Black Debate, 1881 %% It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government - the rights of the people . . . In my present position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism. It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government . . . Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration . . . No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty . . . Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost. -- Abraham Lincoln, December, 1861 in his first State of the Union address %% It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. -- Thomas Jefferson %% It has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself; a convenient belief to those who live on the wealth of others. -- William Morris, Useful Work vs Useless Toil 1885 %% It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. -- Albert Einstein %% It has been contended for many years that the Ten Commandments are the foundations of all ideas of justice and law . . . Nothing can be more stupidly false than such assertions. Thousands of years before Moses was born, the Egyptians had a code of laws . . . far better than the Mosaic. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses" %% It has been said that faith dies the death of a thousand qualifications. Faith inevitably meets the same fate when it is continually attenuated with rambling, nondescript, and pretentious definitions. The liberating truth, of course, is that the readiness with which the term faith evokes sobering qualifications and erratic definitions betrays the superficial manner in which it is used by religionists. -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. -- Bertrand Arthur William Russell %% It has long been an article of our folklore that too much knowledge or skill, or especially consummate expertise, is a bad thing. It dehumanizes those who achieve it, and makes difficult their commerce with just plain folks, in whom good old common sense has not been obliterated by mere book learning or fancy notions. This popular delusion flourishes now more than ever, for we are all infected with it in the schools, where educationists have elevated it from folklore to article of belief. It enhances their self-esteem and lightens their labors by providing theoretical justification for deciding that appreciation, or even simple awareness, is more to be prized than knowledge, and relating (to self and others), more than skill, in which minimum competence will be quite enough. -- The Underground Grammarian %% It has often been repeated that the abolition of slavery among modern people is entirely due to christians. That, I think, is saying too much. Slavery existed for a long period in the heart of christian society, without its being particularly astonished or irritated. A multitude of causes, and a great development in other ideas and principles of civilization, were necessary for the abolition of this iniquity of all iniquities. -- Francois-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874), French historian and statesman, in "European Civilization," vol. I., p.110 %% It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions. I believe it was Magellan who said, "The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church." On the prow of his ship were disobedience, defiance, scorn, and success. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality", 1873, quoted in _The Great Quotations_ %% It is a common saying that thought is free. A man can never be hindered from thinking whatever he chooses so long as he conceals what he thinks. The working of his mind is limited only by the bounds of his experience and the power of his imagination. But this natural liberty of private thinking is of little value. It is unsatisfactory and even painful to the thinker himself, if he is not permitted to communicate his thoughts to others, and it is obviously of no value to his neighbors. Moreover it is extremely difficult to hide thoughts that have any power over the mind. If a man's thinking leads him to call in question ideas and customs which regulate the behaviour of those about him, to reject the beliefs which they hold, to see better ways of life than those they follow, it is almost impossible for him, if he is convinced of the truth of his own reasoning, not to betray by silence, chance words, or general attitude that he is different from them and does not share their opinions. Some have preferred, like Socrates, some would prefer today, to face death rather than conceal their thoughts. Thus freedom of thought, in any valuable sense, includes freedom of speech. -- J.B. Bury, "A history of Freedom of Thought", 1913 %% It is a matter of persisting. At a certain point on his path the absurd man is tempted. History is not lacking in either religions or prophets, even without gods. He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn't fully understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands. He is assured that this is the sin of pride, but he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in store, but he has not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that he is losing immortal life, but that seems to him an idle consideration. An attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels -- his irreparable innocence. This is what allows him everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live /solely/ with what he knows, to accommodate himself with what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without /appeal/. -- Albert Camus, "An Absurd Reasoning" %% It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. -- Albert Einstein %% It is absurd to suppose that a human being sitting around suddenly stands up and says: "You know, I hate freedom. I think I'll go blow myself up." -- Charley Reese, as quoted by Harry Browne %% It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative. -- John Burroughs %% It is always tempting to divide men into two lots: Greeks and barbarians, muslims and infidels, those who believe in god and those who don't. But who does not fear to understand things that threaten his beliefs? Of course, one is not consciously afraid; but everybody who is honest with himself finds that often he does not try very hard to understand what clashes with his deep convictions. -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. %% It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color. -- Voltaire %% It is an absurd fiction that the churches are useful. They are nothing more than propaganda centers for superstitious faiths and doctrines. church members have a right to believe in and propagate their various doctrines. But they should pay every item of the cost, of this propaganda, including fair taxation for all church property. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer. -- William Blackstone, "Commentaries on the Laws of England", Book IV, ch. 27 %% It is better to live your life as if there are no gods, and try to make the world a better place for your being in it. If there is no god, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind. If there is a benevolent god, he will judge you on your merits and not just on whether or not you believed in him. -- Atheist's wager %% It is better to wear chains than to believe you are free, and weight yourself down with invisible chains. %% It is better to weep with wise men than to laugh with fools. -- Spanish Proverb %% It is by Perl alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the regex of Larry that the code acquires flexibility, the flexibility enables obscurity, the obscurity generates a warning. It is by Perl alone I set my mind in motion. %% It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of coffee that the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion. %% It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. -- Voltaire %% It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt %% It is contended by many that ours is a christian government, founded upon the bible, and that all who look upon that book as false or foolish are destroying the foundation of our country. The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemnly decide that this is a christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of jehovah. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality" 1873 %% It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. -- Voltaire %% It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair (1878 - 1968) %% It is easier to fight for principles than to live up to them. -- Alfred Adler %% It is generally easier to read $var_names_like_this than $VarNamesLikeThis, especially for non-native speakers of English. It's also a simple rule that works consistently with "VAR_NAMES_LIKE_THIS". -- "Perl style guide", perlstyle(1) %% It is hard to overstate the debt that we owe to men and women of genius. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% It is impossible for an optimist to be pleasantly surprised. %% It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man. -- Richard Phillips Feynman, "The Meaning of It All", p. 34 %% It is inconceivable that a judicious observer from another solar system would see in our species -- which has tended to be cruel, destructive, wasteful, and irrational -- the crown and apex of cosmic evolution. Viewing us as the culmination of *anything* is grotesque; viewing us as a transitional species makes more sense -- and gives us more hope. -- Betty McCollister, "Our Transitional Species", Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1 %% It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil. -- Friedrich A. Hayek %% It is insisted that, unless the [practices of school prayer] are permitted, a 'religion of secularism' is established in the schools. We agree, of course, that the State may not establish a 'religion of secularism' in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus 'preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe' Zorach v. Clauson supra at 314. We do not agree, however, that this decision in any sense has that effect. -- Justice Tom Clark, Opinion for the Court in School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963) at 255. %% It is much easier to be critical than to be correct. -- Benjamin Disraeli %% It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles. -- George Bernard Shaw %% It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -- Jiddu Krishnamurti %% It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society, it is belief. -- George Bernard Shaw, The Preface to Androcles and the Lion %% It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed. -- Goethe %% It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty. -- Steve Allen, quoted in "2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt", by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996 %% It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error. -- Robert Houghwout Jackson, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Judge at the War-Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg %% It is often said, mainly by the "no-contests", that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of god, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of father christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't *prove* that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies? -- Richard Dawkins %% It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. -- Voltaire %% It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. -- William O. Douglas, Address, Authors' Guild, Dec. 3, 1952 %% It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations. -- Richard Phillips Feynman, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" %% It is owing to this long interregnum of science, and to no other cause, that we have now to look back through a vast chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we call the Ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone on proportionally with the stock that before existed, that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior in knowledge to each other; and those Ancients we now so much admire would have appeared respectably in the background of the scene. But the christian system laid all waste; and if we take our stand about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond. -- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason %% It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a rational human being can believe in god simply because this belief makes him happy, relieves his fear of death or gives his life meaning. The absurdity becomes obvious the moment we swap the notion of god for some other consoling proposition: Imagine, for instance, that a man wants to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in his yard that is the size of a refrigerator. No doubt it would feel uncommonly good to believe this. Just imagine what would happen if he then followed the example of religious moderates and maintained this belief along pragmatic lines: When asked why he thinks that there is a diamond in his yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet discovered, he says things like, "This belief gives my life meaning," or "My family and I enjoy digging for it on Sundays," or "I wouldn't want to live in a universe where there wasn't a diamond buried in my backyard that is the size of a refrigerator." Clearly these responses are inadequate. But they are worse than that. They are the responses of a madman or an idiot. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% It is possible by ingenuity and at the expense of clarity . . . {to do almost anything in any language}. However, the fact that it is possible to push a pea up a mountain with your nose does not mean that this is a sensible way of getting it there. Each of these techniques of language extension should be used in its proper place. -- Christopher Strachey %% It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense. They thus become part of the armies of the night, the purveyors of nitwittery, the retailers of intellectual junk food, the feeders on mental cardboard, for their ignorance keeps them from distinguishing nectar from sewage. -- Isaac Asimov, "The Armies of the Night" %% It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. -- Giordano Bruno (1548-burned at the stake,1600) %% It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which [I] lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the 'merely personal,' from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. -- Albert Einstein, as quoted in Einstein, history, and Other Passions, p. 172 %% It is rather remarkable that such a deed would be overlooked when many more far less wicked deeds of herod were carefully described. -- Isaac Asimov, "Guide to the bible", on herod's allegedly killing all young male children to prevent the messiah %% It is revealing to contrast the tone of public discourse 50 years ago to what it is today. Ronald Reagan abandoned formal rhetoric for folksy chat, and now we're stuck with it. G W Bush got elected by appearing to be just a regular guy--at some point, people forgot that you don't want just a regular guy as your leader, you want the best and brightest. Distrust of intellectuals is at an all time high, because it takes work to understand what they're saying. But democracy takes work, every single day. -- Thangodin (177516) on http://slashdot.org on an article on immaturity in adults %% It is sad to find him belaboring the science community for its united opposition to ignorant creationists who want teachers and textbooks to give equal time to crank arguments that have advanced not a step beyond the flyblown rhetoric of Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan. -- Martin Gardner, "Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 128-131 %% It is sad to think that the first few people on earth needed no books, movies, games, or music to inspire cold-blooded murder. The day that Cain bashed his brother Abel's brains in, the only motivation he needed was his own human disposition to violence. Whether you interpret the bible as literature or as the final word of whatever god may be, christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all our lives. Is it a symbol of hope or hopelessness? The world's most famous murder-suicide was also the birth of the death icon -- the blueprint for celebrity. Unfortunately, for all of their morality, nowhere in the gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue. -- Marilyn Manson, Rolling Stone magazine, June 24 %% It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass." -- Abraham Lincoln %% It is said that desire for knowledge lost us the Eden of the past; but whether that is true or not, it will certainly give us the Eden of the future. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses" %% It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. -- Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Live" %% It is sometimes argued that we have a fifty-fifty betting proposition when considering god's existence or nonexistence. If we bet that god exists and he does exist, then we lose nothing while possibly gaining salvation. If we bet that god exists and he does not exist, then we lose nothing. But if we bet that god does not exist and he does exist, then we lose everything. Of course, if we bet that god does not exist and we are correct, then we lose nothing. Therefore it is prudent to bet on god. (This is Pascal`s Wager). The problem with the above argument is that it does not establish a fifty-fifty betting proposition. There are many alternatives that it fails to consider. For example, god may exist but he may damn anyone who "bets" on his existence merely for reasons of prudence. he may consider such a "bet" to be an insult. Furthermore, it may be that a mere belief in god is not enough to ensure salvation. A further requirement may be the belief in a particular religion. But which religion? Again, there are many alternatives. Another possible alternative is that god offers salvation only to atheists because god does not like being surrounded by obsequious "yes-men." god may prize independence and skepticism. -- B. C. Johnson, "The atheist Debater's Handbook" %% It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved. -- Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of scripture in Philosophical Controversies" %% It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle %% It is the nature of information to transgress artificial boundaries. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% It is the position of some theists that their right to freedom OF religion is abridged when they are not allowed to violate the Rationalists right to freedom FROM religion. -- James T. Green, jgreen@trumpet.calpoly.edu %% It is the quality rather than the quantity that matters. -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca %% It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive. -- Earl Warren %% It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true. -- Bertrand Russell %% It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in god is not important at all. -- Denis Diderot %% It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. -- Henry Ford %% It is well said that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," and I am confirmed every day in my intense conviction that the church as the church is the enemy of freedom. While protesting loudly its faith in the Truth with a capital T, "the truth shall make us free," it fights at every step every effort to learn the truth and publish it and be guided by it. -- Rupert Hughes, "Why I Quit Going to church", New York, Freethought Press Assn., 1924 %% It is worth noting that no one ever need identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, "atheist" is a term that should not even exist. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% It logically follows that if christianity is true, then reason is false. If human reason is false, how does one account for the great marvels created by science based on human reason? -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% It may be that ministers really think that their prayers do good and it may be that frogs imagine that their croaking brings spring. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Which Way?", 1884 %% It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship god but to create him. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% It must be admitted that so-called evangelical scholars aren't out to seek any kind of historical truth about the new testament; rather, they are out to justify their narrow literalist interpretations . . . but in the light of scholarship more careful and critical than theirs, they should rightly come to grief, as I did when I first sought to justify my former christian beliefs with examination of the scriptures. Almost without exception, they confuse second-hand accounts with first-hand accounts, and mere tradition with the pronouncements of apostles. Many uncritically accept any word of the church fathers that could possibly be construed to support their view. _Ad hoc_ defines evangelical musings on the new testament, and I have good doubts about the honesty of anyone who takes their talk seriously. -- J. S. Burke, "An Examination of the Wellsian Thesis" %% It pays to make the U.S. school system a crock of shit because the dumber the people are that come out, the easier it is to draft them, make them into docile consumers, or, you know, mongo employees. There are plenty of yuppies out there with absolutely nothing upstairs. Graduate airheads with PhDs and everything but they don't know anything. And what do they listen to? Certainly not my records. -- Frank Zappa %% It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine. -- Richard Dawkins %% It remains one of the most baffling yet affecting phenomena in modern religious life: A beam of light or a spot of dirt in an otherwise ordinary place is perceived as the image of the virgin Mary, and suddenly thousands of pilgrims descend on the site, turning it into a makeshift shrine . . . In previous years, it has been a vision in the sky, a glint off a car bumper, a face in a tortilla, a tear on an icon . . . But while church leaders are often loath to debunk a visionary experience, not wanting to damage the faith of thousands, they are also leery of letting such events get out of hand. If someone who claims to have communicated with the divine begins spreading teachings that are contrary to church dogma, bishops have not hesitated to step in. -- David Firestone, Newsday, Press Democrat, 23 December 1990 %% It seems appropriate to me that Mapplethorpe's perverse images should be situated so close to Congress, which perpetuates a number of unnatural acts upon the body politic every day, without benefit of artificial lubrication or foreplay. -- Pat Calafia's review of Camille Paglia's "Sex, Art and American Culture" %% It seems to me that it's insulting to human beings to imply that only a system of rewards and punishments can keep you a decent human being . . . I have a conscience. It doesn't depend on religion. -- Isaac Asimov %% It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. -- Nathaniel S. Borenstein %% It struck me as funny that some of the proposed "future" features for Java had already been done in Lisp decades ago. -- Peter Santoro %% It takes a wise man to learn from his mistakes, but an even wiser man to learn from others. -- Zen Proverb %% It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong. -- H. W. Longfellow %% It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment. -- Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of scripture in Philosophical Controversies" %% It was, after all, christianity itself which tutored the Western mind to believe that it should know the truth and the truth would make it free. But now that the student has learned to prize the truth, he has discovered, with pain both to himself and his teacher, that it can only be gained at the cost of rejecting the one who first instilled in him the love of it. -- Van A. Harvey %% It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. -- Albert Einstein %% It would be nice if it were merely a question of priorities. Which do I want more? To be inspired by the beauty of whales? Or to turn them into a revolting bloody mess to be smashed into little cans? But it's not just a question of priorities. We're collectively indoctrinated into a system of fear: fear of poverty. So our priority first and foremost is survival. Why a species that can put a robot on Mars can't alleviate the fear of privation from among its members is a mystery. Even the whales are mystified by it. We've told ourselves this story for so long: ideals and beauty are nice, but they don't put food on the table. Are we really still so primitive that we can't jibe our esthetic ideals with the maintenance of our wealth? -- "The Moment of Truth: Watch That Whale" (http://www.popmatters.com/pm/columns/article/49098/watch-that-whale/) %% It would be very nice if there were a god who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. -- Sigmund Freud %% It's 2002, and programming languages have almost caught up with 1958. -- Paul Graham, "Revenge of the Nerds", on Lisp vs Perl/Python/Java %% It's a marketing term. I mean, it was one that I never had any sympathy with. The term 'comic' does just as well for me. ... The problem is that 'graphic novel' just came to mean 'expensive comic book' and so what you'd get is people like DC Comics or Marvel comics - because 'graphic novels' were getting some attention, they'd stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it "The She-Hulk Graphic Novel", you know? -- Alan Moore, on "graphic novels" %% It's a poor workman who blames his tools, but even a master carpenter cannot build a house out of rotten wood. -- Nathan Paul Simons, on having to use proprietary software to do anything serious %% It's a special kind of arrogance to think that you can just stroll in and understand, much less analyze, a field where people dedicate years, if not decades, to their research. -- seen on http://slashdot.org, in response to climate change deniers %% It's about time we recognize who the phone-tappers, surveillance-freaks, torture-defenders, and black-box voting stooges really are: They are a threat to Americans, our way of life, and our democracy. They are a national security threat. So are their defenders. -- "You know who the enemy is?" comment by gaspar ilom (859751) on http://slashdot.org %% It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit. -- Ronald Reagan %% It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television? -- Richard Dawkins %% It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it. -- E. Debs %% It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. -- George Carlin %% It's easier to think there's a Slashdot groupthink conspiracy against you than admit your beliefs are not realistic. -- Andorin, on http://slashdot.org %% It's from Apple, therefore, all those points are either irrelevant or actually features. You see, it is not the actual hardware or software quality that makes an Apple an Apple. It's the brand. No other brand produces nearly the same sense of smug satisfaction and gloating superiority. Besides owning a large truck that is never used for hauling or off road sporting, nothing says "I have a small penis" like owning something from Apple. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% It's good for your soul. -- Dr. Jean-Louis Lassez, any CS class he's taught %% It's kind of fun to do the impossible. -- Walt Disney %% It's like the Republican Party's permanent informercial. -- Quixote (154172) on http://slashdot.org on Fox News %% It's like there's an if statement in my pants, and everyone's invited! -- random Kurt Ferreira music (random Vandals song) %% It's no wonder christian coalition members repeat their organization's mission like a mantra. Understanding morality not informed by a faith in Jesus christ must confound true believers at least as much as values not guided primarily by common sense perplex the rest of the population. -- Alex Foege, "The Empire god Built: Inside Pat Robertson's Media Machine", pg 143 %% It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times. -- Bill Hicks %% It's not difficult, just tedious. -- Dr. Wen Ben Jone on decoding opcodes in a CPU, CS 331 %% 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, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% It's not hard to admit errors that are [only] cosmetically wrong. -- J.K. Galbraith %% It's not literally true that you can't solve this problem in other languages, of course. The fact that all these languages are Turing-equivalent means that, strictly speaking, you can write any program in any of them. So how would you do it? In the limit case, by writing a Lisp interpreter in the less powerful language. -- Paul Graham, "Revenge of the Nerds", on solving problems in different programming languages %% It's not the [Apple] macs I hate. It's the [Apple] mac users. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% It's not true that the more sex that you have, the more it interferes with your work. I find that the more sex you have, the better work you do. -- H. G. Wells %% It's not usually cost effective time wise to go do it. But if something's really pissing you off, you just go find the code and fix it and that's really cool. -- John Carmack, on the advantages of open source %% It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case. -- Sydney J. Harris %% It's okay to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it. -- Steve McConnell %% It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. -- Tyler Durden, "Fight Club" %% It's rather a shame. Now that the creationists are deprived of their chance of burning people at the stake, their best argument is gone. -- Isaac Asimov, "Life and Time," 1979 %% It's the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation. -- Andy Hertzfeld, about programming %% It's the story of a place called Mouseland. Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do. They even had a Congress. And every four years they had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on election day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats. Now I'm not saying anything against the cats. They were nice fellows. They conducted their government with dignity. They passed good laws--that is, laws that were good for cats. But the laws that were good for cats weren't very good for mice. One of the laws said that mouseholes had to be big enough so a cat could get his paw in. Another law said that mice could only travel at certain speeds--so that a cat could get his breakfast without too much effort. All the laws were good laws. For cats. But, oh, they were hard on the mice. And life was getting harder and harder. And when the mice couldn't put up with it any more, they decided something had to be done about it. So they went en masse to the polls. They voted the black cats out. They put in the white cats. Now the white cats had put up a terrific campaign. They said: "All that Mouseland needs is more vision." They said:"The trouble with Mouseland is those round mouseholes we got. If you put us in we'll establish square mouseholes." And they did. And the square mouseholes were twice as big as the round mouseholes, and now the cat could get both his paws in. And life was tougher than ever. And when they couldn't take that anymore, they voted the white cats out and put the black ones in again. Then they went back to the white cats. Then to the black cats. They even tried half black cats and half white cats. And they called that coalition. They even got one government made up of cats with spots on them: they were cats that tried to make a noise like a mouse but ate like a cat. You see, my friends, the trouble wasn't with the colour of the cat. The trouble was that they were cats. And because they were cats, they naturally looked after cats instead of mice. -- with apologies to Tommy Douglas %% It's time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation -- and not focusing on specific plots. -- Bruce Schneier %% It's widely known that those men who want loud and/or fast cars are often the men with the smallest penises. . . . Frankly, I'm glad I'm European, and I ride a bicycle. The only problem I run into is keeping my cock from getting tangled in the bike chain. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% It's worth noting that Ayn Rand was once considered so beyond the pale on the political spectrum that William Buckley called her an idiot to her face. William Buckley. Told someone to fuck off. For being too conservative. Let that seep in. -- comment on review of "Atlas Shrugged: The Movie" %% Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion. -- Justice Black, US Supreme Court Justice, on the 1st Amendment %% It's just a goddamned piece of paper! -- George W. Bush, on the Constitution of the United States of America %% James & Nathan: YES!! Our file system has errors! %% Jehovah was not a moral god. He had all the vices and lacked all the virtues. He generally carried out all his threats, but he never faithfully kept a promise. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Jesus Hates the Little Children Jesus hates the little children All the little children of the poor. Skin and bone, covered with flies Jesus cheers as each one dies Jesus hates the children of the poor. Jesus starves the little children All the hungry children of the world. If he really was pure good he'd make sure they had some food Jesus starves the children of the world. Jesus hates the little children All the little children of Bhagdad. Even though they're not to blame They are dying just the same Jesus hates the children of Bhagdad. Jesus hates the little children All the little children born with AIDS. Even while he's giving breath he's condemning them to death Jesus hates the children born with AIDS. Jesus hates the little children All the little children raped buy priests. Sunday schoolers, alter boys Jesus rewards priests with toys Jesus hates the children raped by priests. Jesus hates the little children That's why he wants more to abuse he's opposed to birth control No abortion is his goal Jesus wants more children to abuse. Jesus hates the little children All the little children of the poor They've got hunger and disease In the winter they can freeze Jesus hates the children of the poor -- Harry the heretic %% Jesus christ never commanded toleration as a motive for his disciples, and toleration is the antithesis of the christian message. -- "The Southern baptist Convention and Freemasonry" by James L. Holly, Page 30 %% Jesus christ: A common exclamation indicating surprise, disgust, anger or bewilderment. -- Chaz Bufe, The American heretic's Dictionary %% Jesus christ: Imaginary playmate to millions of adults! %% Jesus is just a word I use to swear with. -- Richard Harris %% Jesus is not going to come down from the mountain to save your lily-white hide or your black ass. Save yourselves. -- Harlan Ellison %% Jesus is real! I saw him at a party last week, he was playing quarters with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. %% Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin. -- Michael O'Donohugh %% Jesus was killed by a moral majority. %% Jesus was my co-pilot. But we crashed into the Andes and I had to eat him. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities? -- Emma Goldman %% John Wesley said that if you give up the witchcraft, you must give up the bible. He is right. The choice is easy for me. -- Rupert Hughes, "Why I Quit Going to Church", New York, Freethought Press Assn., 1924 %% Joy is wealth and love is the legal tender of the soul. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Just as Philo, learned in Greek speculation, had felt a need to rephrase Judaism in forms acceptable to the logic-loving Greeks, so John, having lived for two generations in a hellenistic environment, sought to give a Greek philosophical tinge to the mystic jewish doctrine that the Wisdom of god was a living being, and to the christian doctrine that Jesus was the messiah. Consciously or not, he continued Paul's work of detaching christianity from judaism. Christ was no longer presented as a jew, living more or less under the jewish law; he was made to address the jews as "you," and to speak of their law as "yours"; he was not a messiah sent "to save the lost sheep of Israel," he was the coeternal son of god; not merely the future judge of mankind, but the primeval creator of the universe. In this perspective the jewish life of the man Jesus could be put into the background, faded almost as in gnostic heresy; and the god christ was assimilated to the religious and philosophical traditions of the hellenistic mind. Now the pagan world -- even the anti-semitic world -- could accept him as its own. -- Will and Ariel Durant, _The Story of Civilization_ %% Just as most issues are seldom black or white, so are most good solutions seldom black or white. Beware of the solution that requires one side to be totally the loser and the other side to be totally the winner. The reason there are two sides to begin with usually is because neither side has all the facts. Therefore, when the wise mediator effects a compromise, he is not acting from political motivation. Rather, he is acting from a deep sense of respect for the whole truth. -- Stephen R. Schwambach %% Just go ahead and write your own multitasking multiuser OS! Worked for me all the time. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% Just how much longer do you propose we continue to piss the world off? When do we begin to reap the benefits of having everybody either loathe or fear us? Do you think that we'll be able to cow the world into submission and keep them there? At what point do we begin to deal with the reality that today, we're utterly loathed by the people we most need to have on our side in the war against terrorism? -- from a comment by American AC in Paris (230456) on http://slashdot.org on terrorism %% Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases. -- Thomas Carlyle, English writer %% Just say NO to religion. -- Dan Barker %% Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt. -- Clarence Darrow %% Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read. -- Mark Twain %% Kissing, petting, and even intercourse are all right as long as they are sincere. I have never given a kiss in my life that wasn't sincere. As for intercourse, I'd say three times a day was about right. -- Margaret Sangor %% Kneeling is not an heroic attitude. It more becomes the fearful slave than the brave free man . . . These stories of men becoming pious when terrified confirm our conviction that fear begot the gods. -- Charles ??, in The Truth Seeker, July 1942 %% Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes god is on their side. -- signature seen on http://slashdot.org %% Knowing what to render unto Caesar and what unto god requires wisdom of any president. Candidates who reduce religion to a sound bite may not understand that . . . [W]e hope the candidates exercise restraint by wearing religion more in their heart than on their sleeves. The US, after all, is electing a president, not a preacher, who will run a country, not a church. Faith is a personal guide best seen in action. -- Christian Science Monitor editorial on the 2000 elections %% Knowledge is power. -- Francis Bacon %% LAND, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary %% Labor is the only prayer that nature answers. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Address to the Jury", trial of C.B. Reynolds for Blasphemy %% Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it. -- Gloria Steinem %% Law of classes taught by Yodaiken: If you can't get your work done in the first 24 hours, work nights. %% Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. -- Seneca %% Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. -- Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 1774-1776 %% Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government. -- Pierre Joseph Proudhon %% Learn from other people's mistakes, you don't have time to make your own. %% Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separated. -- Ulysses S. Grant, speech to the Army of the Tennessee, Des Moines,Iowa, 1875 %% Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it. -- Will Rogers %% Let every man teach his son, teach his daughter, that labor is honorable. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Let no one ever, from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell, and those who institute it are criminals. Were there even anything to say for it, it should not be said; for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages. -- Robert Nichols %% Let the machine do the dirty work. -- "Elements of Programming Style", Kernighan and Ritchie %% Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around us in awareness. -- James Grover Thurber %% Let us realize that priests are not revealers of truth but only keepers of traditions, and that the purpose of both the scribes and their later translators was not to reveal the truth but to lay the basis of a theistic religion, based on the supernatural and the terrifying. -- Lloyd Graham, "Deceptions and Myths of the bible" %% Let us remember that those who have sought natures truths have not persecuted their neighbors. The astronomers and chemist have forged no chains and built no dungeons. The geologists have invented no instruments of torture. The philosophers have not demonstrated the truths of their theories by burning others. The great infidels, the thinkers have lived for the good of humankind. Intellectual liberty is the fresh air of the universe and the sunshine of the soul. Without it, the universe is a prison. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions. -- Thomas Jefferson %% Let's face it--the yo-yo president of the U.S.A. knows nothing. He is a dunce. He does what he is told to do -- says what he is told to say -- poses the way he is told to pose. He is a fool. This is never an easy thing for the voters of this country to accept. No. Nonsense. The president cannot be a fool. Not at this moment in time -- when the last living vestiges of the American Dream are on the line. This is not the time to have a bogus rich kid in charge of the White House. Which is, after all, our house. That is our headquarters -- it is where the heart of America lives. So if the president lies and act giddy about other people's lives -- if he wantonly and stupidly endorses mass murder as a logical plan to make sure that we are still Number One -- he is a jackass by definition -- a loud and meaningless animal with no fundamental intelligence and no balls. To say that this goofy child president is looking more and more like Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to Nixon. Whoops! Did I say that? Is it even vaguely possible that some New Age Republican whore-beast of a false president could actually make Richard Nixon look like a liberal? -- From Kingdom of Fear, Simon & Schuster, 2003 by Hunter S. Thompson %% Let's say that all the restaurants and supermarkets in your neighborhood are taken over by, not only fast food chains, but McDonalds. That's the only place where you can eat. To you, it tastes bad, it's bad for your health, there is little selection, but you don't have a choice: you gotta eat. But you have actually eaten good food in your life and know that better food exists. Wouldn't you be kind of annoyed? Wouldn't you start cooking for yourself and try to create alternatives? Well, that, in a nutshell is why many people don't like Microsoft and why they are looking for alternatives. It's also why many other people don't mind Microsoft; they don't know anything else. -- "here's an analogy" comment by oohshiny (998054) on http://slashdot.org %% Liberals who have actually read the bible rationalize their adherence to christianity by saying that the bible doesn't really mean what it says. In calling themselves christians, they are appropriating a hallowed name and applying it to a made-up religion of their own. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have. -- Harry Emerson Fosdick %% Liberty is two wolves getting together to pick off the sheep one by one, because the sheep are so conscious of their own liberty that none of them will make common cause with the others. -- Bruce Perens %% Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. -- George Bernard Shaw %% Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of watching television. -- Cal Keegan %% Life can be beautiful, profound, and awe-inspiring, even without an irate god threatening us with eternal torment. -- Judith Hayes %% Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. -- Robert Doisneau %% Life is too short to be taken seriously. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% Life's too short to sell things you don't believe in. -- Patrick Dixon (1957-), Building a Better Business, 2005 %% Like everyone else, I was born an atheist. I just never converted. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% Like most hubristic UIs, Wolfram Alpha is operating with a completely fictitious user narrative. The raison d'etre of the natural-language interface, stated baldly, is to create a usable tool for stupid people who might be confused or intimidated by a tree of menus. The market of stupid people is indeed enormous. The market of stupid people who like to use data-visualization tools is, well, not. (And since the interface is not in fact easy but actually quite difficult, it achieves the coveted status of a non-solution to a non-problem.) -- "Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces", Unqualified Reservations %% Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts. -- Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10 %% Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp. -- "The Lisp Curse", by Rudolf Winestock (http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html) %% Lisp is the most sophisticated programming language I know. It is literally decades ahead of the competition. -- Christian Lynbechs %% Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot. -- Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker" %% Lisp was a simple, elegant language that demonstrated that almost any language written after 1961 was unnecessary, except for demonstrations of concepts like Object-Oriented programming that could then be re-implemented into Lisp, and that any code written in older languages could be replaced with something better. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages. -- Eric Raymond, in Open Sources on MIT's first OS, ITS %% Little else matters than to write good code. -- Karl Lehenbauer %% Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils. -- General John Stark, July 31, 1809 %% Imagine adding object orientation to the C and Scheme programming languages. Making Scheme object-oriented is a sophomore homework assignment. On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup. -- "The Lisp Curse", by Rudolf Winestock (http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html) %% Living well is the best revenge. -- George Herbert %% Look . . . the people you are harassing are the people you depend on. We fix your computers, we update your websites, we route your packets, we patch your servers, we guard your data while you sleep. Do not fuck with us. -- slightly rephrased from "Fight Club" %% Look at me, still talking when there's science to do. -- from "Still Alive" as sung by GLaDOS from Portal %% Look at the god idea from any angle, and it is foolish, it doesn't make sense, but extravagantly proposes more mysteries than it assumes to explain. For instance, is it sensible that a real god would leave mankind in such confusion and debate about his character and his laws? There have been many alleged revelations of god. There have, indeed, been many gods as there have been many bibles. And in different ages and different lands an endless game of guessing and disputing has gone on. Men have argued blindly about god. They still argue -- just as blindly. And if there is a god, we must conclude that he has willfully left men in the dark. He has not wanted men to know about him. Assuming his existence, then it would follow that he would have perfect ability to give a complete and universal explanation of himself, so that all men could see and know without further uncertainty. A real god could exhibit himself clearly to all men and have all men following his will to the last letter without a doubt or a slip. But when we examine even cursorily the many contradictory revelations of god, the many theories and arguments, the many and diverse principles of piety, we perceive that all this talk about god has been merely the natural floundering of human ignorance. There has been no reality in the god idea which men could discover and agree upon. The spectacle has been exactly what we should expect when men deal with theories of something which does not exist. Hidden gods -- no gods -- all we see is man's poor guesswork. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Look, I might be an atheist, but I do enjoy Christmas (at least the parts of Christmas that are actually enjoyable). Christmas means to me what it means to pretty much every other American who celebrates it. Namely, it's all about buying presents for people to make them happy, hoping I get back presents or a piece of ass of comparable value, despising the mall, despising the mall parking lot more, eating and drinking with family and friends and staying indoors as much as possible because it's fucking cold outside. So pass the fucking eggnog, assholes. It's not all for you, and there sure as fuck wouldn't be any liquor in it if Christmas was all about Jesus. -- from http://negativepositive.org/Things-that-need-to-die.html %% Look, there is one statement that bothers me more than anything else, and that's the idea that when the troops are in combat everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning and troops were dying as a result. I can't think anyone would allow that to happen, that would not speak up. Well, what's the difference between a faulty plan and strategy that's getting just as many troops killed? -- Gen. Anthony Zinni, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.), former CENTCOM Commander-in-Chief, 2004-05-21, television interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" %% Losing your faith is a lot like losing your virginity; you don't realize how irritating it was 'til it's gone. %% Love is always open arms. With arms open you allow love to come and go as it wills, freely, for it will do so anyway. If you close your arms about love you'll find you are left only holding yourself. %% Love is dope, not chicken soup. I mean, love is something to be passed around freely, not spooned down someone's throat for their own good by a jewish mother who cooked it all by herself. %% Love truth, but pardon error. -- Voltaire %% Love your country but never trust its government. -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania %% Love your neighbor, yet don't pull down your hedge. -- Benjamin Franklin %% Loyalty to any party or ideology is incompatible with integrity. -- comment by misanthrope101 (253915) on http://slashdot.org %% Luckily the majority of nominal christians has at no time taken the christian ideal very seriously; if it had, the races and the civilization of the west would long ago have come to an end. -- Aldous Huxley, in Cardiff, "What Great Men Think of Religion" %% MORAL MAJORITY You call yourselves the Moral Majority We call ourselves the people of the real world Trying to rub us out, but we're going to survive God must be dead, if you're alive You say, "god loves you. Come and buy the good news" Then you buy the president and swimming pools If Jesus don't save 'till we're lining your pockets God must be dead, if you're alive Circus-tent con men and Southern belle bunnies Milk your emotions then they steal your money It's the new dark ages with the fascists toting bibles Cheap nostalgia for the Salem Witch Trials Stodgy ayatollahs in their double-knit ties Burn lots of books so they can feed you their lies Masturbating with a flag and a bible God must be dead if you're alive Blow it out your ass, Jerry Falwell Blow it out your ass, Jessie helms Blow it out your ass, Ronald Reagan What's wrong with a mind of my own? You don't want abortions you want battered children You want to ban the pill as if that solves the problem Now you wanna force us to pray in school God must be dead if you're such a fool You're planning for a war with or without Iran Building a police state with the Klu Klux Klan Pissed at your neighbor? Don't bother to nag Pick up the phone and turn in a fag Blow it out your ass, Terry Dolan Blow it out your ass, Phyllis Schlafly Ram it up your cunt, Anita 'Cause god must be dead If you're alive God must be dead If you're alive -- "Religious Vomit", Dead Kennedys/Jello Biafra (from "In god We Trust, Inc.", Alternative Tentacles VIRUS 5), 1981 %% Ma gavte la nata. (Take out the cork.) -- from "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco %% Machine Always Crashes, If Not, The Operating System Hangs (MACINTOSH) -- Topic on #Linux %% Mad, adj.: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. -- Ambrose Gwinett Bierce, "The devil's Dictionary" %% Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn't as good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the whole process. -- John Carmack %% Making something gross or sexual or both is probably the easiest thing in the world to do. Just look at the margins of any 7th graders homework. You will find plenty of doodles on par with anything McGee has produced. American has said that his new game OZ will stay fairly true to the books but it will be "darker". It's sad that is the best he can come up with. American has the opportunity to take these well known and loved stories and re-imagine them for the world of video games, a medium with unlimited possibilities. When he made Alice I gave him credit for taking the story in a new direction even if it wasn't a terribly interesting one. Now with OZ he's doing the same thing and it shows that Alice was not some creative masterpiece. This guy is just a pervert and this is all he knows how to do. It's like he has some kind of huge fucking machine. Beloved stories and characters go in one side and junior high quality goth crap comes out the other. Yeah, Yeah McGee, we all know you are very angry. You should save yourself some fucking time and just wear a T-shirt that says "I am dark and brooding". -- Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com) on American McGee %% Man can hardly be defined . . . as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. -- G.K. Chesterton %% Man first unconsciously and involuntarily creates god in his own image, and after this god (religion) consciously and voluntarily creates man in his own image. -- Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, "The Essence Of christianity" 1841 %% Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder. -- Percy Bysshe Shelley %% Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against god's command . . . From the standpoint of the church, which represents authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom. -- Erich Fromm (1900-1980) %% Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacrilizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god. -- Mircea Eliade %% Man must learn to rely upon himself. Reading bibles will not protect him from the blasts of winter, but houses, fires, and clothing will. To prevent famine, one plow is worth a million sermons, and even patent medicines will cure more diseases than all the prayers uttered since the beginning of the world. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Man needs faith in his own potential, faith in his ability, within limits, to plan his own life. He must have faith that nature is subject to laws, that the earth will continue to turn on its axis, and the sun will continue for a few billion more years to warm the earth, and that there will be rain to make the plants grow and thus to maintain life on this planet. The very world itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to believe that there exists a world beyond our own skins. Our faith is not to deny the unknown, to avoid it, or to pretend that the unknown is really known. Our faith is above all resolute belief in ourselves as sovereign individuals. We must understand that beyond ourselves there is no baleful influence bent on frustrating our hopes and plans - even those plagued constantly with difficulties. Nature, we must understand, is not deliberately malign nor deliberately benign; it is simply indifferent. With Amado Nervo (who gets the last word in this essay), we must see ourselves as the architect of our own destinies. -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the "Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% Man should cease to expect aid from on high. By this time he should know that heaven has no ear to hear, and no hand to help. The present is the necessary child of all the past. There has been no chance, and there can be no interference. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. -- Denis Diderot %% Many . . . freely confess that they believe what it makes them feel good to believe. Evidence doesn't play much of a role. They are alleviating their fear of randomness by identifying regularities that are not there. -- Murray Gell-Mann %% Many a sober christian would rather admit that a wafer is god than that god is a cruel and capricious tyrant. -- Edward Gibbon %% Many good souls protest against a destructive criticism of christianity and demand a substitute. I do not feel any obligation to substitute a new god for the old ones. I should gladly let them all go. I do not approve of cancer, and yet I do not feel that I have no right to attack a quack who promises a false cure until I have no real cure to propose. As someone said: he who helps destroy the boll-weevil has done as constructive work as he who plants the seed. -- Rupert Hughes, "Why I Quit Going to church", New York, Freethought Press Assn., 1924 %% Many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war. They come at it from an intellectual perspective, versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off. -- United States Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, 2002 %% Many uses of [function objects] in languages like C++ are simply emulations of the missing closure constructor [which exists in Lisp]. -- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_object on "functors" in Lisp %% Mark's declaration that Jesus came from the dispersion (nazareth), meaning the worldwide community of jews outside Judaea (equivalent to diaspora), was misinterpreted by Matthew and Luke to mean that he came from a city called Nazareth [to fulfill prophesy]. In fact the term nazarite, or nazoraios, had nothing to do with any city of Nazareth, since no such place existed until the fifth century CE when one was built by a christian Emperor to whom the nonexistence of Jesus' alleged hometown was an embarrassment. (Although the site of Nazareth was occupied in the first century, there is no evidence of any village named Nazareth earlier than the fifth century . . . ) -- William Harwood, _Mythology's Last gods: Yahweh and Jesus_ (Prometheus), p. 260 %% Markets are interested in profits and profits only; service, quality, and general affluence are different functions altogether. The universal, democratic prosperity that Americans now look back to with such nostalgia was achieved only by a colossal reigning in of markets, by the gargantuan effort of mass, popular organizations like labor unions and of the people themselves, working through a series of democratically elected governments not daunted by the myths of the market. -- Thomas Frank, "One Market Under God" %% Marriage is socialism among two people. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% Martyrs have been sincere. And so have tyrants. Wise men have been sincere. And so have fools. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power. -- Lao Tsu %% Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% Mathematicians practice absolute freedom. -- Henry Adams %% Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trapping of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. -- Bertrand Arthur William Russell %% Matt's Motto: Mountain Dew and donuts . . . because breakfast is the most important meal of the day. %% Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth -- but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three. -- Lazarus Long %% Maybe fat people will be offended because it shows fat people acting fat. Fuck them. And fuck anyone who doesn't like the message that you can consume yourself into oblivion. First, that's not a political sentiment; it's been politicized by assholes with political agendas, mostly those who want your support in exchange for their assurance you can be as big a pig as you want and it'll never affect anything. Second, if you can't enjoy incredibly well-made movies just because they don't share your opinions, you're a fucking douche. Grow a thicker skin and get your head out of Fox News' asshole long enough to appreciate art and diversity. Probably these same dipshits will label it more Hollywood liberal propaganda. It's not. -- The Filthy Critic reviews "Wall-E" %% Maybe you don't like your job, maybe you didn't get enough sleep -- but nobody likes their job, nobody got enough sleep. Maybe you just had the worst day of your life; well, you know, there's no escape. That's no excuse. Just suck up and be nice. -- "Pixie", by Ani DiFranco %% McDonald: Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are - well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good - not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort. Dawkins: There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting - it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true. -- Richard Dawkins interview by Sheena McDonald %% Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. -- Bill Gates %% Mediocrity finds safety in standardization. -- Frederick Crane %% Meetings are an addictive, highly self indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate. -- Dave Barry %% Men are rewarded and punished not for what they do, but rather how their acts are defined. This is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves. -- Thomas Szasz %% Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life. -- Aristotle, quoted in "2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt", by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996 %% Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts which they entertain on such subjects. They make a merit of implicit faith; and disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asservations and the most positive bigotry. -- David Hume, on doctrinaire religions %% Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds. -- Thomas Paine %% Men freely believe that what they wish to desire. -- Julius Caesar %% Men love their country, not because it is great, but because it is their own. -- Seneca %% Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -- Blaise Pascal %% Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active. -- Leonardo da Vinci %% Men of quality are not afraid of women for equality. %% Men still remember the first kiss after women have forgotten the last. %% Mental power tended to corrupt, and absolute intelligence tended to corrupt absolutely, until the victim eschewed violence entirely in favor of smart solutions to stupid problems. -- Piers Anthony %% Mental slavery is mental death and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality", 1873 %% Microsoft shouldn't be broken up. It should be shut down. -- Bruce Schneier, Cryptogram, 15/05/2000. %% Militant agnostic: I don't know, and you don't either. %% Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz %% Ministers say that they teach charity. That is natural. They live on alms. All beggars teach that others should give. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Truth" 1897 %% Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the virgin Mary appear to lamaists, mohammedans, or hindus who have never heard of her. -- Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), New York Times Book Review %% Modeled after Apple's "Proudly going out of business for twenty-five years now.", I give you: "Almost dead for ten years now." -- "A new slogan for Linux" comment in response to an article that said [GNU/]Linux is dead. %% Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. -- G.K. Chesterton %% Mohandas K. Gandhi often changed his mind publicly. An aide once asked him how he could so freely contradict this week what he had said just last week. The great man replied that it was because this week he knew better. %% Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. -- Aristotle %% Morey's Motto: "For I perceive that behind this seemingly unrelated sequence of events, there lurks a singular, sinister attitude of mind." "Whose?" "MINE! HA-HA!" %% Morey: So, I hear Nathan's been asking you for help with [GNU/]Linux. Cort: Nathan? Oh yeah! he's the one that likes to do things the painful way! %% Most atheists do waste their lives battling against the unconquerable monster of religion -- a monster impervious to the spears of reason, impenetrable by the bullets of logic, and insensible to even the thrust of common sense. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% Most competition for open source software comes from other open source software. It's far more cutthroat than the commercial software market could ever be. -- http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000842.html %% Most humans feel what Paul Kurtz has called the "transcendent temptation," the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning . . . Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about *resisting* the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it; about facing the existential vacuum in all its horrible majesty; and constructing a life of compassion and exuberance on its brink without relying on the dubious shelter of faith. -- Tom Flynn, "The Difference a Word Makes", Free Inquiry %% Most language features I have ever seen are already in Lisp. -- Bill Birch %% Most of the patients come to our abortion clinic as a result of failure of a birth control method, or a failure of our system to provide birth control. -- Dr. Clayton H. McCracken, director of Inter Mountain Planned Parenthood, Fall 2000 %% Most of these gods were revengeful, savage, lustful, and ignorant. As they generally depended upon their priests for information, their ignorance can hardly excite our astonishment. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Most people exhibit what political scientists call "the conservatism of the peasantry." Don't lose what you've got. Don't change. Don't take a chance, because you might end up starving to death. Play it safe. Buy just as much as you need. Don't waste time. When we think about risk, human beings and corporations realize in their heads that risks are necessary to grow, to survive. But when it comes down to keeping good people when the crunch comes, or investing money in something untried, only the brave reach deep into their pockets and play the game as it must be played. -- David Lammers, "Yakitori", Electronic Engineering Times, January 18, 1988 %% Music in the soul can be heard by the universe. -- Lao Tsu %% Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. -- John Lennon %% Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? -- "Civil Disobedience", Henry David Thoreau %% My School Prayer Now I lay me down to learn Which to read and which to burn Pray the lord my soul to turn Over to the school board. Free to worship as I please, Long as it pleases the authorities. Hear me praying on my knees My school prayer. "Once again, boys and girls, I'll remind you that this activity is not mandatory, and those of you who don't believe in a judeo-christian god as defined by Congress should feel free to sit quietly with your fingers in your ears like the atheistic heathen you are. Agnostics may want to plug just one ear." May my every sneeze be blessed. May I pass my urine test. May my mind be underest- imated and ignored, lord Keep my classroom safe and clean. Sanctify my M-16. Every morning, eight-fifteen, It's my school prayer. God bless California, Arizona, North Dakota, Texas, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio and New York, of course. The forty-eight contiguous, And the two ambiguous. The greatest country god ever saved from the pagans. And while we're at it, dear lord, bless the Reagans. God is good, and god is great. So we'd hate to separate Church and state or ourselves from pat- riarchy and theocracy. Peace on earth, thy kingdom come Into my curriculum. Make my head a hollow drum. Strike me dumb Except to mumble My school prayer. -- The Foremen,"My School Prayer", from the "What's Left?" album %% My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. -- George Santayana %% My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can. -- Frank Zappa %% My choice after I quit film school was either to be a script writer for porn flicks or a [GNU/]Linux UI designer. And to tell you the truth, there's hardly any difference. -- Ilan Volow, on his Notes about himself on http://www.advogato.org/ %% My country is the world, and my religion to do good. -- Thomas Paine %% My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right. -- Carl Schurz, 1872 %% My creed is this: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to help make others so. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Motto on the title page of Vol. xii, Works %% My faith in the future rests squarely on the belief that man, if he doesn't first destroy himself, will find new answers in the universe, new technologies, new disciplines, which will contribute to a vastly different and better world in the twenty-first century. Recalling what has happened in my short lifetime in the fields of communication and transportation and the life sciences, I marvel at the pessimists who tell us that we have reached the end of our productive capacity, who project a future of primarily dividing up what we now have and making do with less. To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom. -- "With No Apologies" (1979) by Barry Goldwater %% My feelings as a christian points me to my lord and savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, god's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the lord at last rose in his might and seized the scourge to drive out of the temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that he had to shed his blood upon the cross. As a christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice . . . And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed. -- Adolf Hitler, speech on April 12, 1922, published in "My New Order", quoted in Freethought Today April 1990 %% My guess is that he has forgotten. After all he is 2,000 years old and is probably suffering from advanced Alzheimer's disease -- staggering around pissing in his toga, exposing himself to the little teeny-bopper angels. The old man should pull the plug. -- Earle D. Jones, on Jesus and the rapture %% My lesbianism is an act of christian charity. All those women out there are praying for a man, and I'm giving them my share. -- Rita Mae Brown %% My message is not that biological determinists were bad scientists or even that they were always wrong. Rather, I believe that science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information. I also present this view as an upbeat for science, not as a gloomy epitaph for a noble hope sacrificed on the alter of human limitations. I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it. Galileo was not shown the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion. He had threatened the church's conventional argument for social and doctrinal stability: the static world order with planets circling about a central earth, priests subordinate to the pope and serfs to their lord. But the church soon made its peace with Galileo's cosmology. They had no choice; the earth really does revolve about the sun. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man" %% My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it. -- Thomas Alva Edison, "Do We Live Again?" %% My objection to christianity is that it is infinitely cruel, infinitely selfish, and, I might add, infinitely absurd. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% My practise as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. And I should be a coward if I did not state my theoretical views in public. -- J.B.S. Haldane, cited by L. Beverly Halstead in his article "Evolution -- the Fossils Say Yes!" in _Science and Creationism_, edited by Ashley Montagu [Oxford U. Press, 1984] page 241) %% 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 %% My response to the statement that AIDS is god's punishment against homosexuals is that in that case, god has very bad aim. -- David Bratman %% My rights don't need management. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% N.A.T.H.A.N.: Networked Android Trained for Hazardous Assassination and Nullification -- my name, according to http://www.brunching.com/toys/toy-cyborger.html %% Nathan: I thought this song was by Enya? Morey: No, Enya doesn't have songs with children screaming in them. (discussing Adiemus' "Adiemus") %% Nathan: It's too early in the morning . . . Mike: It's one in the afternoon. Nathan: It's too early in the afternoon . . . %% Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% Naturalistic atheists aren't fanatical, they're just fed up. I know a guy who is a dedicated conspiracy theorist. I have taken the time to show him the evidence that contradicts all of this, pointed him to sites and books, explained the science, shown him historical records. I've actually done a lot of work to present the facts. He has only read a few cover blurbs, some web sites, and cannot even be bothered to formulate coherent rational arguments. He hasn't even read the books he hands to me as "proof". When I go back to him and tell him that the book doesn't say at all what he claims, he admits he hasn't read it and then claims it was written by an illuminati shill. I got fed up. I got tired of the bullshit, of the sloppy thinking, of the unfounded claims, and I got fed up with doing all the work of researching and spoon feeding knowledge to someone who couldn't even be bothered to look for it himself. I am sick of the laziness, the willful ignorance, the deliberate stupidity. But what I am sick of most is the utter contempt for the truth that this person shows. This is how religious believers appear to naturalistic atheists. I understand what [you're] saying because I used to make all the same arguments -- I was a believer too. But the arguments fell apart, and I could not honestly continue to believe in or encourage people to believe in something which had no evidence to support it and a great deal of evidence to suggest that it was a cognitive error. And I do not in any way consider my loss of religious belief unfortunate. That you cannot disprove the existence of god, or the effectiveness of prayer, isn't saying much. You also cannot disprove the existence of the invisible, insubstantial, oderless and silent dragon I may claim to have in my basement. I don't actually care whether you believe in god or not. What I cannot stand is the utter contempt for the truth shared by fundamentalist christians, conspiracy nuts, new age flakes, professional psychics, and all the rest. I'm tired of them sitting around with their heads up their asses, demanding that we spoon feed them proof of reality in tiny, sugarcoated bites so that their delicate minds can cope with it. Go and believe what you want. We are the least of your problems. You have a militant religious faction in America who wishes to create a theocracy, a state religion, and who currently have the ear of the president and many of the people in the ruling party. As the people who landed on Plymouth rock knew, a state religion is almost never your religion. If you want to make a difference, don't bother arguing with atheists. Go and argue with your fellow believers, because they do care what you believe, and some of them want the power to force you to believe exactly as they do. -- Thangodin (177516) on http://slashdot.org %% Naturally, since [the Sumerians] didn't know what caused the flood anymore than we do, they blamed the gods. (That's the advantage of religion. You're never short an explanation for anything.) -- Isaac Asimov, in essay "The Last Man on Earth", 1982, reprinted in his essay collection "The Tyrannosaurus Prescription" %% Nature and Mind! - Terms christian ears resist! For talk like this we burn the atheist! Such words are full of danger and despite; Nature means sin, and mind the devil! The two breed doubt, misshapen evil. Their ill-begot hermaphrodite. -- Goethe, "Faust", Philip Wayne, Penguin Books %% Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton. -- "Queen Mab", III, Percy Bysshe Shelley %% Nature tells man to consult reason, and to take it for his guide: religion teaches him that his reason is corrupted, that it is only a treacherous guide, given by a deceitful god to lead his creatures astray. Nature tells man to enlighten himself, to search after truth, to instruct himself in his duties: religion enjoins him to examine nothing, to remain in ignorance, to fear truth. -- Paul Henry Thiry d'Holbach, "Systeme de la Nature" (1770) %% Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. -- Francis Bacon %% Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. -- Abraham Lincoln %% Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. -- William Pitt, 1783 %% Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church and state.' -- Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947) %% Neither heaven nor hell, and surely not a spaceship, will be found in the tail of a comet. -- Harlan Ellison %% Never attribute to devil-worshipping conspiracies what opportunism, emotional instability, and religious bigotry are sufficient to explain. -- Shawn Carlson, Ph.D. %% Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it will be dear to you. -- Thomas Jefferson %% Never give up - never surrender! -- GalaxyQuest %% Never let your schooling interfere with your education. %% Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a 'right to life.' A piece of protoplasm has no rights -— and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable. -- Ayn Rand %% Never put off till run-time what you can do at compile-time. -- David Gries %% Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. -- Nelson Algren %% Never tell people how to do things. Tell them WHAT to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. -- Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. %% Never trust a [machine] you can't repair yourself. %% Never trust software you don't have sources for. %% Never yet has a god been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a god been described so that a concept of him was made possible to human thought. -- Annie Besant %% Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out any quicker than the christmas spirit. -- Kin Hubbard %% No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, . . . keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace. -- United States Constitution, Article I, Section 10 %% No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. -- Aesop %% No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the deity in the bible. -- Steve Allen, "More Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality" %% No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% No devil, no hell. No hell, no atonement. No atonement, no preaching, no gospel. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "orthodoxy", 1884 %% No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. -- Aristotle %% No god. No master. -- Margret Sanger %% No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it. -- Frank Lloyd Wright %% No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite horror. All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood -- all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death -- all of this is nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul. This is the consolation of the christian religion. This is the justice of god -- the mercy of christ. This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor. It founded the Inquisition, forged the chains, and furnished the fagots. It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain. Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed. It makes man an eternal victim and god an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge. Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, god. While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Why I Am An Agnostic", 1896 %% No knowledge is too much to bear. %% No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. -- Abraham Lincoln, October 16, 1854 %% No man with any sense of humor ever founded a religion. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "What Must We Do To Be Saved", 1880 %% No matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep up. %% No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% No matter what someone else has done, it still matters how we treat people. It matters to our humanity that we treat offenders according to standards that we recognize as just. Justice is not revenge — it's deciding for a solution that is oriented towards peace, peace being the harder but more human way of reacting to injury. That is the very basis of the idea of rights. -- Judith Butler, The Believer, Interview - Issue 2 %% No one . . . I repeat, no one ever died for a flag. They may have died for freedom, which, by the way, includes . . . the freedom . . . to burn the fucking flag. -- Bill Hicks %% No one has an idea really of where we should draw the line. What about the bible? Every nut who kills people has a bible lying around. If you're looking for violent rape imagery, the bible's right there in your hotel room. If you just want to look up ways to screw people up, there it is, and you're justified because god told you to. You have Shakespeare and you have Sophocles -- what are we going to do, lose _Oedipus Rex_ if someone pokes an eye out? -- Penn Jillette, from Reason magazine, on censorship of violent TV shows %% No one is fit to be trusted with power . . . No one . . . Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of . . . And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate. -- Charles Percy Snow, The Light and the Dark %% No one who has lived in the world as long as you & I have, can entertain the pious delusion that it is engineered upon principles of benevolence . . . the cosmos remains always beautiful and profoundly interesting in every corner -- and if I had as many lives as a cat I would leave no corner unexplored. -- Thomas Henry Huxley %% No other country has as diverse religious groups as the U.S., which has at least 52 major denominations with memberships exceeding 100,000. The Yearbook of American and Canadian churches lists 223 sects, cults, and denominations, not counting groups such as the First church of christ, scientist, which provide no membership statistics. -- Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts %% No people are all bad, just as none are all good. -- Tecumseh, (Shawnee) to his nephew Spemica Lawba 1790 %% No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or nonattendance. -- U.S. Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, Majority opinion Everson v. Board of Education 330 U.S. 1 (1947) %% No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack" %% No system can be made perfectly safe. But to claim that commercial software is safer from deliberate authorial corruption takes willful and deliberate ignorance. I mean, seriously, claiming that the software I can't see, that I'm not allowed to see, is more likely to be pure then the stuff anybody (or anybody I hire) can look at is? That flies in the face of both logic and common sense, and is the kind of claim that has been inflated into an long article to blind the reader with words before it can even come close to being seriously entertained; a paragraph summary doesn't pass the laugh test. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. -- Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947) %% No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish. -- David Hume, "Of Miracles", from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748 %% No wild beasts are as hostile to men as christian sects in general are to one another. -- Julian, Emperor of Rome 361-363 A.D. %% No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother. -- Margaret H. Sanger %% No, I'm not a socialist. But I'm coming to the belief that collective ownership of wealth is a good thing. If Bank of America was owned by its employees, then their salaries would show up on the "income" side of the accounting ledger rather than the "expenses" side, and much of the motivation to outsource would evaporate. Otherwise, there is an inherent conflict of interest between management and labor: management wants to keep costs low, and labor is simply another expense to be minimized. Additionally, a worker-owned setup is necessarily more efficient. Workers have the greatest incentive to make the company run as efficiently as possible, so management doesn't have to spend its time figuring out how to best motivate the employees. The workers would just tell them. Worker-owned companies are also more concerned with long-term stability, because there is no golden parachute waiting if they can just keep the stock prices from tanking in the next three quarters. There is only the promise of continued employment. Finally, when a few investors own a company, the goal is to maximize their profit. When workers own a company, they still want to maximize their returns, but they can accept a wider variety of payment: a cleaner environment, more free time to spend with their families, improvements in the social fabric of their communities, less stressful working conditions. In short, collective ownership allows the wealth of a company to serve the many, not the few. -- comment by An Onerous Coward (222037) on http://slashdot.org %% No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man's farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. -- Thomas Jefferson, to Joseph Cabell, 1816 %% No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere. -- Sigmund Freud, "The Future of an Illusion", 1927 %% Nobody forced you to be on the internet, feel free to leave again if you don't like it. -- comment on http://slashdot.org to those who don't quite understand that posting something on the Internet is pretty much putting it in public domain. %% Nobody has ever taken notable pains to locate the legendary heaven; but probably that is because nobody ever thought seriously of going to a heaven. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Nobody is one block of harmony. We are all afraid of something, or feel limited in something. We all need somebody to talk to. It would be good if we talked to each other -- not just pitter-patter, but real talk. We shouldn't be so afraid, because most people really like this contact; that you show you are vulnerable makes them free to be vulnerable too. It's so much easier to be together when we drop our masks. -- Liv Ullman %% Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid. -- Mark Twain %% None of the people who claim to have found god have given us any reason to accept that they have, indeed, found anything but their own delusions. -- Kelsey Bjarnason %% Nor is it possible to explain distinctly, how the deity can be the mediate cause of all the actions of men, without being the author of sin and moral turpitude. -- David Hume, "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" 1748 %% Not a lack of belief, but adherence to false knowledge is the enemy of progress. And certain that we have found everything worth searching for, we see no point in further search and inquiry. Believing what is unworthy of belief, believing falsehood as if it were incontrovertible truth, and sure that we know everything we will ever need to know, we are worse than ignorant. -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% Not one of the learned gentlemen who pretend that the Mosaic laws are filled with justice and intelligence, would live, for a moment, in any country where such laws were in force. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses", 1879 %% Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition. -- Freedom From Religion Foundation %% Not only were a good many of the revolutionary leaders more deist than christian, the actual number of church members was rather small. Perhaps as few as five percent of the populace were church members in 1776 -- Lynn R. Buzzard, Exec Dir of christian Legal Society, as quoted in _They Haven't Got a Prayer_, Elgin IL: David C. Cook, 1982, p. 81 %% 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, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% Nothing can be more infamous than intellectual tyranny. To put chains upon the body is nothing compared with putting shackles on the brain. No god is entitled to the worship or respect of a man who does not give, even to the meanest of his children, every right he claims for himself. If the pentateuch is true, religious persecution is a duty, the dungeons of the Inquisition were temples and the clank of every chain upon the limbs of heresy was music to the ear of god. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Nothing can exceed the mendacity of the religious press. I have had some little experience with political editors, and am forced to say, that until I read the religious papers, I did not know what malicious and slimy falsehoods could be constructed from ordinary words. The ingenuity with which the real and apparent meaning can be tortured out of language is simply amazing. The average religious editor is intolerant and insolent . . . and always accounts for the brave and generous actions of unbelievers by low, base, and unworthy motives. -- "The Ghosts", Robert Green Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p.260 %% Nothing changes history like the christian historian. -- Emmett F. Fields %% Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion. -- Scott Adams, "The Dilbert Principle" %% Nothing fails like prayer. -- Annie Laurie Gaylor %% Nothing frightens me more than religion at my door. -- John Cale %% Nothing is a problem once you debug the code. -- John Carmack %% Nothing is greater than to break the chains from the bodies of men -- nothing nobler than to destroy the phantom of the soul. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Abraham Lincoln", 1894 %% Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview -- nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack" %% Nothing is more dangerous than the certainty of being right . . . All the massacres were done by virtue, in the name of the true faith, of the legitimate nationalism, of the idoneous politics, of the just ideology; in short, in the name of the combat against other people's truth, the combat against satan. -- Francois Jacob %% Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% Nothing is so pleasing to these gods as the butchery of unbelievers. Nothing so enrages them, even now, as to have someone deny their existence. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Nothing motivates a man more than to see his boss put in an honest day's work. %% Nothing seems to kill me No matter how hard I try Nothing is closing my eyes Nothing can beat me down for your pain or delight And nothing seems to break me No matter how far I fall Nothing can break me at all Not one for giving up though not invincible I know I've given everything I need I'd give you everything I own I'd give in if it could at least be ours alone I've given everything I could To blow it to hell and gone Burrow down in and Blow up the outside world Someone tried to tell me something Don't let the world bring you down Nothing can do me in before I do myself So save it for your own and the ones you can help Want to make it understood Wanting though I never would Trying though I know it's wrong Blowing it to hell and gone Wishing though I never could Blow up the outside world -- Soundgarden, "Blow up the Outside World" %% Now christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace, and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so called christians: The inquisition, the conquistadors, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day bible belt. -- William S. Burroughs %% Now it's over I'm dead and I haven't Done anything that I want Or, I'm still alive And there's nothing I want to do -- They Might be Giants, "Dead" %% Now let it be written in history and on Mr. Lincoln's tombstone: 'He died an unbeliever.' -- William H. Herndon, Abraham Lincoln's law partner in Springfield since 1844, "Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life", 1896. Quoted in "Freethinkers" by Susan Jacoby, 2004 %% Now must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in god on the minds of children, producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in god, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake. -- Charles Darwin %% Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old's right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well- functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble. -- Federal Judge Richard Posner, 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, American Amusement Machine Assoc. v. Kendrick No. 00-3643 (7th Cir., March 23, 2001) %% Now they say that this book is inspired. I do not care whether it is or not; the question is, Is it true? if it is true, it doesn't need to be inspired. Nothing needs inspiration except a falsehood or a mistake. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Nowhere is there an account or portrait of christ laughing . . . he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does one see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised . . . -- I.R. %% Nuclear war can ruin your whole compile. -- Karl Lehenbauer %% Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit. (There is no great genius without some touch of madness.) -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca %% Nyarlathotep saved me. He can save you too. -- signature seen on slashdot.org in response to a "Jesus saved me" signature %% OEM/VAR sales magazines conducting security testing on vulnerabilities using 4th-party modified exploits that don't work, and reporting on it. My head hurts. -- Rain Forest Puppy, "Contemplations on dvwssr.dll and how it affects life" %% Obscene? Obscene is young men being trained to drop fire on people, but their commanders not allowing them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene. %% Occident, n.: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by christians, powerful sub-tribe of the hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call "war" and "commerce." These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The devil's Dictionary" %% Of all the American manias, worship of the military is particularly noxious, and if allowed to grow unchecked, it can be especially dangerous -- that is, if you take seriously liberty, freedom and related human concepts. -- "Red State Son: Freedom Granted, Freedom Won", http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2006/01/freedom-granted-freedom-won.html %% Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. -- Thomas Paine %% Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of causality--belief in god may lead to societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in god; each factor may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, these facts prove that atheism is perfectly compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure a society's health. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% Of course, in Perl culture, almost nothing is prohibited. My feeling is that the rest of the world already has plenty of perfectly good prohibitions, so why invent more? -- Larry Wall, "Open Sources" %% Of greater significance was the reconciliation with the Russian orthodox church, the traditional bastion of Russian nationalism and the tsarist regime, which now became associated with the cult of Stalin and resumed its role as a state church. -- Alan Bullock, "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, ISBN 0-394-58601-8), chapter, "Stalin's New Order," pp 906-907, on Stalin's wartime reconciliation with the church, showing that the the "atheism" of the communist party had nothing to do with the treatment accorded religions or the religious during Stalin's regime %% Of the three popes, John the twenty-third was the first victim; he fled and was brought back a prisoner; the most scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest. -- Gibbons, _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ %% Often a non-christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances, . . . and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the christian and laugh to scorn. -- St. Augustine, "De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim" (The Literal Meaning of Genesis) %% Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't need them and the bad people don't follow them so what good are they? -- Ammon Hennacy %% Oh, screw 'em. -- Republican president Richard M. Nixon on the troops in Vietnam. %% Oh, you're just upset because you resemble an ugly religious figure! -- Jason Marino %% Okay: we have eleven internal memos ripped horribly out of context. And in a bizarre coincidence, they tell exactly the same story as a gigantic amount of public information. But that's irrelevant. What's important is we know if we had access to all the relevant government documents, they would tell a completely different story. If only Tony Blair and George Bush had the authority to declassify them! Sadly, of course, this is impossible. Blair and Bush are completely powerless in this matter. All they can do is tell us how they would be completely vindicated if only we knew things we aren't allowed to know. -- Jonathan Schwarz %% On Sept. 11, 2001, roughly 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists. Since then, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure that doesn't happen again. But the same year -- and every year since, according to the National Academies of Science -- about 22,000 Americans died of treatable diseases because they couldn't afford health care. -- http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/health-care-abroad-questions-for-tr-reid/?ref=health %% On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. -- Narrator, "Fight Club" %% On every hand there seems to be design to defeat design. If god created man -- if he is the father of us all, why did he make the criminals, the insane, the deformed and idiotic? Should the mother, who clasps to her breast an idiot child, thank god? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Why I Am An Agnostic", 1896 %% On our campus the UNIX system has proved to be not only an effective software tool, but an agent of technical and social change within the University. -- John Lions (University of New South Wales) %% On proprietary platforms, eventually you'll run into "you can't do that." On open platforms, you'll run into "you have to learn more to do that." -- "Editing audio in Linux", http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/linux-audio.ars/5 %% On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: "An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct creators must have been at work' -- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man", p. 178 %% On the Internet, there is no 'they'. There's only a very, very large 'us'. -- Douglas Adams %% On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies like the crashing of this bus [full of children from a Roman catholic school and for no apparent reason but with wholesale loss of life] are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless _good_ [italics in original] fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. 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, _River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life_, 1995, BasicBooks, New York; ISBN 0-465-01606-5 Also quoted in "god's Utility Function", pg 85, November, 1995 _Scientific American_ %% On the inner walls of the holy of holies in the Temple of Luxor inscribed by King Amenhotep III (1538-1501 B.C.) the birth of Horus is pictured in four scenes very much like christian representations of the annunciation and the immaculate conception of the virgin Mary, and the birth and adoration of the christ child. These four consecutive scenes, as engraved on the walls of the Temple of Luxor, are reproduced in Gerald Massey's Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World Vol. II (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907) page 757, and may be described as follows . . . -- John G. Jackson, "Christianity Before Christ" Austin TX: American atheist Press, 1985 p. 110 %% On the law that requires women to wait twenty-four hours before they are permitted to have an abortion: I think it's a good law. the other day I wanted to go get an abortion. I really wanted an abortion, but then I thought about it and it turned out I was just thirsty. -- Sarah Silverman %% On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation . . . -- Charles Darwin %% On the other hand, the popular e-mail encryption program PGP has always used public algorithms. And none of those algorithms has ever been broken. The same is true for the various Internet cryptographic protocols: SSL, S/MIME, IPSec, SSH, and so on. -- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999 %% On the subject of C program indentation: In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt. -- Blair P. Houghton %% On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), letter to Lady Pollock %% On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. -- Charles Babbage %% Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice. In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the christians called it "christmas" and went to church; the jews called it "hanukka" and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say "Merry christmas!" or "Happy hanukka!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!" -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" %% Once purged of the insanity, plagiarisms, illegalities, contradictions, and the perverse, the bible could be printed on match book covers while increasing it's usefulness. %% Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky. -- Rainer Maria Rilke %% Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, "I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom." The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!" But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. Yet, in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the messiah, come to save us all!" And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more Messiah than you. The river delight to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. But they cried the more, "Saviour!" all the while clinging to the rocks, making legends of a saviour. -- Richard Bach %% Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So, they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener.... So they set up a barbed wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol it with bloodhounds... But no shrieks even suggest that some intruder intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves." At last the Skeptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even no gardener at all?" -- Anthony Flew %% Once upon a time, some people lived in a cave, and no one knew that there was a world outside of the cave. The cave provided everything they needed, with plenty of fish and water. Luminous mushrooms provided both food and light. The only thing in short supply was air. All air came through a small shaft connected to the outside world. The shaft was controlled by a single company, Microshaft, which carefully rationed its flow to maximize demand and collected breathing license fees from everyone who had to breath. To save money the company hired cheap labor to operate the valves, but these laborers were often barely competent, and the air supply was unreliable. The shaft was poorly maintained, the air was often stale and laden with viruses. By selling a product that cost them essentially nothing to produce, Microshaft's profits were enormous and they became rich and powerful. One day, a group of daring young renegades discovered that there were other ways to get air, just by moving some rocks that blocked openings to the outside. And they offered their air free. At first people were hesitant to use Free Air, thinking something must be wrong with it since it was free. Initially Microshaft ignored the renegades, dismissing them as a fringe movement and minor nuisance. But eventually Microshaft saw them as a threat. They started a major marketing campaign to convince people that the Free Air was bad for their health. But people found that they actually felt better and healthier breathing the free, fresh air. Microshaft added more and more features to their air, perfuming it and coloring it with smoke to give it "added value". Many people started to dislike Microshaft's heavy, bloated air that was hard to breath and began flocking in droves to the sources of Free Air. About this time, after some years of hard volunteer work, Open Air developers finally increased the size of a Free Air portal so that a person could actually squeeze through to the outside. The first brave individuals who ventured through it discovered that not only was there an unlimited supply of air in the outside world, there was no way you could harness and control its supply. Alarmed, Microshaft sought to have the government declare Free Air illegal since it threatened their business model, which they had developed and rightfully earned through many years of hard work. They called the use of Free Air "theft" and claimed that the "viral" nature of the Public Breathing License advocated by many Open Air rebels would threaten the livelihood of Microshaft's suppliers and distributors. Indeed, the whole economy of the cave would collapse, they said. Laws were quickly passed and the portals of Free Air were sealed off. A charitable organization called the Business Air Alliance was formed to help protect businesses against the threat of Free Air portals. By proving that it was theoretically possible to fund terrorist organizations with the money saved by breathing Free Air, the BAA successfully lobbied to strengthen the laws so that any attempt to make an opening to the outside became punishable by death. Possession of shovels and picks became a criminal offense, and the BAA performed random audits to help citizens comply with the law. For their protection, everyone was required to wear an Air Rights Management security device, which would send an alarm to the authorities if it didn't detect a secret mix of fumes found only in Microshaft air. As time passed, Microshaft and the government became indistinguishable. To prevent future uprisings, a new feature was added to the air to keep the people sedated happily ever after. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Once upon a time, there was a non-conforming sparrow who decided not to fly south for the winter. However, soon after the weather turned cold, the sparrow changed his mind and reluctantly started to fly south. After a short time, ice began to form his on his wings and he fell to earth in a barnyard almost frozen. A cow passed by and crapped on this little bird and the sparrow thought it was the end, but the manure warmed him and defrosted his wings. Warm and happy the little sparrow began to sing. Just then, a large Tom cat came by and hearing the chirping investigated the sounds. As Old Tom cleared away the manure, he found the chirping bird and promptly ate him. There are three morals to this story: (1) Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy. (2) Everyone who gets you out of shit is not necessarily your friend. (3) If you are warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut. %% Once we decide to be dishonest with our children, our students, or our readers, we have a vested interest in suppressing honesty, in censorship. -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in general, THEN, and only then, have you reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% Once, it was very hard to get into the public square and very easy to fall out of it. One ill-timed word, even a whiff of public scandal, and all the hard work you did in the grange hall on all those winter nights was for nothing. No longer. You can be Bill Bennett, gambling with both fists, but if your books still sell, you can continue to scold the nation about its sins. You can be Bill O'Reilly, calling up subordinates to proposition them both luridly and comically - loofahs? falafels? - and if more people tune in to watch you than tune in to watch some other blowhard, you can keep your job lecturing America about the dangers of its secular culture. Just don't be boring. And keep the ratings up. Idiot America wants to be entertained. -- Charles Pierce in "Esquire", 2005-11-01 %% One bright Sunday morning, in the shadows of the steeple, By the Relief Office, I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there whistling, This land was made for you and me. Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back, This land was made for you and me. As I went walking, I saw a sign there, And on the sign it said: "No Trespassing." But on the other side, it didn't say nothing, That side was made for you and me. -- Woody Guthrie, "This Land Is Your Land" (verses 4, 6, 7) %% One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. -- Helen Keller %% One does not need to puzzle long over why religionists hate atheists so venomously. Atheists stir up the suppressed doubts of believers to the point of producing anguish. This is the anguish that incited believers to burn heretics and atheists at the stake in olden times to remove the source of the unsettling, disturbing doubts that plagued the believers. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% One finds it inexplicable that an all-powerful god would try to make his will known to the world by revealing himself to such few people. It was revelation only to those few; to the rest of the world and future generations it was hearsay -- passed by word of mouth for many generations. Yet such hearsay is the very foundation of judeo-christianity. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Great Infidels", 1881 also from Speech, New York City, 1 May 1881 %% One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. -- Elbert Hubbard %% One man's "magic" is another man's engineering. "Supernatural" is a null word. -- Robert Anson Heinlein %% One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives. -- Ayn Rand, "A Last Survey — Part I", The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. IV, No. 2, 1975. %% One must be impressed by the zealous concern of today's consumer for what he consumes. there has been a veritable renaissance of such interest in light of the current realization that many products do not live up to their names and claims. But it is not yet widely reconized that religion, like many of these products, also can be useless and even dangerous, at least from a psychiatric point of view...I am concerned, therefore, with the effects that religion can be shown to have on mental health as well as on mental illness. -- Eli S. Chese %% One must keep in mind that religious liberty did not come easily. It did not simply ripen and fall to nonchristians as a gift. It had to be fought for in the legislative halls, in constitutional conventions and in the courts. What has been achieved, easily can be lost. -- Morton Borden, Reason magazine June, 1987, from Menendez Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom %% One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the 21st century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns -- about ethics, spiritual experience and the inevitability of human suffering -- in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987 %% One of the sponsors of the creche was asked about his interest in viewing it while it stood on Scarsdale's Boniface Circle during the christmas season. To my surprise as the questioner, it turned out the he never bothered to go look at the creche at all, let alone to admire or draw inspiration from it. But on reflection, it should not have been so surprising. The creche was not there for him to see or to appreciate for its intrinsic spiritual value in his religious universe. It was there for others, who professed other religions or none, so that the clout of his religious group should be made manifest - above all to any in the sharply divided village who would have preferred that it not be there. -- _Faith And Freedom, Religious Liberty In America_, Marvin E. Frankel, retired Federal Judge, p. 61 %% One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. By definition, "news" means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it's probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported -- automobile deaths, domestic violence -- when it's so common that it's not news, then you should start worrying. -- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram", May 15, 2005. %% One of the things that distinguishes nerds from normal people is that nerds have a low tolerance for falsehood. This is why we don't have any friends. The technology we work with every day has no sense of humour. The system of 19 coupled differential equations I am banging my head against right now doesn't care how I feel or what I think: the only thing that matters is that my code--and my math--is exactly right. -- comment by radtea (464814) on http://slashdot.org %% One social evil for which the new testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-semitism. -- Steve Allen, "Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality" %% One thing is that, unlike any other Western democracy that I know of, this country has operated since its beginnings with a basic distrust of government. We are constituted not for efficient operation of government, but for minimizing the possibility of abuse of power. It took the events of the Roosevelt era -- a catastrophic economic collapse and a world war -- to introduce the strong central government that we now know. But in most parts of the country today, the reluctance to have government is still strong. I think, barring a series of catastrophic events, that we can look to at least another decade during which many of the big problems around this country will have to be addressed by institutions other than federal government. -- Bobby R. Inman, Admiral, USN, Retired, former director of Naval Intelligence, vice director of the DIA, former director of the NSA, deputy directory of Central Intelligence, former chairman and CEO of MCC. %% One would no more join christianity to show love and acceptance than one would become a Nazi to show racial tolerance. -- Kelsey Bjarnason %% Only he is a truly ethical, a truly human being, who has the courage to see through his own religious feelings and needs. -- Ludwig Feuerbach %% Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving god while this same god drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world's suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is -- and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% Only the educated are free. -- Epictetus %% Only the other day a gentleman was telling me of a case of special providence. He knew it. he had been the subject of it. A few years ago he was about to go on a ship when he was detained. He did not go, and the ship was lost with all on board. "Yes!" I said, "Do you think the people who were drowned believed in special providence?" Think of the infinite egotism of such a doctrine. Here is a man that fails to go upon a ship with five hundred passengers and they go down to the bottom of the sea -- fathers, mothers, children, and loving husbands and wives waiting upon the shores of expectation. Here is one poor little wretch that did not happen to go! And he thinks that god, the infinite being, interfered in his poor little withered behalf and let the rest all go. That is special providence. Why does special providence allow all the crimes? Why are the wife-beaters protected, and why are the wives and children left defenseless if the hand of god is over us all? Who protects the insane? Why does providence permit insanity? But the church cannot give up special providence. If there is no such thing, then no prayers, no worship, no churches, no priests. What would become of national thanksgiving? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "orthodoxy", 1884 %% Only the very ignorant are perfectly satisfied that they know. To the common man the great problems are easy. He has no trouble in accounting for the universe. He can tell you the origin and destiny of man and the why and wherefore of things. As a rule, he is a believer in special providence, and is egotistic enough to suppose that everything that happens in the universe happens in reference to him. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Liberty In Literature", 1890 %% Only those who leisurely approach that which the masses are busy about can be busy about that which the masses take leisurely. -- Lao Tsu %% Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;) -- Linus Benedict Torvalds, about his failing hard drive on linux.cs.helsinki.fi %% Ooohh . . . "Free BSD is faster over loop back, when compared to [GNU/]Linux over the wire". Film at 11. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Operationally, god is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat. -- Sir Julian Huxley %% Optimism, n.: The belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, good, bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those accustomed to falling into adversity, and most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof -- an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but not contagious. %% Organized christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world. -- Richard Le Gallienne %% Organized religion is responsible for the brainwashing of millions of young children too young to know the difference between reality and the fantasies of millions. Save yourself. Drop christianity. %% Orthodoxy cannot afford to put out the fires of hell. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "orthodoxy" 1884 %% Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Natural Religion %% Our congratulations go to a Burlington Vermont civilian employee of the local Army National Guard base. He recently received a substantial cash award from our government for inventing a device for optical scanning. His device reportedly will save the government more than $6 million a year by replacing a more expensive helicopter maintenance tool with his own, home-made, hand-held model. Not surprisingly, we also have a couple of money-saving ideas that we submit to the Pentagon free of charge: (a) Don't kill anybody. (b) Don't build things that do. (c) And don't pay other people to kill anybody. We expect annual savings to be in the billions. -- Sojourners %% Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade -- a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack" %% Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency . . . Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. -- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957 %% Our ignorance is god; what we know is science. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Our journeys to the stars will be made on spaceships created by determined, hardworking scientists and engineers applying the principles of science, not aboard flying saucers piloted by little gray aliens from some other dimension. -- Robert A. Baker, "The Aliens Among Us: Hypnotic Regression Revisited", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 2 %% Our national debt already hangs like a millstone round the poor man's neck, and our national church and general religious institutions cost us, upon accredited computation, about 20 millions annually. Worship being thus expensive, I appeal to your heads and your pocketbooks whether we are not too poor to have a god? If poor men cost the state as much, they would be put like officers upon half-pay, and while our distress lasts I think it would be wise to do the same thing with deity. -- George Jacob Holyoake, from "The history of the Last trial by Jury for atheism," 1851 %% Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favor, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in *their* religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one. -- Richard Dawkins %% Out of your palaces, princes and queens Out of your churches, you clergy, you christs I'll neither live nor die for your dreams I'll make no subscription to your paradise JESUS DIED FOR HIS OWN SINS, NOT MINE -- Crass %% Over the wild waves of battle rose and fell the banner of Jesus christ. For sixteen hundred years the robes of the church were red with innocent blood. The ingenuity of christians was exhausted in devising punishment severe enough to be inflicted upon other christians who honestly and sincerely differed with them upon any point whatever. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Heretics and Heresies", 1874 %% P.S. Comedy Central refused to air this episode of "South Park" because it contained math. -- James "Kibo" Parry %% Pants: Hurts to wipe!!! Are you sure I should be using Brillo pads??? Write back. Rands: You should be using fine-grain sandpaper Pants: (sputtering) But the FAQ said Rands: Don't trust the Internet !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -- Jerkcity #803 %% Paranoia is heightened awareness. %% Paranoia, n: A healthy understanding of the way the universe works. %% Pascal assumes that the man who believes in order to save his neck, unequivocally prompted by self-seeking prudence, will be saved, while the man who denies himself the comfort of belief in the name of intellectual integrity will not be saved. What, then, does Pascal consider godlike? -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% Patience comes to those who wait. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it. -- Mark Twain %% Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. -- Bertrand Russell %% Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. -- George Bernard Shaw %% Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does NOT mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. -- Teddy Roosevelt %% Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding. -- Albert Einstein %% People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them. -- George Bernard Shaw, "Mrs. Warren's Profession" %% People are such damned idiots, they know a little about biology. They know, for instance that you can produce a fat hog or a thin hog and they get to believing that you can produce wise men. A preacher is just as apt to produce a criminal as anyone else - more so, perhaps. Children don't like to stay around preacher's houses. They run away. -- Clarence Darrow, quoted in The Houston Press, Mar. 11, 1931 %% People come up to me and say "What's wrong?" Nothing. "Well it takes more energy to frown than it does to smile". Yeah, you know it takes more energy to point that out than it does to leave me alone? -- Bill Hicks %% People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know. -- Brook Atkinson, "Once Around the Sun" %% People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should be only a means to insure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a rushless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. The two mutually augment one another, and they are fed from the same source. -- Rudolf Rocker (pg. 10, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 1989 Edition, Pluto Press) %% People get annoyed when you try to debug them. -- Larry Wall, "Open Sources" %% People have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn't it be better to depend on blind matter ( . . . ) than by a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent. Only to finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example preventing others from committing crimes. -- Baron d'Holbach, "Systeme de la Nature" (1770) %% People like the authority figures and moral absolutes of religion to guide them so they can know the right path to trod in a very confusing world. They like to feel that they are walking on the solid rock of infallible religion rather than on the shifting sands of tentative science and moral relativity. People also like the warm, loving acceptance by religious groups, and emotional fulfillment that gives them a closer feeling to god and their church. And mysticism just by itself seems to fulfill a deep, primitive emotional need for most humans. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates. -- Thomas Szasz %% People prefer to believe what they prefer to be true. -- Francis Bacon %% People who are willing to rely on the government to keep them safe are pretty much standing on Darwin's mat, pounding on the door, screaming, 'Take me, take me!' -- Carl Jacobs, Alt.Sysadmin.Recovery %% People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs. -- P.J. O'Rourke %% People who believe that god exists and heeds their prayers have . . . waived the right to mock people who talk to trees or claim to channel the spirits of Native Americans. -- Wendy Kaminer %% People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time. -- Norman Cousins %% People who need [government] to enforce their religion must not have much faith in the power of its message. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% People, upon finding the "truth," spend the remainder of their lives defending it. Christianity protects itself against the doubting of its theology by making doubting one of its greatest sins. By contrast, doubting is the greatest virtue of science. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery %% Perhaps Debian is concerned more about technical excellence rather than ease of use by breaking software. In the former we may excel. In the latter we have to concede the field to Microsoft. Guess where I want to go today? -- Manoj Srivastava %% Perhaps religion might be dismissed as unimportant if it were merely theoretical. If it were merely theoretical. It is difficult, however, if not impossible to separate theory and practice. Religion, to be sure, is full of inconsistencies between theory and practice; but there is and has always been sternly and largely a disposition of religion to enforce its theory in the conduct of life; religion has meant not simply dogmatism in abstract thinking but intolerance in legal and social action. Religion interferes with life and, being false, it necessarily interferes very much to the detriment of the sound human interests of life. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Perhaps some future [D&D] variation may even take a cue from recursive movies like "Being John Malkovich" and the "Scream" series. In it, you'd play a game-company vice president with the Bard-like name of Dancey. To win, you'd need to regain the trust of embittered former loyalists and guide them through the bizarre Astral Plane known as the Internet -- where a cruel kingdom called Microsoft battles a guild of gnome-like tinkerers and their nebbishy leader, a sorcerer from faraway Finland, the one with an unpronounceable name and a magic penguin. -- Wagner James Au %% Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology. -- Adrian Desmond, "Huxley", p.79 %% Perhaps the most important advance in the behavioral sciences in our times has been the growing recognition that the perceiver is not just a passive camera taking a picture, but takes an active part in perception. He sees what experience has conditioned him to see. What perceiver then sees what is really there? Nobody of course. Each of perceives what our past has prepared us to perceive. We select and distinguish, we focus on some objects and relationships and we blur others. We distort objective reality to make it conform to our needs our, or hopes, or fears, or hates, or envies or affections. Our eyes and brains do not merely register some objective portrait of other persons or groups but our very active scene is warped by what we have been taught to believe, by what we want to believe and by what we need to believe. It is impossible to reason a man out of something he has not been reasoned into. When people have acquired their beliefs on an emotional level they cannot be persuaded out of them on a rational level. No matter how strong the proof or the logic behind it, people will hold onto their emotional beliefs and twist the facts to meet their version of reality. -- Sidney J. Harris %% Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection. -- Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. %% Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% "I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." -- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring %% Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves possess. -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"] %% Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one. -- "Perl style guide", perlstyle(1) %% Personal dishonesty seems to be a necessary basis for religion. That is understandable. Children are indoctrinated with a code of behavior that is instinctually impossible to follow. So they regularly violate the code and to avoid punishment cover up the violations by lying. For them, lying becomes part of their religion. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% Personally I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -- there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy. -- Noam Chomsky, Business Today, May 1973 %% Personally, I don't often talk about social good because when I hear other people talk about social good, that's when I reach for my revolver. -- Eric Stevens Raymond %% Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an "ethic." -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% Pilfering Treasury property is particularly dangerous: big thieves are ruthless in punishing little thieves. -- Diogenes %% Politically correct is what some people call you if they don't like it when you ask them to have some respect for other people. -- King Kaufman %% Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. -- Ronald Reagan %% Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error. -- Thomas Jefferson %% Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. -- Henry Adams %% Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. -- Ambrose Bierce %% Prayer won't cure AIDS. Research will. -- Public service advertisement of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, dropped because of complaints by religionists, from Freethought Today, March 1997 %% Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end. -- George Santayana, "Imaginative Nature of Religion" %% Prayers never bring anything . . . They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas. -- W. C. Fields %% Praying in churches hasn't improved society and praying in schools won't either. -- Ellen Johnson %% Premature optimization is the root of all evil. -- Donald Erwin Knuth %% President Clinton did lie about a blowjob, and I don't care. At all. It's completely insignificant in the balance of world affairs. The current President lies about torture. It wasn't under oath, so isn't impeachable, and that distinction is about as morally insignificant as you can get. It's wrong to torture people and then redefine the term in mid-sentence and then pretend you're being forthright about what you're doing. The way those people are being treated would be called torture if it was happening in our country to our citizens, and we know it. It was called torture before we were doing it, wasn't it? If it was your mother or best friend being interrogated in Dallas with these methods, you'd call it torture. -- misanthrope101 (253915) on http://slashdot.org, on a comment regarding blowjobs vs torture %% Prevalent beliefs that knowledge can be tapped from previous incarnations or from a "universal mind" (the repository of all past wisdom and creativity) not only are implausible but also unfairly demean the stunning achievements of individual human brains. -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Consciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171 %% Priests and preachers have tricked, terrified and exploited mankind. They have lied for "the glory of god." They have collected immense financial tribute for "the glory of god." Whatever may be said about the character of individuals among the clergy, the character of the profession as a whole has been distinctly and drastically anti-human. And of course the most sincere among the clergy have been the most dangerous, for they have been willing to go to the most extreme lengths of intolerance for "the glory of god." -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Prior to 1865, blacks in slave states were considered 3/5 of a person in deciding a state's representation in the Electoral College. You are advocating for a system that says a California citizen is worth 1/3 of a Wyoming citizen in deciding a state's representation in the Electoral College. As far as electoral standing goes, today's Californian is worth less than a pre-civil war slave. -- comment by scheming daemons (101928) on http://slashdot.org on disenfranchisement via the electoral college %% Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands . . . The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. -- Albert Einstein %% Probably get his dumb ass nailed to a cross . . . -- Response to WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) paraphernalia %% Problem solving under linux has never been the circus that it is under AIX. -- Pete Ehlke %% Programming, motherfucker. -- http://programming-motherfucker.com %% Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. -- Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition %% Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. -- George Bernard Shaw %% Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. -- Isaac Asimov %% Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it doesn't interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property, that interferes with your right to have that property, you don't have it, I have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this, maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it's very different from other rights. -- Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, September 24, 1997 %% Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. -- Henry Louis Mencken, "A Book of Burlesques" %% Q. Where does Jodie Foster stand in the debate between science and faith? A: I absolutely believe what Ellie believes - that there is no direct evidence, so how could you ask me to believe in god when there's absolutely no evidence that I can see? I do believe in the beauty and the awe-inspiring mystery of the science that's out there that we haven't discovered yet, that there are scientific explanations for phenomena that we call mystical because we just don't know any better. -- Jodie Foster, interview with Dan McLeod, "Foster Makes Contact With Sagan" published in Vancouver's Georgia Strait July 10, 1997 issue, on her role as Dr. Eleanor Arroway in the film "Contact" %% Q: Do you believe in MS-Office for [GNU/]Linux? A: Do I believe in it? I suppose so, in the same sense as I believe in my cat's excrement under the dining room table. I have to acknowledge that could someday happen, but I don't want it to, and sure don't want to be the one to step in it. -- excerpt from an interview with the author of Vigor %% Q: Jesus was renowned for his ability to heal. What was the one affliction that proved too malignant for his cure? A: Christianity. %% Question everything. %% Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software. -- Arthur C Clarke %% Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. Had he run unopposed he would have lost. -- Mort Sahl %% Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -- Philip K Dick %% Reality is the temporary resultant of the struggle between rival groups of programmers. %% Reality must take precedence over public relations, for mother nature cannot be fooled. -- Richard Phillips Feynman %% Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% Reason and faith are completely irreconcilable pathways to knowledge. The two cannot exist side by side. Reason underlies the methodology of the scientist. Without it he would be ineffectual. Faith is the "being" of the "religionist." Without it he could not exist. The scientist accepts nothing on faith. Faith to him is a synonym for belief. In hebrews 11:1 we read: "Faith is the substance of things desired, the evidence of things unseen." The "religionist" is ever alert to prevent reason from undermining his precepts. Reason is his (and god's) worst enemy. Reason is our means of processing what we learn of the world through our proverbial five senses. Faith does no processing; whatever sense (or nonsense) is accepted as is, without rational consideration. Those facts which reason allows us to accept must display consistency and predictability. There are no criteria to restrict that which we will accept on faith, as section 61 of this book shows. Those content to accept on faith are those who accept without thinking, without the rational demonstrations that establish the truth (predictive content) of what we believe. Faith is the road to myth and error, the way to add to man's already overflowing storehouse of "things he _knows_ but that are not so." -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% Reason, Observation and Experience -- the holy Trinity of Science -- have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Reasonable people who are located in very different parts of the social world find themselves differentially exposed to diverse realities, and this differential exposure leads each of them to come up with different -- but often equally reasonable -- constructions of the world. Similarly, even deeply devout religious people, because they too are located in different parts of the social world and, furthermore, come from different religious and cultural traditions, can disagree about what god's will is in any particular situation. When combined with the fact that attitudes toward abortion rest on these deep, rarely examined notions about the world, it is unambiguously clear why the abortion debate is so heated and why the chances for rational discussion, reasoned arguments, and mutual accomodation are so slim. -- Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984) %% Reasoning from analogies is like tying your shoes with laces made of butter. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Recent studies have demonstrated an inverse relationship between religiousity and ethical behaviour--this should come as no surprise, given the appalling and violent history of states dominated by religion. And this, I suspect, is due to the atrophying of moral judgment that comes with religiousity, and the deferrence to external authority. External discipline is not self-discipline; it is to be used only when self-discipline fails, because it erodes the will and makes children of us all, rudderless and easily blown by whatever the strongest wind may be. -- comment by Thangodin (177516) on http://slashdot.org %% Recursion is basically magic. -- Dr. Mazumdar, CS344, Design and Analysis of Algorithms %% Reliability means never having to say you're sorry. -- Daniel J. Bernstein, author of qmail %% Religion . . . can exercise a severe crippling and inhibiting effect upon the human mind, by fostering irrational anxiety and guilt, and by hampering the free play of the intellect. -- Dr J C Flugel %% Religion and Ideology have been the only causes of war, and always will be. -- Zac Gane %% Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can. -- P.W. Atkins, "The Limitless Power of Science" essay in "Nature's Imagination", John Cornwell, ed.; 1995 Oxford University Press, p.125 %% Religion convinced the world that there's an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do. And there's 10 things he doesn't want you to do or else you'll go to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of eternity. But he loves you! . . . And he needs money! He's all powerful, but he can't handle money! -- George Carlin, on Politically Incorrect, May 29, 1997 %% Religion divides us, while it is our human characteristics that bind us to each other. -- Sir Hermann Bondi, interview in Free Inquiry magazine %% Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it, religion has actually convinced people that there's an INVISIBLE MAN . . . LIVING IN THE SKY . . . who watches every thing you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten special things that he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever 'til the end of time . . . but he loves you. -- George Carlin, "Brain Droppings" %% Religion is a disease. It is born of fear; it compensates through hate in the guise of authority, revelation. Religion, enthroned in a powerful social organization, can become incredibly sadistic. No religion has been more cruel than the christian. -- Dr. George A. Dorsey %% Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- David Foley %% Religion is a result of primal urges, and I hope that it, like murder and septic personal hygiene, becomes unfashionable. -- Brian Hayward %% Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental ability to solve natural phenomena. The church is an organized institution that has always been a stumbling block to progress. -- Emma Goldman, "What I Believe" %% Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. -- Sigmund Freud, "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" %% Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. -- Steven Weinberg, Freethought Today, April, 2000 %% Religion is kind of like wearing lifts in your shoes. If it helps you to feel better about yourself or whatever, fine, I don't have a problem with that. Just don't ask me to wear your shoes. -- George Carlin %% Religion is not insanity but it is born of the stuff which makes for insanity . . . all religions perform the function of delusion. -- George Dorsey %% Religion is only area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give evidence in defense of their strongly held beliefs. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines. -- Bertrand Arthur William Russell %% Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the open. Both have their proper sphere and they should realize that they are allies. -- John Haldane, "Science and Life: Essays of a Rationalist" %% Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think. -- Arthur Schopenhauer, "Studies in Pessimism" %% Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% Religion makes enemies instead of friends. That one word, "religion," covers all the horizon of memory with visions of war, of outrage, of persecution, of tyranny, and death. That one word brings to the mind every instrument with which man has tortured man. In that one word are all the fagots and flames and dungeons of the past, and in that word is the infinite and eternal hell of the future. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why", 1881 %% Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "A Christmas Sermon" printed in Evening Telegraph, Dec. 19, 1891 %% Religion would then be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children . . . If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth. -- Sigmund Freud %% Religion, throughout the greater part of its history, has been a form of "holy" terrorism. It still aims its terrors at men, but modern realism and the spread of popular enlightenment has progressively robbed those terrors of their old-fashioned effectiveness. Wherever men take religion very seriously -- wherever there is devout belief -- there is also the inseparable feeling of fear. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few. -- Stendhal %% Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false. -- Richard Dawkins %% Religions which expect men to march in synchronized step and to chant stereotyped doctrines cease to serve free man in an open society. There can be no such thing as an open society peopled by a preponderance of closed minds. -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives. -- Barry Goldwater, 1981 speech %% Religious fanaticism has clearly produced, and in all probability will continue to produce, enormous amounts of bickering, fighting, violence, bloodshed, homicide, feuds, wars, and genocide. For all its peace-inviting potential, therefore, arrant (not to mention arrogant) religiosity has led to immense individual and social harm by fomenting an incredible amount of anti-human anti-humane aggression. -- Albert Ellis %% Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature. -- Sigmund Freud, "The Future of an Illusion" 1927, p.34 %% Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the "no-contests." -- Richard Dawkins %% Remember that millions of christians still base their belief in a god upon the words of the bible, which is a collection of the most flabbergasting fictions ever imagined -- by men, too, who had lawless but very poor and crude imagination. Ingersoll and numerous other critics have shot the christian holy book full of holes. It is worthless and proves nothing concerning the existence of a god. The idea of a god is worthless and unprovable. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Replacing the cult of god by respect and love of humanity, we proclaim human reason as the only criterion of truth; human conscience as the basis of justice; individual and collective freedom as the only source of order in society. -- Bakunin, "Revolutionary Catechism" in _Bakunin on Anarchy_ %% Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea. %% Responsible parenthood involves decades devoted to the child's proper nurture. To sentence a woman to bear a child against her will is an unspeakable violation of her rights: her right to liberty (to the functions of her body), her right to the pursuit of happiness, and, sometimes, her right to life itself, even as a serf. Such a sentence represents the sacrifice of the actual to the potential, of a real human being to a piece of protoplasm, which has no life in the human sense of the term. It is sheer perversion of language for people who demand this sacrifice to call themselves 'right-to-lifers.' -- Leonard Peikoff (Objectivism, in the Chapter on Government) %% Rigidly conforming children have a way of growing up to be rigidly conforming adults. They are not educated; they are formed. They are not trained to think, but to defend. They are not asked to reflect, but to memorize. -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% Robustness, adj.: Never having to say you're sorry. %% Rome was far better when pagan than when catholic. It was better to allow gladiators and criminals to fight than to burn honest men. The greatest of the Romans denounced the cruelties of the arena. Seneca condemned the combats even of wild beasts. He was tender enough to say that "we should have a bond of sympathy for all sentient beings, knowing that only the depraved and base take pleasure in the sight of blood and suffering." Aurelius compelled the gladiators to fight with blunted swords. Roman lawyers declared that all men are by nature free and equal. Woman, under Pagan rule in Rome, became as free as man. Zeno, long before the birth of christ, taught that virtue alone establishes a difference between men. We know that the Civil Law is the foundation of our codes. We know that fragments of Greek and Roman art -- a few manuscripts saved from christian destruction, some inventions and discoveries of the Moors -- were the seeds of modern civilization. Christianity, for a thousand years, taught memory to forget and reason to believe. Not one step was taken in advance. Over the manuscripts of philosophers and poets, priests with their ignorant tongues thrust out, devoutly scrawled the forgeries of faith. For a thousand years the torch of progress was extinguished in the blood of christ, and his disciples, moved by ignorant zeal, by insane, cruel creeds, destroyed with flame and sword a hundred million of their fellow-men. They made this world a hell. But if cathedrals had been universities -- if dungeons of the inquisition had been laboratories -- if christians had believed in character instead of creed -- if they had taken from the bible all the good and thrown away the wicked and absurd -- if domes of temples had been observatories -- if priests had been philosophers -- if missionaries had taught the useful arts -- if astrology had been astronomy -- if the black art had been chemistry -- if superstition had been science -- if religion had been humanity -- it would have been a heaven filled with love, with liberty and joy. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Christian Religion" Part III, The Ingersoll - Black Debate, 1881 %% Ronald Reagan's platform seems to be: Hey, I'm a big good-looking guy and I need a lot of sleep. -- Roy G. Blount, Jr. %% Running Linux is like owning a lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time." -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Running [Microsoft] Windows on a Pentium is like having a brand new Porsche but only be able to drive backward with the hand brake on. %% SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing. -- Philip Greenspun %% SUNDAY SERMON A technician, wrapped in a stiff, white smock, takes an albino rat from the big crate delivered just that morning, puts it in the god model box, leaves and locks the room. The box, with random corners and angles, is monitored by a ceiling mounted video camera. A switch mounted in one corner is well protected by spring wire traps, barriers and rat repellent. The switch delivers an electric shock when touched by the rat. The experiment lasts 24 hours or so, depending on the whim and will of the technician. If during that time, the rat sits on the switch for thirty or forty seconds, the technician will set it free in the field behind the fence. Otherwise, he will restrain the rat in a vice and slowly pull off its tail and its legs, one by one, then skin it and leave it to die. Slowly. Little is learned in this experiment either by the rat or the technician who is not at all surprised that none of rats ever perform the required task. But the technician does get to skin a lot of rats, and he likes to hear them squeal. %% Sages do not display themselves, therefore they are illuminated. They do not define themselves, therefore they are distinguished. They do not make claims, therefore they are credited. They do not boast, therefore they advance. Since, indeed, they do not compete, the world cannot compete with them. -- Loa Tsu, Chapter 22, The Tao Te Ching %% Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent. -- George Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi" %% Salvation for credulity means damnation for investigation. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Salvation through slavery is worthless. Salvation from slavery is inestimable. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Sapere aude (Dare to know) -- Immanuel Kant %% Saying Apple is better than [Microsoft] is like saying Botulism is better than rabies. -- signature of goatan (673464) on http://slashdot.org %% Saying your prayers could be a health hazard according to a report in the Medical Journal of Australia. Dr. Margaret T. Taylor traced a case of lead poisoning to the rosary beads an eight-year-old girl was in the habit of kissing. Dr. Taylor suggested that lead poisoning from the same source could account for anemia among nuns and other members of the catholic faith. -- Cleveland Press, as quoted in _True Facts_ %% School vouchers as proposed by Reagan and Bush do not represent free market competition. The reason is fairly simple. The source of the money is not the consumers. The vouchers are paid for by tax dollars. School vouchers are an attempt to breach the separation of church and state by allowing individuals who are not constrained by the prohibition against Congress passing laws respecting religion to spend tax dollars for the benefit of the religion of their choice. I have no objection to parents sending their children to the school of their choice. The problem with public funding of schools is that it is an inherently collectivist system. The restraints that have been placed on what public schools must teach and what they are prohibited from teaching protect us to a limited extent from the full magnitude of the damage that they have the potential to do if used as a propaganda tool. I have never granted that anyone else rightfully has the freedom to choose how my money will be spent. The only difference between that and slavery is that the masters do not have the authority to beat, sell, or kill me if I choose not to work. Send your children to schools that brainwash them any way that you wish. But do not insist on paying for it with money taken from me by taxation. -- D. Dale Gulledge (ddg@cci.com) %% Science . . . warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, 1960 %% Science built the academy, superstition the inquisition. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than christianity did in eighteen hundred years. -- John Burroughs (1837-1921) American naturalist, _The Light of Day_ %% Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did, and never will agree. They are not in the least related. They are deadly foes. What has religion to do with facts? Nothing. Can there be methodist mathematics, catholic astronomy, presbyterian geology, baptist biology, or episcopal botany? Why, then, should a sectarian college exist? Only that which somebody knows should be taught in our schools. We should not collect taxes to pay people for guessing. The common school is the bread of life for the people, and it should not be touched by the withering hand of superstition. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses", 1879 %% Science is the attempt to come up with systematic, coherent and useful descriptions of how the natural world works. -- Chris Mack, litho guru %% Science is the enemy of fear and credulity. It invites investigation, challenges the reason, stimulates inquiry, and welcomes the unbeliever. It seeks to give food and shelter, and raiment, education and liberty to the human race. It welcomes every fact and every truth. It has furnished a foundation of morals, a philosophy for the guidance of man. From all books it selects the good, and from all theories, the true. It seeks to civilize the human race by the cultivation of the intellect and heart. It refines, through art, music and the drama -- giving voice and expression to every noble thought. The mysterious does not excite the feeling of worship, but the ambition to understand. It does not pray -- it works. It does not answer inquiry with the malicious cry of "blasphemy." Its feelings are not hurt by contradiction, neither does it ask to be protected by law from the laughter of heretics. It has taught man that he cannot walk beyond the horizon -- that the questions of origin and destiny cannot be answered -- that an infinite personality cannot be comprehended by a finite being, and that the truth of any system of religion based on the supernatural cannot by any possibility be established -- such a religion not being within the domain of evidence. And, above all, it teaches that all our duties are here -- that all our obligations are to sentient beings; that intelligence, guided by kindness, is the highest possible wisdom; and that "man believes not what he would, but what he can." -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Response to Wm. E. Gladstone on his letter "Regarding Col. Ingersoll on christianity; Some Remarks on his Reply to Dr. Field", 1888 %% Science makes godlike -- it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such -- it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the original sin. This alone is morality: "Thou shalt not know" -- the rest follows. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians. -- John Burroughs (1837-1921), from Thomas S. Vernon, Great Infidels, M&M Press, 1989 %% Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of god offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that. We cannot prove that there is no god, but we can safely conclude the he is very, very improbable indeed. -- Richard Dawkins, from the _New Humanist_, the Journal of the Rationalist Press Association, Vol 107 No 2 %% Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion. %% Science was tearing through the 'fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs' to behold a new cosmos, in which our Earth is merely an 'eccentric speck'-- a world of evolution 'and unchanging causation'. It invited new ways of thinking. It demanded a new rationale for belief. With science's truths the only accessible ones, 'blind faith' was no longer admirable but 'the one unpardonable sin'. -- Adrian Desmond, "Huxley", p. 345 %% Science, unlike theology, never leads to insanity. -- Luther Burbank as quoted by Joseph McCabe %% Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not. -- Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden" %% Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of that of children. This means that the children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of about Evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about christ's ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier's and Wright's. Worse than that, they are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science. -- J.B.S. Haldane %% Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for god to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate. -- Richard Phillips Feynman, "The Meaning of It All," p. 39 %% Screw guilt, I could have sex with 10 men and it wouldn't bother me, I'm an atheist! -- Adam Corolla, host of MTV's "Loveline" show, responding to a licensed minister who couldn't suppress his feelings of homosexuality %% Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based. -- Ambrose Bierce, The devil's Dictionary, 1911 %% Security is like an analogy. It only works up until the point that someone considers an angle or aspect that you haven't previously considered and accounted for. -- Chandler Howell %% Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature . . . Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. -- Helen Keller %% Security, like correctness, is not an add-on feature. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum %% See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist -- it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn't built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist -- just because it's anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic -- there's no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that's produced -- that's their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance. -- Noam Chomsky, In Understanding Power, 2002 %% Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children? -- Tecumseh, Shawnee %% Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. -- Thomas Jefferson %% Shaw's Principle: Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it. %% She can kill all your files; She can freeze with a frown. And a wave of her hand brings the whole system down. And she works on her code until ten after three. She lives like a bat but she's always a hacker to me. -- Apologies to Billy Joel %% Shermer's Three Principles of Provisional Morality and Evolutionary Ethic: 1. The ask-first principle: to find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first. 2. The happiness principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else's happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else's unhappiness. 3. The liberty principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else's loss of liberty. 0. The Zeroeth principle: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. %% Shikata ga nai. (There is no other choice) -- from "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson %% Shikin Harimitsu Daikomyo (May my next act bring enlightenment) -- Mantra uttered at start of practice in Taijutsu %% Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid. -- General Dwight Eisenhower %% Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle %% Should it turn out that I am the worst man in the whole world, the story of the flood will remain just as improbable as before, and the contradictions of the pentateuch will still demand an explanation. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes Of Moses", 1879 %% Silence can be the biggest lie of all. We have a responsibility to speak up; and whenever the occasion calls for it, we have a responsibility to raise bloody hell. -- Herbert Block %% Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart. -- Peter Medawar, "The Act of Creation" (New Statesman, 19 June 1964) %% Since I have started up in Lisp, I am both measurably better at other languages, and immeasurably more frustrated by the limitations of those languages. -- Matt Knox %% Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so . . . Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency -- the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known. -- Stephen Jay Gould, from Michael Shermer, "Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition & Other Confusions of Our Time, p. xii) %% Slashdot: When news breaks, we give you the pieces!. %% Slowly and surely the UNIX crept up on the Nintendo user . . . %% Smurf tigers getting their Baraka on under the Tree of Life. -- summary of James Cameron's "Avatar" %% So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the gospels in praise of intelligence. -- Bertrand Arthur William Russell %% So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake . . . Religion is all bunk. -- Thomas Alva Edison %% So here's a picture of reality: (picture of circle with lots of squiggles in it) As we all know, reality is a mess. -- Larry Wall, "Open Sources" %% So live your life and live it well There's not much left of me to tell I just got back up each time I fell -- "Of Mice and Men", Megadeth %% So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong. -- Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies %% So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. What's important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that. -- Paul Graham, "The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn" %% So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe. -- Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg _Nightfall_ %% So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% So you have Hindu computers and Christian reactors . . . oh, that's right, you don't. No religion has ever made a single contribution to science and technology. How about that? Apparently, despite all claims, they haven't a clue about how the world really works. -- comment by Thangodin (177516) on http://slashdot.org %% So, let me get this straight. You happy people (non-tech) will put us in jail for attempting to help you use technology in a secure way, because you hate and fear us so much. You actually are prepared to alienate all of us (and imprison some of us) rather than deal with the embarrassment of your own inability to use technology, and to willingly make it impossible for anyone to conduct IT security work in good faith. You want to make enemies of all of us, do you? (dusts off black hat) Have it your way. -- a comment to slashdot on someone getting arrested for doing helpful security work %% Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born. -- Garrett Hardin %% Society is made up of groups, and as long as the smaller groups do not have the same rights and the same protection as others - I don't care whether you call it capitalism or communism - it is not going to work. Somehow, the guys in power have to be reached by counterpower, or through a change in their hearts and minds, or change will not come. -- Cesar Chavez %% Software is like sex; it's better when it's free. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% Soldiers, by and large, are tools used to advance the interests of those who own and run the country. They are lied to, conned and conditioned to believe they are fighting for "freedom" when in most cases they are killing, dying and being maimed to enrich domestic elites and their allies/business partners. This is a big hard truth to swallow, which is why a lot of military personnel, and many vets, prefer the standard story. -- "Red State Son: Freedom Granted, Freedom Won", http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2006/01/freedom-granted-freedom-won.html %% Some people's mouths work faster than their brains. They say things they haven't even thought about yet. %% Some president wishes to be re-elected, and thereupon speaks about the bible as "the corner-stone of American Liberty." This sentence is a mouth large enough to swallow any church, and from that time forward the religious people will be citing that remark of the politician to substantiate the inspiration of the scriptures. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Morality and Immorality" interview, printed in The News, Detroit, Michigan, January 6, 1884 %% Sometimes even to live is an act of courage. -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca %% Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan %% Sooner or later, you have to face facts. Man up and learn Emacs. -- from "MacOS X is an Unsuitable Platform for Web Development" (http://teddziuba.com/2011/03/osx-unsuitable-web-development.html) %% Sophisticated persons masturbate without compunction. They do it for reasons of health, privacy, thrift and because of the remarkable perfection of invisible partners. -- P. J. O'Rourke %% Speak softly and carry a +6 two-handed sword. %% Standards are different for all things, so the standard set by man is by no means the only 'certain' standard. If you mistake what is relative for something certain, you have strayed far from the ultimate truth. -- Chuang Tzu %% Stare at the pale blue dot of planet earth from several millions of miles away. Stare at that dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that god created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. -- Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot" %% Stating the 'The Constitution guarantees that government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religious exercises,' the court held the First Amendment is violated by including clerical members who offer prayer as part of an official school graduation ceremony, even though attendance was supposedly voluntary. The court concluding that attendance was in a real sense obligatory with the students induced to conform. -- Lee v. Weisman (1992, U S) 120 L Ed 2d 467, 112 S Ct 2649, from the 1996 pocket part for the book "Modern Constitutional Law, Vol. I: The Individual And The Government", by Chester J. Antieau %% Stop the vegetarians, they eat all the animals' food! %% Strike any user to continue. %% Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the [psychological] predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. -- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" %% Success is a journey, not a destination. %% Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get. %% Such is the ease with which the human mind can be partitioned by faith, and such is the degree to which our intellectual discourse still patiently accommodates religious delusion. Only the atheist has observed what should now be obvious to every thinking human being: If we want to uproot the causes of religious violence we must uproot the false certainties of religion. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% Superstitions, cults and mysticism appear with surprising consistency during a social crisis. Today it is ESP and UFOs, astrology and clairvoyance, mystic cults and mesmeric healers. The growth of interest in such things is a sure indicator of social unrest, personal uneasiness, frustration and loss of purpose. These symptoms are also present in the West, particularly in the U.S., where they are more chronic; in the Soviet Union, however, we have an acute fever . . . Carl Sagan of Cornell University has told me that in the U.S. there are 15,000 astrologers and only 1,500 astronomers . . . It is fascinating that in the Soviet Union we are importing creationism from fundamentalists in the U.S . . . The momentous changes happening now in the Soviet Union are the reason for this current upsurge of the irrational. What is important is the emerging extremism that they may signal. -- Sergei Kapitza, President of the Physical Society of the U.S.S.R. and editor of the Russian edition of Scientific American, "Antiscience Trends in the U.S.S.R.", Scientific American 265(2):32-38, August 1991 %% Suppose Hitler was an atheist. Suppose Stalin tortured and killed more people than all of the theists put together. What implications follow for atheism as a whole? None -- few atheists are even remotely like Hitler or Stalin. Suppose Hitler was a theist. Suppose the Crusades resulted in more suffering and death of innocents than the actions of all atheists combined. What follows for theism as a whole? Nothing -- the majority of theists are nothing like Hitler and despise the Crusade mentality. -- Was Hitler an Atheist or a Theist? More Importantly, Who Cares?, July 21, 1999, by Mark I. Vuletic %% Suppose, however, that god did give this law to the jews, and did tell them that whenever a man preached a heresy, or proposed to worship any other god that they should kill him; and suppose that afterward this same god took upon himself flesh, and came to this very chosen people and taught a different religion, and that thereupon the jews crucified him; I ask you, did he not reap exactly what he had sown? What right would this god have to complain of a crucifixion suffered in accordance with his own command? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses", in Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 2, p. 259 %% Surely investigation is better than unthinking faith. Surely reason is a better guide than fear. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child" %% Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at least, you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and all depths; that there are no walls nor fences, nor prohibited places, nor sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought; that your intellect owes no allegiance to any being, human or divine; that you hold all in fee upon no condition and by no tenure whatever; that in the world of mind you are relieved from all personal dictation, and from the ignorant tyranny of majorities. Surely it is worth something to feel that there are no popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods, to whom your intellect can be compelled to pay a reluctant homage. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Surprisingly, recent research suggests that a religious person is more likely to commit a crime than a non-religious person. One can even argue that the more religious the society, the more likely it is to have high crime rates. -- "Religion and Crime: Do They Go Together?", by Lisa Conyers and Philip D. Harvey, Summer 1996 issue of _Free Inquiry_ %% SysProg's Law of Priorities: Lack of planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on our part. %% SysProg's Motto: If we can't fix it, it ain't broke. %% TV is chewing gum for the eyes. -- Frank Lloyd Wright %% Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Ghosts", 1877, in Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 285 %% Take man's most fantastic invention, god. Man invents god in the image of his longing, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it . . . [Religion is] not a matter of god, church, holy cause. etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self . . . Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, 'it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves . . . ' -- Eric Hoffer %% Take the Kyoto Protocol. Destruction of the environment is not only rational; it's exactly what you're taught to do in college. If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market. The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it's called democratic. Well, suppose that we believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational, because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational. -- Noam Chomsky, Interview by Yifat Susskind, August 2001 %% Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant. -- Celsus, on the spread of christianity, _True Discourse_, c. 170 CE %% Talk of god leads by a direct road to the conclusion of atheism. The only sensible attitude is to dismiss the idea of god -- to get it out of the way of more important ideas. The wide dissemination of this intelligent atheistic attitude is one of the leading features of any program of popular education which is completely worthy of the name. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. -- Friedrich Nietzsche %% Tart words make no friends; a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar. -- Benjamin Franklin %% Tax is the price we pay for a civilised society. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes %% Techical solutions are not a matter of voting. Two legislations in the US states almost decided that the value of Pi be 3.14, exactly. Popular vote does not make for a correct solution. -- Manoj Srivastava %% Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. -- Aldous Huxley %% Telegraph: For god to create the universe he would have to be hyper- intelligent. But intelligence only evolves over time. Is that about the strength of it? Dawkins: It's worse than that, the argument for god starts by assuming what it is attempting to explain -- intelligence, complexity, it comes to the same thing -- and so it explains nothing. God is a non-explanation. Whereas evolution by natural selection /is/ an explanation. It really does start simply and become complex. -- Sunday Telegraph (UK) interview with Richard Dawkins, Sept. 26, 1999 %% Tell me there is a god in the serene heavens that will damn his children for the expression of an honest belief! More men have died in their sins, judged by your orthodox creeds, than there are leaves on all the forests in the wide world ten thousand times over. Tell me these men are in hell; that these men are in torment; that these children are in eternal pain, and that they are to be punished forever and forever! I denounce this doctrine as the most infamous of lies. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child", 1877 %% Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people. -- Edward Abbey %% Testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next. -- Richard Dawkins %% Thank you for Not Smoking. Cigarette smoke is the residue of your pleasure. It contaminates the air, pollutes my hair and clothes, not to mention my lungs. This takes place without my consent. I have a pleasure, also. I like a beer now and then. The residue of my pleasure is urine. Would you be annoyed if I stood on a chair and pissed on your head and your clothes without your consent? -- Sign from Ken's Magic Shop %% That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously. -- Benjamin Franklin %% That church [catholic] teaches us that we can make god happy by being miserable ourselves . . . -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "What Must We Do To Be Saved?" 1880, in Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 1, p. 492 %% That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject. -- George Santayana %% That government is best which governs least. -- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience" %% That it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to agnosticism. That which agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, "Agnosticism and Christianity," 1889, Prometheus Publications p. 193 %% That kind of god is always man-made They made him up then wrote a book To keep you on your knees -- Skunk Anansie, "Selling Jesus" %% That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted. -- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture %% That the system of morals expounded in the new testament contained no maxim which had not been previously enunciated, and that some of the most beautiful passages in the apostolic writings are quotations from pagan authors, is well known to every scholar . . . To assert that christianity communicated to man moral truths previously unknown, argues on the part of the asserted either gross ignorance or wilful fraud. -- Henry Thomas Buckle, "History of Civilization," Vol. I, p. 129 %% That which the heathen had respected the catholic outraged. The great cardinal Ximenez restored the primitive rite and devoted this charming chapel to its service. How ill a return was made for moorish tolerance we see in the infernal treatment they afterwards received from king and church. They made them choose between conversion and death. They embraced christianity to save their lives. Then the priests said, "Perhaps this conversion is not genuine! Let us send the heathen away out of our sight." One million of the best citizens of Spain were thus torn from their homes and landed starving on the wild African coast. And Te Deums were sung in the churches for this triumph of catholic unity. From that hour Spain has never prospered. -- Castilian Days, The City of the Visigoths, John Hay, 1903 %% That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% The "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment means at least this: neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Majority opinion Everson v. Board of Education 330 U.S. 1 (1947) %% The 'moral majority' is neither. %% The 'religious right' is neither. %% The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can "prove" anything from it. -- Robert Heinlein, Dr. Jacob Burroughs in "The Number of the Beast" %% The Bill of Rights stands in tatters. We measure our national debt in trillions. We're so deeply in bed with various murderous dictators around the world I can't even say the words "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" with a straight face any more. We're torturing prisoners. Our cops are shooting unarmed, handcuffed, face-down pleading men in the back. Texas has disappeared Thomas Jefferson from their civics curriculum. We're so afraid of terrorists we think strip-searching everyone is a good idea. I routinely, day in and day out, hear my fellow citizens argue that women with terminal breast cancer should be left to die in the street, and that only children who can afford it should have access to health care. -- seen on http://slashdot.org, 2010-05-04 %% The Buddha . . . resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha -- which is to demean oneself. -- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" %% The Creation Museum is a symptom, like Sarah Palin, etc., of a country that takes stupid way too seriously and discounts intelligence, intellect and expertise as "elitist". -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% The Declaration of Independence announces the sublime truth that all power comes from the people. This was a denial, and the first denial of a nation, of the infamous dogma that god confers the right upon one man to govern others. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality" 1873 %% The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it. -- P.J. O'Rourke %% The First Amendment commands government to have no interest in theology or ritual; it admonishes the government to be interested in allowing religious freedom to flourish -- whether the result is to produce catholics, jews, or protestant, or to turn the people toward the path of Buddha, or to end in a predominantly moslem nation, or to produce in the long run atheists or agnostics. On matters of this kind, government must remain neutral. This freedom plainly includes freedom from religion with the right to believe, speak, write, publish and advocate antireligious programs. -- Justice William O. Douglas, dissent in McGowan v. Maryland %% The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach. -- Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947),last words %% The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting. -- William J. Brennan, Jr. %% The Good is that which leads to health, The Right is that which leads to peace. Purpose is ours to choose, Meaning is the story we choose to join. We are all members of Darwin's family, all kin from the beginning of life. If you value anything, value other humans, for they are the only help you will have in times of trouble. The godless Universe is vast and wondrous, and more than enough. We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. -- John Hodges, 1999 %% 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, Berlin, February 1, 1933 %% The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. -- John Gilmore %% The North American church is out of touch with global realities. -- Evangelical Foreign Mission Association, affiliated with the baptist church, on the current state of mission outreaches by American christian churches %% The PCMCIA people are idiots. -- Comment in kernel-source-2.6.8/drivers/net/3c59x.c %% The Roman Rule: The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it. %% The Santa myth is one of the most effective means ever devised for intimidating children, eroding their self-esteem, twisting their behavior, warping their values, and slowing their development of critical thinking skills. -- Tom Flynn, _The Trouble with Christmas_ %% The Street finds its own uses for technology. -- William Gibson %% The Tao doesn't take sides; it gives birth to both wins and losses. The Guru doesn't take sides; she welcomes both hackers and lusers. The Tao is like a stack: the data changes but not the structure. the more you use it, the deeper it becomes; the more you talk of it, the less you understand. Hold on to the root. %% The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is masked but always present. I don't know who built to it. It came before the first kernel. %% The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together. -- Sir Peter Brian Medawar %% The United States also has its native fascists who say that they are 100 percent American . . . -- U. S. Army (1945) %% The United States is in no sense founded upon the christian doctrine. -- George Washington %% The United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious literalism and opposition to evolutionary theory; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, STD infection and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious superstition and hostility to evolutionary theory, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% The Universe is populated by stable things. -- Richard Dawkins %% The War on Drugs is just a small part of the War on the United States Constitution. %% The Web is full of home pages. Most of them are pointless, zero-content sludge -- very snazzy-looking sludge, mind you, but sludge all the same. -- Eric Stevens Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker" aka the Hacker-HOWTO %% The Wright Bothers weren't the first to fly. They were just the first not to crash. %% The `loner' may be respected, but he is always resented by his colleagues, for he seems to be passing a critical judgment on them, when he may be simply making a limiting statement about himself. -- Sidney Harris %% The account shows, however, that the gods dreaded education and knowledge then just as they do now. The church still faithfully guards the dangerous tree of knowledge, and has exerted in all ages her utmost power to keep mankind from eating the fruit thereof. The priests have never ceased repeating the old falsehood and the old threat: "Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." From every pulpit comes the same cry, born of the same fear: "Lest they eat and become as gods, knowing good and evil." For this reason, religion hates science, faith detests reason, theology is the sworn enemy of philosophy, and the church with its flaming sword still guards the hated tree, and like its supposed founder, curses to the lowest depths the brave thinkers who eat and become as gods. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal. -- Karl Augustus Menninger, "The Human Mind" %% The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper. -- Thomas Jefferson %% The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded. -- George Orwell %% The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. -- Richard Dawkins, _The Blind Watchmaker_ (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 5 %% The analogy between the god of popular roman catholicism and a cruel Caesar is striking: one must serve him in every way and praise him all but continually; those who displease him are given over to eternal torture; he cannot be approached directly even with petitions; the best procedure is to ask somebody who has found favor - a saint, and a particular one depending on the nature of one's case - to intercede with the mother of his son, in the hope that she may take up the matter with her son, and the son with the father. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% The ancient poets animated all objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast. -- William Blake, from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" %% The answer is simple: kill the heretics. History shows us that this is the actual solution that competing religions apply -- trial by combat or trial by ordeal. God is the final arbiter. What a sad waste of human potential it has proven to be. -- Paul Hager (hagerp@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu) %% The anti-abortionists' claim to being "pro-life" is a classic big lie. You cannot be in favor of life and yet demand the sacrifice of an actual, living individual to a clump of tissue. -- Leonard Peikoff %% The anti-semitism of the new movement (christian social movement) was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge. -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3 %% The argument that the literal story of genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186 %% The assassin cannot sanctify his dagger by falling on his knees, and it does not help a falsehood if it be uttered as a prayer. Religion, used to intensify the hatred of men toward men under the pretense of pleasing god, has cursed this world. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% The assertion that "all men are created equal" was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use. -- Abraham Lincoln %% The assumed instinctive belief in god has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent deity. -- Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man" %% The atheist bashes all religions whilst the theist bashes all but his own, upon which he lavishes great care in case it should come in contact with reality. -- Gully Foyle %% The atheist does not say "there is no god", but he says "I do not know what you mean by god; I am without the idea of god; the word god is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny god, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception and the conception of which by its affirmer is so imperfect that he is unable to define it to me. -- Charles Bradlaugh, _National Review_, Nov. 25, 1883 %% The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to god than the believer caught up in his own false image of god. -- Martin Buber %% The attack on the peasant economy was accompanied by a fierce campaign against the orthodox church, the center of traditional peasant culture, which was seen by the Stalinist leadership as one of the main obstacles to collectivization. -- Alan Bullock, "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, ISBN 0-394-58601-8), p. 264, in the chapter "Stalin's Revolution", showing that Stalin's motivation for destroying churches was because of their threat to his political plans and not communistic "atheism" %% The attempt to solve the problem of suffering by postulating original sin depends on the belief that cruelty is justified when it is retributive; indeed, that morality demands retribution. -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% The attraction of "religion" for many of its adherents is that its comforts help enable them to face the suffering, injustice, morality and meaninglessness of human life on this earth. But it is these comforts that often dissuade men from doing something about the ills humanity experiences. Too many of us become so encapsulated in our own comfortable world that we become blind to the adversities that beset our fellow man. We live in our own luxury, insulated from ugliness and doubt. -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% The bad reputation UNIX has gotten is totally undeserved, laid on by people who don't understand, who have not gotten in there and tried anything. -- Jim Joyce, former computer science lecturer at the University of California %% The barbaric religions of primitive worlds hold not a germ of scientific fact, though they claim to explain all. Yet if one of these savages has all the logical ground for his beliefs taken away, he doesn't stop believing. He then calls his mistaken beliefs 'faith' because he knows they are right. And he knows they are right because he has faith. -- Harry Harrison, Jason dinAlt character, Deathworld, Berkeley Medallion Edition, 1976 %% The belief in a demonic world is inculcated throughout the gospels and the rest of the books of the new testament; it pervades the whole patristic literature; it colors the theory and the practice of every christian church down to modern times. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, "Controverted Questions," 1892 %% The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. -- Robert Lynd %% The belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of the body is a matter of philosophical or theological speculation rather than of simple faith, and is accordingly nowhere expressly taught in holy scripture. -- The jewish Encyclopedia (1910), Vol. VI, p. 564 %% The believers in the bible are loud in their denunciation of what they are pleased to call the immoral literature of the world; and yet few books have been published containing more moral filth than this inspired word of god. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom. -- Clarence Darrow %% The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% The bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, English biologist %% The bible commands that we hate. -- H. A. (Buster) Dobbs, Editor of Firm Foundation magazine and church of christ preacher, from the June 1994 issue. %% The bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the bible. It is therefore not above criticism. -- Steve Allen, "Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality" %% The bible has done more harm than any other book in the world. -- William Floyd, "Christianity Cross-Examined" %% The bible is not inspired in its morality, for the reason that slavery is not moral, that polygamy is not good, that wars of extermination are not merciful, and that nothing can be more immoral than to punish the innocent on account of the sins of the guilty. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% The bible is not my book and christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of christian dogma. -- Abraham Lincoln %% The bible is one of the most genocidal books in history. -- Noam Chomsky %% The bible must be seen in a cultural context. It didn't just happen. These stories are retreads. But, tell a christian that -- No, No! What makes it doubly sad is that they hardly know the book, much less its origins. -- Isaac Asimov %% The bible nowhere prohibits war . . . Although war was raging in the world in the time of christ and his apostles, still they said not a word of its unlawfulness and immorality. -- Henry Wagner Halleck, "Military Art and Science," 1846 %% The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine? -- Judith Hayes %% The biggest threat to America is not communism it is moving America towards a fascist theocracy and everything the Reagan administration has been doing is steering us right down that path. When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view. -- Frank Zappa %% The book is worth attention for only two reasons: (1) it attacks attempts to expose sham paranormal studies; and (2) it is very well and plausibly written and so rather harder to dismiss or refute by simple jeering. -- Harry Eagar, reviewing "Beyond the Quantum" by Michael Talbot, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 200-201 %% The book, called the bible, is filled with passages equally horrible, unjust and atrocious. This is the book to be read in schools in order to make our children loving, kind and gentle! This is the book they wish to be recognized in our Constitution as the source of all authority and justice! -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% The broader and more influential organisations of businessmen have acted to undermine the basic foundation of the free market system they purport to represent and defend. -- Milton Friedman Lecture "The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community" (1983); cited in Filters Against Folly (1985) by Garrett Hardin %% The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream; it is a most depressing and humiliating reality. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% The bug stops here. %% The cannibals burn their enemies and eat them in good-fellowship with one another: meek christian divines cast those who differ from them but a hair's-breadth, body and soul into hell-fire for the glory of god and the good of his creatures! It is well that the power of such persons is not co-ordinate with their wills . . . -- William Hazlitt, "On the Pleasure of Hating" %% The capitalist class is interested in keeping the workingmen divided among themselves. Hence it foments race and religious animosities that come down from the past. -- Daniel DeLeon, Two Pages from Roman History, 1903 %% The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government. -- Thomas Jefferson %% The catholic church . . . upheld feudalism, then monarchism, warning of growing evils and possible revolutions. In the same manner, and under the same reservations, she now upholds capitalism; but, above all things and forever, she upholds the catholic church. -- Daniel DeLeon, The Vatican in Politics, 1891 %% The catholics have a pope. Protestants laugh at them, and yet the pope is capable of intellectual advancement. In addition to this, the pope is mortal, and the church cannot be afflicted with the same idiot forever. The protestants have a book for their pope. The book cannot advance. Year after year, and century after century, the book remains as ignorant as ever. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% The child begins by acting like the grownups who believe, and soon believes himself. The proofs come later, if at all. Religious belief generally starts as make-believe. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% The christian lives in a nightmare and thinks it is a pleasant dream. %% The christian party asserted that all knowledge is to be found in the scriptures and in the traditions of the church; that, in the written revelation, god had not only given a criterion of truth, but had furnished us all that he intended us to know. The scriptures, therefore, contain the sum, the end of all knowledge. The clergy, with the emperor at their back, would endure no intellectual competition . . . The church thus set herself forth as the depository and arbiter of knowledge; she was ever ready to resort to the civil power to compel obedience to her decisions. She thus took a course which determined her whole future career: she became a stumbling-block in the intellectual advancement of Europe for more than a thousand years. -- John William Draper, "History of the Conflict between Science and Religion", Chapter II %% The christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. -- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748 %% The christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly, has made the world evil and ugly. -- Friedrich Nietzsche %% The christians have fathers who aren't fathers, mothers who aren't mothers, brothers who aren't brothers, and sisters who aren't sisters, they swear off sex, and then try to explain "family values" to the rest of us. %% The christians were the first to make the existence of satan a dogma of the church. What is the use in a pope if there is no devil? -- Elena Blavatsky %% The church founded by Jesus has not made its way; has not permeated the world -- but did become extinct in the country of its birth -- as nazarenism and ebionism. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, Letter to Robert Taylor, June 3, 1889 %% The church had a devastating impact upon society. As the church assumed leadership, activity in the fields of medicine, technology, science, education, history, and commerce all but collapsed. Europe entered the dark ages. Although the church amassed a great deal of wealth during these centuries, most of what defines civilization disappeared. -- Hellen Ellerbe, "The Dark Side Of christianity" (Morningstar, 1995) %% The church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down here. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% The church has contributed nothing to civilization. It has progressed somewhat, and it has become a little more decent, in reflection of the movements of civilization that have taken place outside of the church and usually in the face of the strong opposition of the church. But the church has always resisted the process of civilization. It has struggled to the last ditch, by fair means and foul, to preserve as long as it could the vestiges of ancient and medieval theology, with all the puerile moralities and harsh customs and medieval styles of belief. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% The church never doubts -- never inquires. To doubt is heresy -- to inquire is to admit that you do not know -- the church does neither. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Thomas Paine", 1870 %% The church persecutes the living and her god burns, for all eternity, the dead. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Heretics and Heresies", 1874 %% The churches beg -- and if we don't give them money, why, they take it anyway, forcibly, by means of this unjust state tax exemption. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% The churches can well afford to pay fair taxation. But supposing they couldn't. Would not that be a very significant evidence that the churches were not really wanted? -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% The churches have no confidence in each other. Why? Because they are acquainted with each other. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Sixth Interview on Rev. Talmadge, 1882 %% The civilization of man has increased just to the same extent that religious power has decreased. The intellectual advancement of man depends upon how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth. The church never enabled a human being to make even one of these exchanges; on the contrary, all her power has been used to prevent them. In spite, however, of the church, man found that some of his religious conceptions were wrong. By reading his bible, he found that the ideas of his god were more cruel and brutal than those of the most depraved savage. He also discovered that this holy book was filled with ignorance, and that it must have been written by persons wholly unacquainted with the nature of the phenomena by which we are surrounded; and now and then, some man had the goodness and courage to speak his honest thoughts. In every age some thinker, some doubter, some investigator, some hater of hypocrisy, some despiser of sham, some brave lover of the right, has gladly, proudly and heroically braved the ignorant fury of superstition for the sake of man and truth. These divine men were generally torn in pieces by the worshipers of the gods. Socrates was poisoned because he lacked reverence for some of the deities. Christ was crucified by a religious rabble for the crime of blasphemy. Nothing is more gratifying to a religionist than to destroy his enemies at the command of god. Religious persecution springs from a due admixture of love towards god and hatred towards man. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom. %% The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. -- John Muir %% The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "orthodoxy", 1884 %% The clerics and their lay allies commonly tell us, that if we refuse to admit that there is good ground for expressing definite convictions about certain topics, the bonds of human society will dissolve and mankind lapse into savagery. There are several answers to this assertion. One is that the bonds of human society were formed without the aid of their theology; and, in the opinion of not a few competent judges, have been weakened rather than strengthened by a good deal of it. Greek science, Greek art, the ethics of old Israel, the social organization of old Rome, contrived to come into being, without the help of any one who believed in a single distinctive article of the simplest of the christian creeds. The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of those of Greece and Rome - not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world, were alike despicable. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, "Agnosticism and Christianity" 1889] http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE5/Agn-X.html %% The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence. -- Fred Brooks, Jr. %% The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. -- Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer Power and Human Reason" %% The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous. -- Bjarne Stroustrup, "The C++ Programming Language" %% The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself. -- Hilaire Belloc %% The counter-argument you sometimes hear is that secret cryptography is stronger because it is secret, and public algorithms are riskier because they are public. This sounds plausible, until you think about it for a minute. Public algorithms are designed to be secure even though they are public; that's how they're made. So there's no risk in making them public. If an algorithm is only secure if it remains secret, then it will only be secure until someone reverse-engineers and publishes the algorithms. A variety of secret digital cellular telephone algorithms have been "outed" and promptly broken, illustrating the futility of that argument. -- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999 %% The counter-evolutionistas love to huff and puff until they find a person who so soundly refutes them that they have no possible comeback. Then they ignore that person and go on making their ridiculous claims elsewhere as if they have not just been shown to be absurd. It's frustrating. You make the same point over and over. You refute the same idiocy over and over. Nothing changes. It's like a sick game to them. They're like the baby that keeps throwing its strained peas on the floor, and we keep picking them up. It doesn't matter how much evidence we have. It doesn't matter how many times their objections to the theory are answered. It's not about truth to them, its about belief. Specifically, control of belief, which is religion's bread and butter. It's sophistry, plain and simple. They don't argue to arrive at the truth through a dialectic process. They argue to protect their untenable belief system from anything that might threaten it. I would say that "Deliberate and venal ignorance" is about the best working definition of "Evil" that I can come up with. Counter-evolutionistas are evil. -- comment by spun (1352) on http://slashdot.org about creationists %% The country that has got the least religion is the most prosperous, and the country that has got most religion is in the worst condition. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Speech in Boston, April 23, 1880 %% The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse. It is doubtful whether a movement which does not profess some preposterous and patently irrational dogma can be possessed of that zealous drive which "must either win men or destroy the world." It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction between profession and practice - that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt - are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others. -- Eric Hoffer, _The True Believer_, 1951, section 88 %% The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny. . . . In war, then, as in peace, assert the freedom of speech and of the press. Cling to this as the bulwark of all our rights and privileges. -- William Ellery Channing %% The current situation in the mobile phone market isn't very flattering if you care about standardization and openness. Basically every manufacturer has their own proprietary platform. If you want to extend your mobile phone with new features and software you are generally dependable solely on the phone manufacturer itself. The vision behind OpenMoko describes a completely different world. It is a world where there is a common standard platform for mobile phones which is open and therefore friendly to developers. It is a world where once you buy your phone you can install or remove software from it as you wish, customizing the phone and its capabilities in much the similar manner you can customize your PC. It is a world which is, thanks to the visionaries and enthusiasts behind the OpenMoko project, near. -- "Forget iPhone, hail OpenMoko, the true revolution" article (http://www.libervis.com/article/forget_iphone_hail_openmoko_the_true_revolution) %% The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion -- except for the sect that can win political power. -- Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, dissenting opinion in Zorach v. Clauson (343 US 306 -- 1952) %% The day when working on Debian requires the use of a web interface will be the day that I hunt down and painfully kill the person responsible for doing it. -- Andrew Suffield, on debian-devel, discussing http://launchpad.net %% The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors. -- Thomas Jefferson %% The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism . . . Even the difference between theism and atheism is not nearly so profound as that between these who feel and those who do not feel their brothers' torments. -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. -- F. Dostoyevski %% The desire for revenge keeps one's wounds open. -- Leonid S. Sukhorukov, All About Everything (2005) %% The destroyer of weeds, thistles and thorns is a benefactor whether he soweth grain or not. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, motto on the title page of "Some Mistakes of Moses", mentioned in Interview with Chicago Times, November 14, 1879 %% The devil and god are components of a Siamese twin. Neither has any existence apart from the other. In denying the existence of the one, christians have helped to kill the other. If there need to be no fear of hell, people may well ask what is the attraction of heaven? Gods and devils were born together. Gods and devils will die together. -- Chapman Cohen, "The devil", Pamphlets for the People, no. 6 %% The dialog in Watchmen is so great it brings tears to the eyes of any normal person. Rorschach is the best. He makes the longest speeches, always to himself in voiceover. And I know they are really super great speeches because they sound exactly like the writing in my Twilight fan fiction. The characters in my stories always have really deep and profound things to say and they do it like they were tough guy detectives. Because that is so supercool and never, ever gets old or belabored! -- "Jimmy Critic" reviews "Watchmen" (http://bigempire.com/filthy/watchmen.html) %% The difference between a miracle and a fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal. -- Mark Twain %% The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits. -- Albert Einstein %% The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim . . . to save mankind form this sense of guilt, which they call sin. -- Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents" %% The direct use of force is so poor a solution to the problems of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations. -- David Friedman %% The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time. -- Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism (1990) %% The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the gospels do we find a precept for creeds, confessions, oaths, doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in christianity. -- John Adams %% The divorce between church and state ought to be absolute. It ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no church property anywhere, in any state, or in any nation, should be exempt from taxation, for if you exempt the church property of any church organization, to that extent you impose tax upon the whole community. -- US Pres. James A. Garfield, speech to Congress, June 22, 1874 %% The doctrine of eternal punishment is the most infamous of all doctrines -- born of ignorance, cruelty and fear. Around the angel of immortality christianity has coiled the serpent. Upon love's breast the church has placed the eternal asp. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called "faith." What man, who ever thinks, can believe that blood can appease god? And yet, our entire system of religion is based upon that belief. The jews pacified jehovah with the blood of animals, and according to the christian system, the blood of Jesus softened the heart of god a little, and rendered possible the salvation of a fortunate few. It is hard to conceive how the human mind can give assent to such terrible ideas, or how any sane man can read the bible and still believe in the doctrine of inspiration. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% The dogma of the infallibility of the bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the popes. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, "Controverted Questions," 1892 %% The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life -- hence it is a valuable possession to him. I do not see how eternal punishment hereafter could accomplish any good end, therefore I am not able to believe in it. To chasten a man in order to perfect him might be reasonable enough; to annihilate him when he shall have proved himself incapable of reaching perfection might be reasonable enough; but to roast him forever for the mere satisfaction of seeing him roast would not be reasonable -- even the atrocious god imagined by the jews would tire of the spectacle eventually. -- Mark Twain %% The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not on the doctrine taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious - it makes little or no difference . . . Under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything. -- Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World Revisited," 1958 %% The end of labor is to gain leisure. %% The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% The enemy with whom I have to grapple is one with whom no peace can be made. Idolatry will not parley; superstition will not treat on covenant. They must be uprooted for public and individual safety. -- Richard Carlisle %% The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. -- U.S. Constitution, Amendment 9. (Bill of Rights) %% The evidence of the emotions, save in cases where it has strong objective support, is really no evidence at all, for every recognizable emotion has its opposite, and if one points one way then another points the other way. Thus the familiar argument that there is an instinctive desire for immortality, and that this desire proves it to be a fact, becomes puerile when it is recalled that there is also a powerful and widespread fear of annihilation, and that this fear, on the same principle proves that there is nothing beyond the grave. Such childish "proofs" are typically theological, and they remain theological even when they are adduced by men who like to flatter themselves by believing that they are scientific gents . . . -- Henry Louis Mencken %% The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal. -- Charles Galton Darwin %% The existence of god implies a violation of causality. %% The exoteric, state-organized section of the christian church persecuted and stamped out the esoteric section, destroying every trace of its literature . . . in striving to eradicate . . . gnosis from human history. -- Dion Fortune, "The Mystical Qabalah" %% The expanded power Bush has granted himself was done without oversight. It was done without consent, or review, or even knowledge of others whom it affected. They did it in secrecy, which indicates they knew it was wrong. Bush has proven more than untrustworthy. He has betrayed America, and the world. And the worst part is, the same people who got their panties in a twist over a blow-job in the oval office are sitting by silently, like they are sports fans who support their team through even the worst losing streak. -- Tony (765) on http://slashdot.org on a comment on government spying %% The fact is that late term abortions are exceedingly rare. They are performed only when necessary to preserve a woman's health or life, or when a woman is carrying a fetus with lethal anomalies, many of which would die soon after birth. Again, the fact is that these abortions, these terminations are compelled by life and, life and health reasons and grave fetal abnormalities. -- Kate Michelman, President, National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League [NARAL] %% The fact of the matter is, most people treat computers like a glorified appliance. A computer should more aptly be treated like a motor vehicle; yeah, you can go have some fun in it but you'd better drive defensively and know how to operate the thing properly. You don't just take it out of the box and start pressing buttons. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other can. -- Wilhelm Reich %% The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality. -- George Bernard Shaw, The Preface to Androcles and the Lion %% The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible. -- Bertrand Arthur William Russell, "Marriage and Morals" %% The fact that millions of people still believe in a hell of eternal punishment for sinners and unbelievers is a drastic reminder of the need for persistent, progressive education of the masses. We have as yet only begun to realize the possibilities of progress. But science, rationalism and humanism have pointed the way, they have taken the first great steps, and we must keep right ahead on the highway of modernism. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% The fact that religion in the public sphere has become such a contentious subject in recent decades is precisely because there are too many people of faith who would seek to impose their belief structures on everyone else. Do the Ten Commandments constitute a reasonable code for moral behavior? Probably so, but they are by definition the product of a specific religious tradition - the Judeo-Christian tradition - and do not belong in publicly sponsored venues any more than the Five Pillars of Islam or the Eightfold Path of Buddhism. -- Lore McLaren, in a letter to the editor of Christian Science Monitor, July 11, 2006 edition %% The fact that the ontological argument reeks of logical trickery belies its philosophical force. It has in fact been taken very seriously by many philosophers over the years, including briefly by the atheistic Bertrand Russell. Nevertheless, even theologians have not generally been prepared to defend it. One problem lies with the treatment of "existence" as if it were a property of things, like mass or color. Thus the argument obliges one to compare the concepts of gods-that-really-exist and gods-that-don't-really-exist. But existence is not the sort of attribute to be placed alongside normal physical properties. I can meaningfully talk about having five little coins and six big coins in my pocket, but what does it mean for me to say that I have five existing coins and six nonexistent coins? -- Paul Davis, "The Mind of god", on the "ontological" argument for god's existence %% The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth. -- Clarence Darrow %% The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people; I was saved, they were damned . . . Our hymns were loaded with arrogance -- self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come judgment day. -- Robert Anson Heinlein, from Laurence J. Peter, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time, also James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief %% The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% The farther you go, the less you know. -- Lao Tsu, "Tao Te Ching" %% The fear of gods and devils is never anything but a pitiable degradation of the human mind. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction. -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Science Fiction" %% The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% The first correlation is with the unbalance between technological acceleration and political retrogression, which has proceeded earth-wide at ever widening danger levels since 1914 and especially since 1964. The breaking apart is fundamentally the schizoid and schismatic mental fugue of lawyer-politicians attempting to administrate a worldwide technology whose mechanisms they lack the education to comprehend and whose gestalt trend they frustrate by breaking apart into obsolete Renaissance nation-states. -- The Illuminatus! Trilogy %% The first great step towards progress, is, for man to cease to be the slave of man; the second, to cease to be the slave of the monsters of his own creation. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Ghosts", 1877 %% The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought to himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself belongs to nobody. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Dissertation On the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind" %% 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 A. Bakunin, "God and the State," from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief %% The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means. -- Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), French novelist, political writer. "Why Freedom?" The last essays of George Bernanos (1955) %% The foundation of morality is to . . . give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge. -- Thomas Henry Huxley %% The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgement and action. -- Albert Einstein %% The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment. -- Richard Phillips Feynman %% The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the tooth fairy has. -- Isaac Asimov, quoted in "2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt", by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996 %% The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start (examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science -- or of any honest intellectual inquiry. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "Bully for Brontosaurus," 1990, quoted in "2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt", by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996 %% The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. -- Albert Einstein %% The general precept of any product is that simple things should be easy, and hard things should be possible. -- Alan Kay %% The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other. -- Sir Francis Bacon %% The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. %% The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable - if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it. -- Noam Chomsky %% The god of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic-cleanser urging his people on to acts of genocide. -- "The Root of All Evil?", Richard Dawkins %% The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them. -- Sigmund Freud, "The Future of an Illusion", 1927 %% The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. -- Jane Addams %% The great danger of these religious charlatans lies in their unremitting attack on the separation of church and state in an effort to legislate their theological beliefs. Whether they are motivated from the desire for personal aggrandizement and greed, or sincere but misplaced superstition, they pose a very real danger to the liberties of all Americans. -- Joseph L. Daleiden, "The Final Superstition: A Critical Evaluation of Judeo-christian Legacy", p.439 %% The great paradox of freedom is that freedom allows those who would deny it to speak. %% The greater the number of men to whom the treasures of knowledge become accessible, the more widespread is the falling-away from religious belief -- at first only from its obsolete and objectionable trappings, but later from its fundamental postulates as well. -- Sigmund Freud %% The greatest achievement ever made in the cause of human progress is the total and final separation of church and state. If we have nothing else to boast of, we could lay claim with justice that the first among the nations we of this country made it an article of organic law that the relations between man and his maker were a private concern, into which other men have no right to intrude. To measure the stride thus made for the emancipation of the race, we have only to look back over the centuries that have gone before us, and recall the dreadful persecutions in the name of religion that have filled the world. -- David Dudley Field (1805-1894) in describing 'American Progress in Jurisprudence,' as quoted in Anson Phelps Stokes, Church And State In The United States Vol I, p. 37 %% The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by mean of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. -- Justice Louis O. Brandeis (Olmstead vs. United States) %% The greatest thing, you'll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved, in return. -- "Nature Boy" %% The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. -- Roger 'Verbal' Kint, "The Usual Suspects" %% The greatness of christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine. -- Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" Vol. 1 Chapter 12 %% The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The devil" 1899 %% The happiness of society is the end of government. -- John Adams %% The happy chaos out of which enlightenment might come. -- Hallucinogen, "Deranger" %% The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens. -- Alexis Charles henri Maurice de Tocqueville %% The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Great Infidels", 1881 also from Speech, New York City, 1 May 1881 %% The history of the rise of christianity has everything to do with politics, culture, and human frailties and nothing to do with supernatural manipulation of events. Had divine intervention been the guiding force, surely two millennia after the birth of Jesus he would not have a world where there are more muslims than catholics, more hindus than protestants, and more nontheists than catholics and protestants combined. -- John K. Naland, "The First Easter", Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 2 %% The hope of immortality never came from any religion. The hope of immortality has helped to make religion. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% The horizon of many people is a circle with a radius of zero. They call this their point of view. -- Albert Einstein %% The human instinct to censor thrives, as it always will, living in irrepressible conflict with the human instinct to speak. Outrage, self-righteousness, and paranoia feed the maw of censorship. Squelching speech, however, never reduces society's net paranoia quotient; it simply redirects it, drives it underground, where it festers into more dangerous hysterias. In the words of Justice Brandeis, "Men feared witches and burned women." -- Rodney Smolla, "Free Speech in an Open Society", p. 43. %% The human race had unencumbered, uncensored, SECRET communications for its entire history. "Talking" and "writing letters" and "making phone calls", we called it. The stars did not fall, liberty was not crushed, and The Enemy did not kill us all. -- comment on http://slashdot.org by Catbeller (118204) %% The idea of a personal god is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously. -- Albert Einstein, letter to Hoffman and Dukas, 1946 %% The idea of an incarnation of god is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker? . . . christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking "for our sakes was the world created." -- Julian The Apostate %% 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. He who desires to worship god must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity. -- Mikhail Bakunin, from "Federalism, Socialism, and Anti-Theologism" %% The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armor to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place. -- Douglas Adams %% The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying. -- John Carmack on software patents %% The idea that an arbitrary naive human should be able to properly use a given tool without training or understanding is even more wrong for computing than it is for other tools (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, guns, power saws). -- Doug Gwyn %% The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, pull back the curtains, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater. -- Frank Zappa %% The important thing is not to stop questioning. %% The impression is given that a special kind of morality is affirmed by accepting the vagaries of religion without evidence. But is it moral to accept uncritically every superstition, delusion, or prejudice our pulpiteers espouse? Is not the faith that we are told is holy, the trust in divinity that we are told is our duty, the certitude that a complete rejection of reason is moral behavior - all of this - nothing more than abject credulity, a complete surrender of our unique, personal sovereign identity? When "false" or "true" become irrelevant and a blanket assent regardless of the nature of that which we are asked to believe is considered sane behavior, do we not resign ourselves to slavery? When acceptance is on the basis of infallible authority and not on the basis of personal, reasoned conviction, have we not relinquished something very precious - our natural, temperamental individuality? Is not the mind of one who accepts blindly, precisely the mind of a production-line robot, the mind of one who goes through life oblivious of meaning and values, bereft of the hope of injecting sense into the profusion of nonsense that threatens to engulf us? Is this the faith we are told is good? -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, in Cardiff, "What Great Men Think of Religion" %% The inability to benefit from feedback appears to be the primary cause of pseudo-science. Pseudo-scientists retain their beliefs and ignore or distort contradictory evidence rather than modify or reject a flawed theory. Because of their strong biases, they seem to lack the self-correcting mechanisms scientists must employ in their work. -- Thomas L. Creed, "The Skeptical Inquirer," Summer 1987 %% The infidels of one age have been the aureoled saints of the next. The destroyers of the old are the creators of the new. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Great Infidels", 1881 %% The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented hell. -- Bertrand Arthur William Russell %% The influences that have lifted the race to a higher moral level are education, freedom, leisure, the humanizing tendency of a better-supplied and more interesting life. In a word, science and liberalism - the two forces, fundamentally skeptical, that we have seen continuously at work in human progress - have accomplished the very things for which religion claims the credit. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Outline of Bunk" %% The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion but no brains. -- Abu'l-`Ala' al-Ma`arri, d. 1057, poeet of Ma`arra, quoted in Amin Maalouf's book "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes" %% The ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. -- Mohammed %% The inspiration of the bible depends on the credulity of him who reads. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Christian Religion" Sec. III, The Ingersoll-Black Debate, (New York) April 25, 1881 %% The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods" 1872 %% The inventor of a good soup did more for his race than the maker of any creed. The doctrines of total depravity and endless punishment were born of bad cooking and dyspepsia. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "About Farming in Illinois", 1877 %% The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world. -- seen on the net %% The judaical and christian theology show us a partial god who chooses or rejects, who loves or hates, according to his caprice; in short, a tyrant who plays with his creatures; who punishes in this world the whole human species for the crimes of a single man; who predestines the greater number of mortals to be his enemies, to the end that he may punish them to all eternity, for having received from him the liberty of declaring against him. -- Denis Diderot, Footnote to d'Holbach's "The System of Nature" %% The justifications for drug testing are part of the presently fashionable debate concerning restoring America's "competitiveness." Drugs, it has been revealed, are responsible for rampant absenteeism, reduced output, and poor quality work. But is drug testing in fact rationally related to the resurrection of competitiveness? Will charging the atmosphere of the workplace with the fear of excretory betrayal honestly spur productivity? Much noise has been made about rehabilitating the worker using drugs, but to date the vast majority of programs end with the simple firing or the not hiring of the abuser. This practice may exacerbate, not alleviate, the nation's productivity problem. If economic rehabilitation is the ultimate goal of drug testing, then criteria abandoning the rehabilitation of the drug-using worker is the purest of hypocrisy and the worst of rationalization. -- The concluding paragraph of "Constitutional Law: The Fourth Amendment and Drug Testing in the Workplace," Tim Moore, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, vol. 10, No. 3 (Summer 1987), pp. 762-768. %% The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. -- Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy %% The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land. -- Thomas Henry Huxley %% The lack of open source software billionaires is by design. It's part of the intent of open source software -- to balance the scales by devaluing the obscene profit margins that exist in the commercial software business. Duplicating software is about as close to legally printing money as a company can get; profit margins regularly exceed 80 percent. -- http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000842.html %% The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in 13 states in the course of 11 years, is but one for each state in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. -- Thomas Jefferson in letter to James Madison, 20 December 1787 %% The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. -- Henry David Thoreau %% The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -- Anatole France %% The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own. -- H.G. Wells %% The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others. -- Thomas Jefferson %% The level of atheism throughout the rest of the developed world refutes any argument that religion is somehow a moral necessity. Countries like Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on Earth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. Conversely, the 50 nations now ranked lowest in terms of human development are unwaveringly religious. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% The level of awe that you get by contemplating the modern scientific view of the universe: deep time (by which I mean geological time), deep space, and what you could call deep complexity, living things . . . that level of awe is just orders of magnitude greater and more awe-inspiring than the sort of pokey medieval world-view which the church still actually has. I mean, they sort of pay lip-service to the scientific world-view, but if you listen to what they say on Thought For The Day [a religious program on BBC Radio] and things like that, it is medieval. It's a small world, a small universe, with the sky up there, very little advance since that time. So I yield to nobody in my awe for the universe and for life, but I also have a deep desire to understand it, in terms of what makes it work, what makes it tick, and not to take refuge in spurious non-explanations like "I just believe it because I believe it," that sort of thing. -- Richard Dawkins, interview with Douglas Adams %% The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt %% The life which is unexamined is not worth living. -- Plato %% The longer I have been an atheist, the more amazed I am that I ever believed christian notions. -- Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease . . . -- John Maynard Keynes %% The low level operating systems SUCKS SO BAD it is hard to believe. The first order problem is lack of memory management / protection. It took me a while to figure out that the zen of mac development is 'be at peace while rebooting'. I rebooted my mac system more times the first weekend than I have rebooted all the WinNT systems I have ever owned.... there is just no excuse for an operating system in this day and age to act like it doesn't have access to memory protection. -- John Carmack, On programming under the Classic Mac OS, in his '.plan' file %% The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program. -- Frederick Brooks %% The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency. -- Albert Einstein %% The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child" 1877 %% The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been. -- Alan Ashley-Pitt %% The man who worships a tyrant in heaven naturally submits his neck to the yoke of tyrants on earth. -- George W. Foote, "Flowers of Freethought" %% The manifest object of the men who framed the institutions of this country, was to have a _state without religion_, and a _church without politics_ -- that is to say, they meant that one should never be used as an engine for any purpose of the other, and that no man's rights in one should be tested by his opinions about the other. As the church takes no note of men's political differences, so the state looks with equal eye on all the modes of religious faith . . . Our fathers seem to have been perfectly sincere in their belief that the members of the church would be more patriotic, and the citizens of the state more religious, by keeping their respective functions entirely separate. -- Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Jeremiah S. Black, from "Essays and Speeches," 1885, p. 53 %% The many instances of forged miracles, and prophecies, and supernatural events, which, in all ages, have either been detected by contrary evidence, or which detect themselves by their absurdity, prove sufficiently the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and marvelous, and ought reasonably to begat a suspicion against all relations of this kind. -- David Hume, "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" 1748 %% The map is not the territory. -- Alfred Korzybski %% The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. -- Wilhelm Stekel %% The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm. -- Joel Bakan %% The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. -- Henry David Thoreau %% The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. -- "Civil Disobedience", Henry David Thoreau %% The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which; he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both. -- Zen buddhist Text %% The mechanic, when a wheel refuses to turn, never thinks of dropping on his knees and asking the assistance of some divine power. He knows there is a reason. He knows that something is too large or too small; that there is something wrong with his machine; and he goes to work and he makes it larger or smaller, here or there, until the wheel will turn. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child", 1877 %% The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. -- Richard Dawkins, "Viruses of the Mind" %% The mind is everything; what you think, you become. -- Buddha %% The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them. -- Albert Einstein, letter to Sigmund Freud, 30 July 1932 %% The missionaries go forth to christianize the savages -- as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already. -- Edward Abbey %% The missionary zeal seems rather an expression of some deep misgiving, some pressing feeling of insufficiency at the center. Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth. The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. -- Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer" %% The modern world is essentially non-religious. This may seem a strange statement given the rise of a militant catholic church and militant muslim, American protestant, and judaic groups. But if one examines the acts, as opposed to the rhetoric, of these movements, one finds their primary purpose is to reassert dominance over women and subordinate groups, e.g., muslim socialists, American blacks, Israeli arabs. -- Marilyn French, "Will Secularism Survive?" article in _Free Inquiry_ magazine %% The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery. -- Bertrand Russell %% The more I use other operating systems, the more I like Debian GNU / Linux. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. -- Richard Bach, "Illusions" %% The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events, the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal god interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light, but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast powers in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task. -- Albert Einstein %% The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. -- Tacitus, 56-120 A.D. %% The more important the issue at hand, the more it demands careful scrutiny. This is a simple but important point which most religious people overlook. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be. -- Lao Tsu %% The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief. -- Sigmund Freud %% The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds -- it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. -- Albert Einstein,_The World as I See It_ %% The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations. -- Noam Chomsky %% The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny . . . " -- Isaac Asimov %% The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "Dinosaur in a Haystack" %% The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H.Sapiens is that the lord god of creation, shaper and ruler of the universes, wants the sacharrine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not recieve this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history. -- Lazarus Long, from "Time Enough For Love" by R. Heinlein %% The most telling evidence of the nature of our government is that paying someone elses parking meter is illegal. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. -- Stanley Kubrick %% The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on. %% The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called theosophy and spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion. Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning. -- Albert Einstein, letter of 5 February 1921 %% The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian savior Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight, the instant of the turn of the year from increasing darkness to light. -- Joseph Campbell, _The Mythic Image_, Bollingen Series C, Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 33 %% The notion of a free product that is in many ways superior to its commercial counterpart scares a lot of people. It's frightening to any business minded person that there is a large wealth of talented developers who are making an amazing product and not only distributing it free of charge, but giving away the source as well. To a business person, this is simply nonsense, but to those of us who believe in creating something useful and of high quality "just for fun", it's not only a hobby, but a cause. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% The notion of religious liberty is that you cannot be forced to participate in a religious ceremony that's not of your choosing simply because you're out-voted. -- Ira Glasser, Exec. Dir.of ACLU, 1995 %% The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes -- that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects -- this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once--and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity . . . -- Henry Louis Mencken, 1930 %% The notion that the "Soldier not the reporter" gave us freedom of the press, and the "Soldier not the poet" gave us free speech, while reassuring, is mostly wrong. Actually, war, the threat of war, and post-war periods often deliver the opposite of free press and speech. -- "Red State Son: Freedom Granted, Freedom Won", http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2006/01/freedom-granted-freedom-won.html %% The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a communist notion . . . In a free society these institutions must be wholly free -- which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state. -- Alan Barth %% The object of the freethinker is to ascertain the truth - the conditions of well being - to the end that his life will be made of value. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, contribution to The Truth Seeker, 1890 %% The objections which have been brought against a standing army, . . . may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. -- Henry David Thoreau %% The old complaint that mass culture is designed for eleven-year-olds is of course a shameful canard. The key age has traditionally been more like fourteen. -- Robert Christgau, "Esquire" %% The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned. -- Bruce Ediger, in comp.os.linux.misc, on X interfaces. %% The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. --John Stuart Mill %% The only good thing ever to come out of religion was the music. -- George Carlin, _Brain Droppings_ %% The only happiness lies in reason; all the rest of the world is dismal. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy. -- Albert Einstein %% The only people for me are the mad ones -- the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles. -- Jack Kerouac, "On the Road" %% The only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane. -- Phaedrus %% The only question which a wise man can ask himself is whether a doctrine is true or false. Consequences will take care of themselves. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, English biologist (1825-1895) %% The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. -- Kernighan and Ritchie %% The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true. %% The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice. -- Clarence Darrow %% The originality of repetition, and the mental vigor of acquiescence, are all that we have any right to expect from the christian world. As long as every question is answered by the word "god," scientific inquiry is simply impossible. As fast as phenomena are satisfactorily explained the domain of the power, supposed to be superior to nature must decrease, while the horizon of the known must as constantly continue to enlarge. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by lesser men. -- Plato %% The philosophy of atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation. -- Emma Goldman %% The point is that choice is good. You can select the right tool for the job. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail. I guess you could similarly say "when all you have is Microsoft Windows, every problem tends to look like either a labor-intensive impossibility or a GPF waiting to happen." %% The political policies that are called conservative these days would appal any genuine conservative, if there were one around to be appalled. For example, the central policy of the Reagan Administration - which was supposed to be conservative - was to build up a powerful state. The state grew in power more under Reagan than in any peacetime period, even if you just measure it by state expenditures. The state intervention in the economy vastly increased. That's what the Pentagon system is, in fact; it's the creation of a state-guaranteed market and subsidy system for high-technology production. There was a commitment under the Reagan Administration to protect this more powerful state from the public, which is regarded as the domestic enemy. Take the resort to clandestine operations in foreign policy: that means the creation of a powerful central state immune from public inspection. Or take the increased efforts at censorship and other forms of control. All of these are called "conservatism," but they're the very opposite of conservatism. Whatever the term means, it involves a concern for Enlightenment values of individual rights and freedoms against powerful external authorities such as the state, a dominant Church, and so on. That kind of conservatism no one even remembers anymore. -- Noam Chomsky, Interview by Adam Jones, February 20, 1990 %% The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment. To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog. -- Buckminster Fuller %% The positive and negative reinforcements of religion verses atheism tell quite a story. First of all, most religions promise you heaven and promise that your enemies will be punished in hell. What these promises amount to is an assurance of justice, one of humankind's greatest longings. Atheism promises nothing. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. -- John Berger %% The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- George Bernard Shaw %% The power of the priesthood lies in the submission to a creed. In their onslaughts on rebellion they have exhausted human torments; nor, in their lust for earthly dominion, have they felt remorse, but rather joy, when slaying christ's enemies and their own. -- Brooks Adams, The Emancipation of Massachusetts %% The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. -- U.S. Constitution, Amendment 10. (Bill of Rights) %% The presence or absence of a god or the religions that postulate gods does not change what should and what should not be considered morality. Human kindness will always be a good thing, god or no god. Attributing morality to the propensities of some kind of deity is nothing more than quibbling. Here we have an "it is so because it is so," kind of pseudoreasoning. -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces: what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities. -- Ursula K. LeGuin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1997) %% The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this. -- Albert Einstein %% The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. -- Plato %% The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them. -- Joseph Campbell %% The primary tool of science is skepticism, whose light shrivels unquestioning faith. -- Mike Huben %% The problem is that Americans don't recognize there are other moral forces outside the world of immaterial gods. Morality can be derived from reason and rational thought. It can be based on our relationship to each other, instead of our relationship to a god no one can see. Religion isn't morality. A lack of faith isn't immorality. When Americans can recognize that, when we recognize our human power to solve our human problems instead of counting on a god to fix it, maybe we will gain a better understanding of just what it means to be moral. -- James L. Hartley %% The problem with most people is, they wouldn't recognize rave music if it came up and offered them a hit of ecstasy. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music. -- Donald Erwin Knuth %% The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual . . . Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. -- "Civil Disobedience", Henry David Thoreau %% The proper place for the study of religious beliefs is in a church or temple, at home, or in a course on comparative religions, but not in a biology class. There is no place in our world for an ideology that seeks to close minds, force obedience, and return the world to a paradise that never was. Students should learn that the universe can be confronted and understood, that ideas and authority should be questioned, that an open mind is a good thing. Education does not exist to confirm people's superstitions, and children do not learn to think when they are fed only dogma. -- Tim Berra, "Evolution and the Myth of Creationism" %% The public demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties. -- Henry Louis Mencken, "Prejudice" %% The quality of life is determined by its activities. --Aristotle %% The question arises, therefore, why cannabis is so regularly banned in countries where alcohol is permitted. [...] It may be that we can ban cannabis simply because the people who use it, or would do so, carry little weight in social matters and are relatively easy to control, whereas the alcohol user often carries plenty of weight in social matters and is difficult to control, as the U.S. prohibition era showed. It has yet to be shown, however, that the one is more socially or personally disruptive than the other. -- Ph.D. H.B.M Murphy, M.D., Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal. "The Cannabis Habit" (1963). published in 'Bulletin on Narcotics' by UNDCP %% The radical right and left are both very wrong and very dangerous. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% The real oppressor, enslaver, and corrupter of the people is the bible. That book is the chain that binds, the dungeon that holds the clergy. That book spreads the pall of superstition over the colleges and schools. That book puts out the eyes of science, and makes honest investigation a crime. That book fills the world with bigotry, hypocrisy and fear. -- _Some Mistakes of Moses_, Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 2 p. 43 %% The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do. -- B.F. Skinner %% The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. -- Christopher Morley %% The really incredible part of christian theology is god's demanding after perpetrating his brutal crimes and injustices on humankind and ordering his own son murdered -- demanding that humankind honor him, worship him, kneel down to him, and sing his praises day and night forever. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% The reason for the success of this somewhat communist-sounding strategy, while the failure of communism itself is visible around the world, is that the economics of information are fundamentally different from those of other products. -- Bruce Perens, "Open Sources" %% The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw %% The religion of Jesus christ, as preached by his church, causes war, bloodshed, hatred, and all uncharitableness; and why? Because, they say, a certain belief is necessary to salvation. They do not say, if you behave yourself you will get there; they do not say, if you pay your debts and love your wife and love your children, and are good to your friends, and your neighbors, and your country, you will get there; that will do you no good; you have got to believe a certain thing. No matter how bad you are, you can instantly be forgiven; and no matter how good you are, if you fail to believe that which you cannot understand, the moment you get to the day of judgment nothing is left but to damn you, and all the angels will shout "hallelujah." -- Robert Green Ingersoll "Orthodoxy", 1884 %% The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion will be based on experience, which refuses dogma. If there's any religion that would cope with scientific needs it will be buddhism . . . -- Albert Einstein %% The religion that is afraid of science dishonors god and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of god's empire but it is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image - a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being. For this reason, people of our type see in morality a purely human matter, albeit the most important in the human sphere. -- Albert Einstein, from "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited by helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press, pp 69-70 %% The reverend Robert H. Schuller, second to none in the multiformity of his televised effusions, gives us more than three hundred definitions of the word faith. He could go on forever. In his 'Tough-Minded Faith for Tender-hearted People' [muddleminded faith for simpleminded people] Schuller makes it plain that "faith" can be dictum, psychological judgment, scientific proposition, or mystic symbolism. It can be whatever puritanical perception, frivolous fancy, arbitrary assumption, or capricious conviction. It can be both horse and vehicle, north and south, sinister and dexter, verso and recto, larboard and starboard. There are no restrictions. Faith has so many meanings to Schuller that it is meaningless. Meaning everything, it means nothing - as is usually the case when religionists use the term faith. -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% The revolution will not be televised. %% The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom. -- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas %% The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. -- Rowan Atkinson %% The right to revolt has sources deep in our history. -- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas %% The rights of the people to be free to exercise their religious and "philosophical beliefs" includes *by necessity* the right to abstain from the practise of any religious and philosophical beliefs. This right cannot be guaranteed in any environment wherein a practice of this type is enacted in a state funded context -- like a classroom -- and the participation is all but compulsory for those present in that they must experience another's religious practice on their time and against their will. School ground is not the issue. School TIME *is*. At that point, it becomes STATE time, which makes it STATE religion. Say hello to theocracy. -- Timothy Jones , on alt.atheism %% The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it. -- Albert Einstein %% The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month. -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself. -- John Kenneth Galbraith, "Annals of an Abiding Liberal" %% The same goes for the freedom to demonstrate, the right to a fair trial, and the freedom to burn the flag -- it was the activists, lawyers, writers and other advocates who were on the frontlines of those battles, at times facing the very soldiers who supposedly were granting all that freedom to begin with. -- "Red State Son: Freedom Granted, Freedom Won", http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2006/01/freedom-granted-freedom-won.html %% The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment -- that it should obey a program of coded instructions -- is again only quantitatively less true for brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another, but also we sometimes don't. Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to ``speak in tongues'' -- the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive -- are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability. -- Richard Dawkins, "Viruses of the Mind" %% The secret of happiness is total disregard of everybody. %% The sectaries of a religion, which preaches, in appearance, nothing but charity, concord, and peace, have proved themselves more ferocious than cannibals or savages, whenever their divines excited them to destroy their brethren. There is no crime in which men have not committed under the idea of pleasing the divinity or appeasing his wrath. -- Baron D'Holbach, "Good Sense," 1772 %% The sense of spiritual relief which comes from rejecting the idea of god as a supernatural being is enormous. -- Sir Julian Huxley. "Religion Without Revelation" %% The simple rights, the civil liberties from generations of struggle must not be just fine words for patriotic holidays, words we subvert on weekdays, but living, honored rules of conduct among us. -- Adlai Ewing Stevenson %% The siren sings a lonely song Of all the wants and hungers The lust of love, a brute desire The ledge of life goes under Divide the dream into the flesh Kaleidescope and candle eyes Empty winds scrape on the soul But never stop to realize -- White Zombie, "Blood, Milk, and Sky" %% The sixth precept of the natural law is, that in revenge and punishments we must have our eye not at the evil past, but the future good: that is, it is not lawful to inflict punishment for any other end, but that the offender may be corrected, or that others warned by his punishment may become better. But this is confirmed chiefly from hence, that each man is bound by the law of nature to forgive one another, provided he give caution for the future, as hath been showed in the foregoing article. Furthermore, because revenge, if the time past be only considered, is nothing else but a certain triumph and glory of mind, which points at no end (for it contemplates only what is past, but the end is a thing to come), but that which is directed to no end, is vain: that revenge therefore which regards not the future, proceeds from vain glory, and therefore without reason. But to hurt another without reason introduces a war, and is contrary to the fundamental law of nature. It is therefore a precept of the law of nature, that in revenge we look not backwards, but forward. Now the breach of this law is commonly called CRUELTY. -- Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ch.3, sec. 11 %% The sky isn't always blue, The sun doesn't always shine, It's alright to fall apart, Sometimes. -- Robert Miles, "One and One" %% The so-called religious right of the republican party - the christian right, they call themselves, although in my view they are neither christian nor right - is after a totalitarian state. -- Edward Albee, interview in Progressive August 1996 issue %% The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy . . . neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. %% The software required [Microsoft Windows 95] or better, so I installed [GNU/]Linux. %% The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. -- John Stuart Mill %% The solution . . . would seem to lie in dismantling the theistic edifice, which will no longer bear the weight of the universe as enlarged by recent science, and attempting to find new outlets for the religious spirit. God, in any but a purely philosophical, and one is almost tempted to say Pickwickian sense, turns out to be a product of the human mind. As an independent or unitary being active in the affairs of the universe, he does not exist. -- Julian Huxley, "Science, Religion and Human Nature," Conway Memorial Lecture, 1930 %% The spectacle of astrology in the White House -- the governing center of the world's greatest scientific and military power -- is so appalling that it defies understanding and provides grounds for great fright. The easiest response is to laugh it off, and to indulge in wisecracks about Civil Service ratings for horoscope makers and palm readers and whether Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev for his sign. A contagious good cheer is the hallmark of this presidency, even when the most dismal matters are concerned. But this time, it isn't funny. It's plain scary. -- Daniel S. Greenberg, Editor, _Science and Government Report_, writing in "Newsday", May 5, 1988 %% The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man" %% The state of some commercial [software] is more insecure than any [GNU/]Linux box without a root password . . . -- Bernd Eckenfels %% The statement that god created man in his own image is ticking like a time bomb in the foundations of christianity. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% The story is what ties all the big-ass special effects together. It gives them context. Without something decent to think about all you're left with is a very, very pretty travelogue of a place that doesn't exist. Without a good story, you're stuck with people saying, "Oh, shit!" about a half-dozen times. People in movies should rarely shout, "Oh shit!" That's what a bad screenwriter puts on paper when he has nothing to say. Rather, the movie should make the audience say it while those on screen react. -- the Filthy Critic reviews "Avatar" (http://bigempire.com/filthy/archive.html) %% The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker . . . I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly. -- Richard Matthew Stallman, "Open Sources" %% The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure. -- Albert Einstein %% The strong individual loves the earth so much he lusts for recurrence. he can smile in the face of the most terrible thought: meaningless, aimless existence recurring eternally. The second characteristic of such a man is that he has the strength to recognize -- and to live with the recognition -- that the world is valueless in itself and that all values are human ones. He creates himself by fashioning his own values; he has the pride to live by the values he wills. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness. -- Ursula K. LeGuin, "The Dispossessed" %% The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions. -- Confucious %% The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell. -- Confucius %% The superior man... does not set his mind either for anything, or against anything; what is right he will follow. -- Confucious %% The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer. -- Bruce Schneier %% The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. -- Thomas Jefferson %% The technology in question is an example of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)--technology designed to restrict the public. Describing it as "copyright protection" puts a favorable spin on a mechanism intended to deny the public the exercise of those rights which copyright law has not yet denied them. -- Richard Stallman %% The terrible religious wars that inundated the world with blood tended at least to bring all religion into disgrace and hatred. Thoughtful people began to question the divine origin of a religion that made its believers hold the rights of others in absolute contempt. A few began to compare christianity with the religions of heathen people, and were forced to admit that the difference was hardly worth dying for. They also found that other nations were even happier and more prosperous than their own. They began to suspect that their religion, after all, was not of much real value. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. -- Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald %% The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it -- even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves? -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. -- Richard Dawkins, _The Blind Watchmaker_ (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 317 %% The things you own end up owning you. -- Tyler Durden, "Fight Club" %% The thoughts of man, in order to be of any real worth, must be free. Under the influence of fear the brain is paralyzed, and instead of bravely solving a problem for itself, tremblingly adopts the solution of another. As long as a majority of men will cringe to the very earth before some petty prince or king, what must be the infinite abjectness of their little souls in the presence of their supposed creator and god? Under such circumstances, what can their thoughts be worth? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% The time has come for atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and humanists to come out of the closet and to openly confront the religious hegemony in America that has created a political correctness so powerful that even the most courageous are afraid to violate it openly. -- Alan M. Dershowitz, F.I. Mag. Summer 1999 %% The time has come for people of reason to say: enough is enough. Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive, and it's dangerous. -- "The Root of All Evil?", Richard Dawkins %% The trinitarian believes a virgin to be the mother of a son who is her maker. -- Sir Francis Bacon, quoted in "2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt", by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996 %% The trouble is that god in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no resemblance to the god of the bible or any other religion. If a physicist says god is another name for Planck's constant, or god is a superstring, we should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the nature of superstrings or the value of Planck's constant is a profound mystery. It has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable of forgiving sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about whether or not the sabbath begins at 5pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil or have a bit of arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable of imposing a death penalty on his son to expiate the sins of the world before and after he was born. -- Richard Dawkins %% The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it. -- Franklin P. Jones %% The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time. -- Franklin Adams %% The true free living human being is the one that achieves his dream without depending on someone. -- Lao Tsu %% The true religion, interesting the whole human race at all times and in all situations, ought to be eternal, universal, and self-evident; whereas the religions pretended to be revealed having none of these characteristics, are consequently demonstrated to be false. -- Attributed to Diderot, possibly written by translater Julian Hibbert in "Thoughts On Religion", 1770 %% The truth is rarely pure, and never simple. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% The truth is that christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church as an organization has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings. -- Henry Louis Mencken %% The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of heaven, too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen shall perish. -- Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer" %% The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. -- Herbert Agar, "A Time for Greatness" 1942 %% The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. -- Herbert Spencer %% The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. -- Martin Luther King Jr., "Where do we go from here: Chaos or community?" (1967) %% The unitarians are really just a bunch of atheists who really like going to church. %% The universe is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering. -- Chinese proverb %% The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. -- 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, "River Out of Eden" %% The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- Benjamin Franklin %% The use of the astrological zodiac in the bible has been well established, and without much question, the twelve zodiacal gods have come down to us as the twelve apostles. The shepherd's crook used by the Egyptians' Osiris was used for the bishops' and popes' crozier. They transformed his ankh, the phallic sign of life, into the christian cross, and they copied the high- pointed headdress of Osiris as their prototype for Saint Peter's papal tiara. There could only be four gospels written. The reason there are only four biblical gospels was because Saint Jerome believed in the four cardinal gods of the zodiac. But who was father of the four "cardinal" gods of the zodiac? Yes, indeed! It was the divine Egyptian son Horus, whose birthday was on the 25th of December long before there was a biblical Jesus. -- Dr. Wally F. Dean, "The Mania of Religion", 1995, p. 106 %% The vast majority of successful major crimes against property are perpetrated by individuals abusing positions of trust. -- Lawrence Dalzell %% The very concept of sin comes from the bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage? -- Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% The virgin birth, the resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the old testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children. Every one of these miracles amounts to a violation of the normal running of the natural world. Theologians should make a choice. You can claim your own magisterium, separate from science's but still deserving of respect. But in that case, you must renounce miracles. Or you can keep your lourdes and your miracles and enjoy their huge recruiting potential among the uneducated. But then you must kiss goodbye to separate magisteria and your high-minded aspiration to converge with science . . . -- Richard Dawkins, "Snake Oil and holy Water," in Forbes magazine, Oct. 4, 1999 %% The virgin mother story was easily acceptable to the Roman people, because they were already psychologically conditioned to the same established myth of the vestal virgin Rhea Silva and her godly son Romulus. -- Dr. Wally F. Dean, "The Mania of Religion", 1995, p. 103 %% The war on drugs to me is absolutely phoney; it's so obviously phoney, ok? It's a war against our civil rights, that's all it is. They're using it to make us afraid to go out at night, afraid of each other, so that we lock ourselves in our homes and they are suspending our rights one by one. -- Bill Hicks %% The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors and acquirers scurry alongside trying to wave money in your face. -- Paul Graham, "The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn" %% The weakness of the body and that of the mind in infancy are exactly proportioned; their vigor in manhood, their sympathetic disorder in sickness, their common gradual decay in old age. The step further seems unavoidable; their common dissolution in death. -- David Hume (1771-1776) "Of the Immortality of the Soul" %% The whole bible was written by slave owners, and for slave owners. There is no hint of criticism of slavery anywhere in that book. Jesus made no objection to mistreatment of slaves. He indicated that selling of debtors into slavery would be continued his forthcoming kingdom of heaven as well as masters having the right to beat their slaves and put them to torture. -- Merrill Holste, "Slavery and the bible", article in the May 1986 issue of American atheist Magazine %% The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. -- G.K. Chesterson %% The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. -- Bertrand Arthur William Russell %% The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. -- G.K. Chesterton %% The word heretic ought to be a term of honor . . . -- Charles Bradlaugh %% The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand. -- Richard Dawkins %% The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles. -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis %% The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity. -- G.B. Shaw %% The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized -- and never knowing. -- David Viscott %% Theism tells men that they are the slaves of a god. Atheism assures men that they are the investigators and users of nature. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% Theists and atheists who spend their time trying to denounce the other side by arguing that "tyrant W was an atheist," "racist murderer X was a theist," "insidious philosophy Y presumes there is no God," or "destructive dogma Z is based on the Bible," are typically engaging in a classic act of bigotry -- the demonization of an entire class of highly varied people on the basis of the actions of a few extremists. In the process, they insult and polarize the good people on each side, and trivialize the comparatively minor, yet still dangerous, elements within. -- Was Hitler an Atheist or a Theist? More Importantly, Who Cares?, July 21, 1999, by Mark I. Vuletic %% Theists think all gods but theirs are false. Atheists simply don't make an exception for the last one. %% Then there are those who really do believe, but take very good care to separate their religion off in a separate part of their mind. They don't let clashing thoughts ever literally clash. Either they do it by only thinking about religion on Sunday, or they somehow manage to keep their religious thoughts separate from their scientific ones. Those are the ones I find least easy to understand. And then, of course, there are those who just aren't very bright. -- Richard Dawkins, "A Trick of Light: Richard Dawkins on Science and Religion" %% Theologians do not just do this incidentally: (gerrymander) this is theology. Doing theology is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in which the verses of scripture are the pieces: the finished picture is prescribed by each denomination, with a certain latitude allowed. What makes the game so pointless is that you do not have to use all the pieces, and that pieces which do not fit may be reshaped after pronouncing the words "this means." -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system. -- Baron Paul Henri T. d'Holbach %% Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. -- Robert Anson Heinlein, "JOB: A Comedy of Justice" %% Theology is not what we know about god, but what we do not know about nature. In order to increase our respect for the bible, it became necessary for the priests to exalt and extol that book, and at the same time to decry and belittle the reasoning powers of man. The whole power of the pulpit has been used for hundreds of years to destroy the confidence of man in himself-- to induce him to distrust his own powers of thought, to believe that he was wholly unable to decide any question for himself, and that all human virtue consists in faith and obedience. The church has said 'Believe and obey!' If you reason you will become an unbeliever, and unbelievers will be lost. If you disobey, you will do so through vain pride and curiosity, and will, like Adam and Eve, be thrust from paradise forever! For my part, I care nothing for what the church says, except in so far as it accords with my reason; and the bible is nothing to me, only in so far as it agrees with what I think or know. -- _Some Mistakes of Moses_, Ingersoll's Works, Vol. 2 p. 53 %% Theology is the systematic attempt to pour the newest wine into the old skins of a denomination. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% There appears to be irrefutable evidence that the mere fact of overcrowding induces violence. -- Harvey Wheeler %% There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches and the like. All these are the work of human hands aided by money. But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safegaurd which is the common possession of all, especially to the dealings of democracies with dictatorships. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm. -- Demosthenes, 2nd Phillipic Oration %% There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for. -- Albert Camus %% There are few people more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be thought so. %% There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. -- Ed Howdershelt %% There are hundreds of millions who believe the messiah has come. If he did, then it is unfortunately the case that his heroic sacrifice and death have had no effect whatsoever on the very problem his coming might have been expected to address, for history demonstrates, beyond question, that we christians have been just as dangerous, singly and en masse, as non-christians. -- Steve Allen, "Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality" %% There are many intelligent species in the universe. They all own cats. %% There are no atheists in the foxholes. -- William Thomas Cummings, _Field_Sermon_on_Bataan_ (1942) I was an atheist in a foxhole. -- Philip K. Paulson, Vietnam veteran (http://www.americanhumanist.org/humanism/foxhole.html) %% 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, Interview by Ira Shorr, February 11, 1996 %% There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob. -- G.K. Chesterton %% There are none more ignorant and useless, than they that seek answers on their knees, with their eyes closed. %% There are others who take the ground that all is natural; that there never has been, never will be, never can be any interference from without, for the reason that nature embraces all, and that there can be no without or beyond. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Why Am I An agnostic?", Part II, 1890 %% There are revolutions that are sweeping the world and we in America have been in a position of trying to stop them. With all the wealth of America, with all of the military strength of America, those revolutions are revolutions against a form of political and economic organization in the countries of Asia and the Middle East that are oppressive. They are revolutions against feudalism. -- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, 1952 %% There are some truths, however, that we should never forget: Superstition has always been the relentless enemy of science; faith has been a hater of demonstration; hypocrisy has been sincere only in its dread of truth, and all religions are inconsistent with mental freedom. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Humboldt", 1869 %% There are three magical words that make everyone feel happy: 'no compilation errors'. %% There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power. -- J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (1966) %% There are two kinds of fool: one says 'this is old therefore good'; [the other] says 'this is new therefore better'. -- Dean Ing %% There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and BSD. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. -- Jeremy S. Anderson %% There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. -- http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html %% There are two things in the world that can never get together - religion & common sense. -- George W. Foote, from "Flowers of Freethought", 2 vols. 1893-94 %% There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship. -- Ralph Nader %% There can be no greater good than the quest for peace, and no finer purpose than the preservation of freedom. -- Ronald Reagan %% There can be no perfect freedom unless the church and state are separated. But the church and state are not separated in America so long as the state grants a subsidy to the church in the form of tax exemption. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full. -- Henry Alfred Kissinger %% There does not now, nor will there ever exist, a programming language in which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs. -- Lawrence Flon %% There had to be a better way, and then I was introduced to Lisp . . . a programmer's koan. -- Bill Birch %% There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back. -- Robert Anson Heinlein, "Life Line" %% There has never been a religion in the annals of the world with such a bloody record as christianity. -- Elena Blavatsky %% There is a very subtle difference between theory and practice. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. %% There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical god is a fiction. As Richard Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% There is brutality and there is honesty. There is no such thing as brutal honesty. %% There is but one way to demonstrate the existence of a power independent of and superior to nature, and that is by breaking, if only for one moment, the continuity of cause and effect. Pluck from the endless chain of existence one little link; stop for one instant the grand procession and you have shown beyond all contradiction that nature has a master. Change the fact, just for one second, that matter attracts matter, and a god appears. The rudest savage has always known this fact, and for that reason always demanded the evidence of miracle. The founder of a religion must be able to turn water into wine -- cure with a word the blind and lame, and raise with a simple touch the dead to life. It was necessary for him to demonstrate to the satisfaction of his barbarian disciple, that he was superior to nature. In times of ignorance this was easy to do. The credulity of the savage was almost boundless. To him the marvelous was the beautiful, the mysterious was the sublime. Consequently, every religion has for its foundation a miracle -- that is to say, a violation of nature -- that is to say, a falsehood. No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of nature. The church wishes us to believe. Let the church, or one of its intellectual saints, perform a miracle, and we will believe. We are told that nature has a superior. Let this superior, for one single instant, control nature, and we will admit the truth of your assertions. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. -- Darwin %% There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. -- Arthur C. Clarke %% There is incessant debate about it: have theists or atheists historically caused more suffering and death? When you add up the numbers, opposing Stalin with Torquemada, the Chinese Revolution with the Crusades, have atheists or theists killed more, tortured more? And was Hitler a theist or an atheist, anyway? Here's a better question: who cares? -- Was Hitler an Atheist or a Theist? More Importantly, Who Cares?, July 21, 1999, by Mark I. Vuletic %% There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling -- absolutely essential to mental health and happiness. -- Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% There is little sense in worrying about winds and storms, for these things come and go of there own accord. Worry instead about your ship and crew, your supplies and sails, for over them alone have you command. Always remember that hard work is the hull of your ship, and careful planning the rigging that supports your sails. Curse not the gods when your hopes and dreams seem certain to be crushed upon the rocks of reality. For it was you alone who charted the course, and you alone who must keep your dreams afloat. -- Sir William Wallace %% There is more to life than increasing its speed. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi %% There is no act of treachery or mean-ness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour. -- Benjamin Disraeli, "Vivian Grey" %% There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth. -- Jean Giraudoux, "Tiger at the Gates" %% There is no distinctly American criminal class except congress. -- Mark Twain %% There is no faith, however respectable, no interest, however legitimate, which must not accommodate itself to the progress of human knowledge and bend before truth. -- Paul Broca %% There is no god but our god The humble christians say. There is no god but our god. To him alone we pray. What of the others by the score, Gods just as great and mighty. Of Allah, Odin, Jove and Thor, Venus and Aphrodite. If to the one alone we pray, And he is just a faker (fakir?), There surely will be hell to pay When we meet our maker. So, good christians take my advice. Don't be so egotistic. And on occasion in your prayers Address some other mystic. Remember there have been a score, A hundred, thousands, maybe more. To say there is but one god Might make the others sore. Good christians believe in one god. Myself, I must confess, Am not so very different. I believe in just one less. %% There is no sin but ignorance. -- Christopher Marlowe %% There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence. -- Robert G. Ingersoll %% There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information. -- Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden" %% There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few. -- Van Wyck Brooks, The Nation, 14 August 1954 %% There is no war crime, war is a crime. -- D.R.I. %% There is no way to get around the grotesque historical fact, which is that soldiers fight heroically no matter the character of the government they serve. -- William F. Buckley, Jr. %% 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 not the slightest question but that the god of the old testament is a jealous, vengeful god, inflicting not only on the sinful pagans but even on his chosen people fire, lightning, hideous plagues and diseases, brimstone, and other curses. -- Steve Allen, "Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality" %% There is not to be found, in all history any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned goodness, education, and learning as to secure us against all delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood; and at the same time attesting facts, performed in such a public manner, and in so celebrated a part of the world, as to render the detection unavoidable. -- David Hume, "Of Miracles", from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748 %% There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it. -- Havelock Ellis %% There is nothing to fear from gods, There is nothing to feel in death, Good can be attained, Evil can be endured -- The Four Herbs of Epicurus, 341-270 BC %% There is one reason, and one reason only to watch ordinary TV in America. You and your flatmate take turns flipping channels. First one to hit a car ad makes the coffee. You never wait more than 90 secs. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% There is one thing you absolutely must know about modern advertising. No matter how true any single advertisement is, modern advertising itself, taken as a whole, tells a lie - that you need the thing being advertised. It is a lie because consumer goods of real value do not need to be advertised - such goods are part of a natural market that flows "beneath" the [consumerist] marketplace, although as time passes these basic necessities represent a shrinking percentage of the total flow of goods. -- "Consumer Angst", http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/consumerangst.html %% There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or later the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable. -- Henry Louis Mencken, 1930 %% There may be a god who will make us happy in another world. If he does, it will be more than he has accomplished in this. A being who has the power to prevent it and yet allows thousands and millions of his children to starve, who devours them with earthquakes, who allows whole nations to be enslaved, cannot -- within my judgment -- be implicitly depended upon to do justice in another world. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% There never was a good war or a bad peace. -- Benjamin Franklin %% There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment -- anywhere. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% There's a lesson that I need to remember When everything is falling apart In life, just like in loving There's such a thing as trying too hard You've gotta sing Like you don't need the money Love like you'll never get hurt You've gotta dance Like nobody's watching It's gotta come from the heart If you want it to work. -- Kathy Mattea %% There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got... because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now... the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later 'cause they own this fuckin' place. It's a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people: white collar, blue collar, it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on. Good, honest, hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all! At all! At all! And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth. It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it. -- George Carlin %% There's a tendency today to absolve individuals from moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that, you pay with your soul. It's not men who limit women, it's not straights who limit gays, it's not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don't have the nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it. -- Bernard Mickey Wrangle %% There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out. The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well. It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully. -- Ellen Goodman %% There's an old proverb that says just about whatever you want it to. %% There's been no top authority saying what marijuana does to you. I really don't know that much about it. I tried it once but it didn't do anything to me. -- John Wayne %% There's more to living Than only surviving. Maybe I'm not there, But I'm still trying. -- Offspring, "Staring at the Sun" %% There's no reason to treat software any differently from other products. Today Firestone can produce a tire with a single systemic flaw and they're liable, but Microsoft can produce an operating system with multiple systemic flaws discovered per week and not be liable. This makes no sense, and it's the primary reason security is so bad today. -- Bruce Schneier, Cryptogram, 16/04/2002. %% There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. -- Ayn Rand %% There's nothing like a hot bath, a cold beer and a good book. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% There's nothing shameful in acknowledging that you don't have the answers to every question about life. Just accept the fact that you know only a fraction of what's going on in the world. You don't have to attach explanations in terms of a special revelation of god's will, a glimpse at the supernatural, evidence of a conspiracy, or anything else. -- Harry Browne, "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World", Avon Books, 1973, p. 151 %% These deities have demanded the most abject and degrading obedience. In order to please them, man must lay his very face in the dust. Of course, they have always been partial to the people who created them, and have generally shown their partiality by assisting those people to rob and destroy others, and to ravish their wives and daughters. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% These facts notwithstanding, religious moderates tend to imagine that human conflict is always reducible to a lack of education, to poverty or to political grievances. This is one of the many delusions of liberal piety. To dispel it, we need only reflect on the fact that the Sept. 11 hijackers were college educated and middle class and had no discernable history of political oppression. They did, however, spend an inordinate amount of time at their local mosque talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in paradise. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% These gods did not even know the shape of the worlds they had created, but supposed them perfectly flat. Some thought the day could be lengthened by stopping the sun, that the blowing of horns could throw down the walls of a city, and all knew so little of the real nature of the people they had created, that they commanded the people to love them. Some were so ignorant as to suppose that man could believe just as he might desire, or as they might command, and that to be governed by observation, reason, and experience was a most foul and damning sin. None of these gods could give a true account of the creation of this little earth. All were woefully deficient in geology and astronomy. As a rule, they were most miserable legislators, and as executives, they were far inferior to the average of American presidents. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% They [preachers] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live. -- Thomas Jefferson %% They [religious idealists] say in a single breath: "god and the liberty of man," "god and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men" -- regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if god exists, all these things are condemned to nonexistence. For, if god is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave. Now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their god as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty. A master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. -- Mikhail Bakunin, "God and the State", 1874 %% They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man. These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams -- and still calls for more. They are fools that think otherwise. No great effort was ever bought. No painting, no music, no poem, no cathedral in stone, no church, no state was ever raised into being for payment of any kind. No Parthenon, no Thermopylae was ever built or fought for pay or glory; no Bukhara sacked, or China ground beneath Mongol heel, for loot or power alone. The payment for doing these things was itself the doing of them. To wield oneself -- to use oneself as a tool in one's own hand -- and so to make or break that which no one else can build or ruin -- THAT is the greatest pleasure known to man! To one who has felt the chisel in his hand and set free the angel imprisoned in the marble block, or to one who has felt sword in hand and set homeless the soul that a moment before lived in the body of his mortal enemy -- to those both come alike the taste of that rare food spread only for demons or for gods." -- Gordon R. Dickson, "Soldier Ask Not" %% They 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, "The Selfish Gene" %% They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you're high, you can do everything you normally do, just as well. You just realize that it's not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference. -- Bill Hicks %% They may think they chose their doctrine because it is offered to us as infallible and true, but this is plainly no sufficient reason: scores of other doctrines, scriptures, and apostles, sects and parties, cranks and sages make the same claim. Those who claim to know which of the lot is justified in making such a bold claim, those who tell us that this faith or that is really infallible and true are presupposing in effect, whether they realize this or not, that they themselves happen to be infallible. -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when not actually threatened. How very nice for authority. I decided not to learn this particular lesson. -- Richard Matthew Stallman %% They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 %% They want freedom from "the fearful burden of free choice," freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product. They do not want freedom of conscience, but faith -- blind, authoritarian faith. -- Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer" %% They want to see my ass dead, well it's his turn That's why they're calling me a communist, a socialist Ain't that a bitch? I'd rather be a commie than a fascist -- "Victim of a Criminal", Front Line Assembly %% They were allowed to stay there on one condition, and that is that they didn't eat of the tree of knowledge. That has been the condition of the christian church from then until now. They haven't eaten as yet, as a rule they do not. -- Clarence Seward Darrow, American lawyer (1857-1938) %% Things are not always what they seem. -- Phaedrus %% Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too. -- Voltaire %% Think of computer security like power tools. The day you think you are totally safe is the day you end up hurt. -- Alan Cox, in an email to the Linux-Kernel mailing list %% Think of the egotism of a man who believes that an infinite being wants his praise! -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% Think tanks are like universities minus the students and minus the systems of peer review and other mechanisms that academia uses to promote diversity of thought. Real academics are expected to conduct their research first and draw their conclusions second, but this process is often reversed at most policy-driven think tanks. -- sourcewatch.org article on so called "think tanks" %% This aspect of marketing has a lot in common with traditional religious practices: * The truth is hidden from view. * Your reward lies in the hereafter. * True happiness is only available to the initiated, the "insiders." * Everyday reality is a sham, a waste of time, an illusion. * We are all defective, our personal experiences have no legitimacy without the validation of priests. -- "Consumer Angst", http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/consumerangst.html %% This century will be called Darwin's century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox christianity. he has not only stated, but he has demonstrated, that the inspired writer knew nothing of this world, nothing of the origin of man, nothing of geology, nothing of astronomy, nothing of nature; that the bible is a book written by ignorance -- at the instigation of fear. Think of the men who replied to him. Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin; and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task. He was held up to the ridicule, the scorn and contempt of the christian world, and yet when he died, England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest. Charles Darwin conquered the intellectual world, and his doctrines are now accepted facts. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "orthodoxy", 1884 %% This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "An Interview on Chief Justice Comegys", Brooklyn Eagle, 1881 %% This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. [...] An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. -- Albert Einstein, Why Socialism? %% This government never of itself furthered any enterprise but with the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the west. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and would have done if the government had not sometimes gotten in its way. For government is an expedient, by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most left alone by it. -- "Civil Disobedience", Henry David Thoreau %% This is a good plan for life in general[:] If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it. -- Paul Graham, "How to Make Wealth" %% This is a typical problem, that was discussed a few days ago. People are confusing Microsoft's success in general with Technological superiority. I find it interesting that *anyone* would care what Bill Gate's opinion is on security. The volume of critical problems reported, and of actual viruses and worms that have spread across the Internet lately should've been enough to indicate that Microsoft doesn't have a good understanding of security in general. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% This is my religious problem: it would be wonderful to believe in the most fundamental way. It would make life easier, it would explain everything, it would give meaning where none is apparent, it would make tragedies bearable. If I went to a revival meeting, I have no doubt I could be one of the first to go down on his knees. It seems as if the only religion worth having is the simplest possible religion. But something about the fact that all it takes to make it so is deciding it IS so puts me off. Knowing it could instantly make me much happier makes it somehow unworthy of having. -- Dick Cavett interview, on his lack of religious faith %% This is not an attack on the First Amendment rights of people who believe in faith healing. We just don't believe the First Amendment allows them to inflict their views upon their children and let them die from such things as infections, when one quick trip to a doctor would cure the problem. Children should not have to die to uphold the religious beliefs of their parents. -- Scott Greenwood, Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD) %% This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose. -- Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden" %% This is the first age that's paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one. -- Arthur Clarke %% This is the real mobile communications revolution we should be expecting. It is not merely about creating a technologically superior mobile phone that looks good. It is about creating an open common environment which welcomes innovators of all kinds to converge and create technological superiority not dependable on one vendor. It is the mirror of the Free Software ecosystem that produced things like GNU/Linux, Mozilla Firefox, Apache, PHP, Drupal and other impressive software technologies. -- "Forget iPhone, hail OpenMoko, the true revolution" article (http://www.libervis.com/article/forget_iphone_hail_openmoko_the_true_revolution) %% This is the way nerds approach the world, and we have nothing but pity for people who are so stupid as to put anything ahead of truth, because we know that the truth is what moves the world. Everything else--however deadly or destructive it sometimes can be--is just the transient flailing of sad little people who want to put their fantasies in place of reality. -- comment by radtea (464814) on http://slashdot.org %% This is vital in cryptography, because security has nothing to do with functionality. You can have two algorithms, one secure and the other insecure, and they both can work perfectly. They can encrypt and decrypt, they can be efficient and have a pretty user interface, they can never crash. The only way to tell good cryptography from bad cryptography is to have it examined. -- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999 %% This is what people don't understand about iPhone/iPad/iPod -- it's not up to you. It's entirely up to Apple whether or not they're consistent or fair, and so far, they've been neither. And yet, people keep simultaneously buying these things and whining that they can't do stuff. It's like buying fertilizer and complaining that it's shit. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% This isn't a slippery slope, i's a greased cliff with a vicious downdraft and parachute made out of fucking elephants. -- from http://fuckthenewyorktimes.com %% This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration. At the appropriate time as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to send via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school. After work, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to a house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it's valuables thanks to the local police department. I then log on to the internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post on freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% This occupation with ideas of immortality is for people of rank, and especially for ladies who have nothing to do. But a man of real worth who has something to do here, and must toil and struggle to produce day by day, leaves the future world to itself, and is active and useful in this. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe %% This question is put to christians who believe that the bible unerringly describes god and reports the commands and the characteristics of god. If there is a god, it is natural that we should wish to be quite correct in our understanding of that god's nature. So, we ask: Can and does god lie? Looking this point up in the mazes of holy writ, we discover confusion. In Numbers xxiii, 19, we are told: "god is not a man, that he should lie." This is put even mere strongly in hebrews vi, 18, where we read: "It was impossible for god to lie." But do these citations settle the matter? Ah, no, we are upset in, our calculations the moment we turn to 2 Thessalonians ii, 11, where we read: "For this cause god shall send them strong delusions, that they should believe a lie." And in I Kings xxii, 23, god is thus reported: "Now, therefore, behold, the lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the lord hath spoken evil concerning thee." Can god lie? Can the bible lie? Anyway, there is a mistake somewhere. The big mistake is in entertaining the idea of a god. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% This whole christian theology thing is that god came down to experience life through his son. Well, how's he experiencing life if he doesn't get laid? Give me a break. And why would he not get laid, as he created the apparatus in the first place? -- Tori Amos, interview in _Vox_, May, 1994, by Steve Maline %% Those Romans who perpetrated the rape of the Sabines, for example, did not work themselves up for the deed by screening Debbie Does Dallas, and the monkish types who burned a million or so witches in the Middle Ages had almost certainly not come across Boobs and Buns or related periodicals. -- Barbara Ehrenreich %% Those committed to an institution generally claim that all those who prefer fresh air and freedom lack the courage to commit themselves. In fact, the shoe is on the other foot. More often than not, commitment to an institution issues from a want of courage to stand up alone. Typically, it is an escape, a search for togetherness, for safety in numbers. -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% Those of us who are pro-choice are also, passionately, pro-life. Most of us love babies, love children, and love our liberty - not to mention loving sex and our right to have it when, how, and with whomever we choose. -- Rachel Kramer Bussel, "I'm Pro-Choice and I Fuck", Village Voice, January 13, 2006 %% Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship god in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money. -- Eleanor Roosevelt %% Those who don't understand [GNU/]Linux are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. -- unidentified source %% Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well. -- Aristotle %% Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy %% 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. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. -- Barry Goldwater, Acceptance Speech as the 1964 Republican Presidential candidate. %% Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of scientific truth as they would a cold bath plunge. -- Luther Burbank, "Why I Am an Infidel," 1926 %% Those who think any sex act being performed on video is automatically degrading are probably admitting more about themselves and their own hang-ups about sex than they would like to think. -- from a somethingawful.com movie review %% Those who would hijack the personal beliefs of the Founders in an attempt to justify their own faiths and render them in some way fundamentally American are utterly missing the point. If there is anything to be gleaned from a study of the beliefs of the Founders, it is this: Their individual approaches to faith were exactly that - individual approaches. The Founders recognized first and foremost that there can be no official religion in the United States. This would be anathema to the kind of society they sought to establish. Whether the Founders were Christians, deists, or products of the Age of Reason is irrelevant; they all recognized that each citizen must be free to pursue spirituality in his or her own way. -- Lore McLaren, in a letter to the editor of Christian Science Monitor, July 11, 2006 edition %% Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly? -- Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner on the Ten Commandments ruling, June 27, 2005 %% Those who write software only for pay should go hurt some other field. -- Erik Naggum, in gnu.misc.discuss %% Those whose visions dictate that they cannot peacefully coexist with the rest of us we will have to quarantine as best we can. . . . If you insist on teaching your children falsehoods -- that the Earth is flat, that 'Man' is not a product of evolution by natural selection -- then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at the earliest opportunity. Our future well-being -- the well-being of all of us on this planet -- depends on the education of our descendants. -- "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", Daniel C. Dennett %% Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained. -- The Tao of Programming %% Thought is one of the manifestations of human energy, and among the earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand conspicuous -- Fear and Greed. Fear, which, by stimulating the imagination, creates a belief in an invisible world, and ultimately develops a priesthood; and Greed, which dissipates energy in war and trade. -- Brooks Adams (1848-1927), The Law of Civilization and Decay %% Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in god doing this and that -- it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population. -- Noam Chomsky %% Through all the years, those who plowed divided with those who prayed. Wicked industry supported pious idleness, the hut gave to the cathedral, and frightened poverty gave even its rags to buy a robe for hypocrisy. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "What Must We Do To Be Saved?", 1880 %% Throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and liberty has been not terrorism, but the power of the state. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Throughout this protracted & disgraceful assault on American womanhood the clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the christian religion . . . -- Matilda Joslyn Gage %% Thus blind faith is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves; insatiable desire a substitute for hope; accumulation a substitute for growth; fervent hustling a substitute for purposeful action, and pride a substitute for unattainable self-respect. -- Eric Hoffer, N.Y. Times Magazine, Feb. 15, 1959 %% Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist. -- Epicurus %% 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 %% Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you (religionists) whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance. And, meanwhile, we will endeavor to be as charitable as possible, and whilst you trumpet forth officially your contempt for our skepticism, we will at least try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own bluster. -- Leslie Stephen, "An Agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876 %% Time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time. -- Bertrand Russell %% To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. -- Theodore Roosevelt %% To ask where the open source billionaires are is to demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of how open source software works. If you wanted to become obscenely rich by starting an open source software company, I'm sorry, but you picked the wrong industry. You'll make a living, perhaps even a lucrative one. But you won't become Bill Gates rich, or Paul Allen rich, by siphoning away the exorbitant profit margins commercial software vendors have enjoyed for so many years. -- http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000842.html %% To be awake is to be alive. -- Henry David Thoreau, "Walden" %% To be great is to be misunderstood. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% To be is to program. I program, therefore I am. %% To be patriotic, hate all nations but your own; to be religious, all sects but your own; to be moral, all pretenses but your own. -- Lionel Strachey %% To be quite honest, I love music but I don't care about feeding musicians. I used to write music and I produce DJ mixes but I give it all away for free and work 9-5 like the rest of us. Thanks for getting me to tap my toe every day, musicians, but I don't see why entertainers should be millionaires. IT admins and plumbers and receptionists and janitors make things happen in this world. Entertainers just give us proles something to enjoy while we are busy maintaining and improving the world. -- comment on http://slashdot.org by spyrochaete (707033) %% To be true to the mythical conception of a god is to be false to the interests of mankind. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% To create a world in which reason is suspect, religious faith is a virtue, and doubt is regarded as sin, is to sanctify ignorance. -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% To date, the firm conclusions of Project Blue Book are: 1. no unidentified flying object reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security; 2. there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and 3. there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED are extraterrestrial vehicles. -- the summary of Project Blue Book, an Air Force study of UFOs from 1950 to 1965, as quoted by James Randi in Flim-Flam! %% To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection. -- Henri Poincaré %% To doubt has more of faith . . . than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge %% To exempt the church from taxation, is to pay part of the priest's salary. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Interview in The Truth Seeker, New York, September 5, 1885. Quoted by Joseph Lewis in "Franklin the Freethinker" %% To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy. -- David Brooks, "The Necessity of atheism" %% To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. -- Bertrand Arthur William Russell %% To fill a world with religion . . . is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used. -- Richard Dawkins %% To hate man and worship god seems to be the sum of all the creeds. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses" 1879 %% To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Alva Edison %% To know that the bible is the literature of a barbarous people, to know that it is uninspired, to be certain that the supernatural does not and cannot exist -- all this is but the beginning of wisdom. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "How to Edit a Liberal Paper", Secular Thought, Toronto, January 8, 1887 %% To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% To lead people, you must follow behind. -- Lao Tsu %% To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. -- Claude Adrien Helvetius %% To love justice, to long for the right, to love mercy, to pity the suffering, to assist weak, to forget wrongs and remember benefits. -- to love the truth, to be sincere, to utter honest words, to love liberty, to wage relentless war against slavery in all its forms, to love wife and child and friend, to make a happy home, to love the beautiful in art, in nature, to cultivate the mind, to be familiar with the mighty thoughts that genius has expressed, the noble deeds of all the world, to cultivate courage and cheerfulness, to make others happy, to fill life with the splendor of generous acts, the warmth of loving words, to discard error, to destroy prejudice, to receive new truths with gladness, to cultivate hope, to see the calm beyond the storm, the dawn beyond the night, to do the best that can be done and then to be resigned -- this is the religion of reason, the creed of science. This satisfies the brain and heart. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Foundations of Faith", 1895, Section VIII, "Conclusion" %% To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws. -- Ursula LeGuin, "The Dispossessed" %% To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt. --E.C. Stanton %% To make sense of the churches' mission to save souls, one must suppose that those who either are not reached by christian preaching or reject it are not saved but left to some bad fate, traditionally named hell. To make sense of the churches mission, one has to suppose that a man's eternal fate does not depend on his own efforts or his conduct, and that god lets our eternal bliss or torment hinge, at least in large part, on the efficiency of one or another organization. A human judge acting in analogous fashion would be said to have abdicated any effort to be just. -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% To make the Greeks into the fathers of true civilization - the fathers, in a word, of the first Enlightenment - was to subvert the foundations of christian histiography by treating man's past as a secular, not sacred, record. The primacy of Greece meant the primacy of philosophy, and the primacy of philosophy made nonsense of the claim that religion was man's central concern. -- Peter Gay, "The Enlightenment - The Rise of Modern Paganism" %% To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. -- George Santayana %% To me, the most obscene word in our language is celibacy. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Liberty in Literature", 1890 %% To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom . . . -- Susan B. Anthony %% To prove the gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature. -- Diderot %% To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant -- inexcusably ignorant. -- "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", Daniel C. Dennett %% To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the "scientific" establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it. -- Isaac Asimov %% To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world, is just as base as to use force. -- Hypatia (c. 370-415 CE), Alexandrian mathematician, murdered by a christian mob in 415 CE %% To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough For Love" %% To succeed the theologan invades the cradle. In the minds of innocents they plant the seeds of superstition. Save children from the pollution of this horror. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% To sum up (or I shall be pursuing the infinite), it is quite clear that the christian religion has a kind of kinship with folly in some form, though it has none at all with wisdom. If you want proofs of this, first consider the fact that the very young and the very old, women and simpletons, are the people who take the greatest delight in sacred and holy things, and are therefore always found nearest the altars, led there doubtless solely by their natural instinct. Secondly, you can see how the first great founders of the faith were great lovers of simplicity and bitter enemies of learning. Finally, the biggest fools of all appear to be those who have once been wholly possessed by zeal for christian piety. They squander their possessions, ignore insults, submit to being cheated, make no distinction between friends and enemies, shun pleasure, sustain themselves on fasting, vigils, tears, toil and humiliations, scorn life and desire only death - in short, they seem to be dead to any normal feelings, as if their spirit dwelt elsewhere than in their body. What else can that be but madness? And so we should not be surprised if the apostles were thought to be drunk on new wine, and Festus judged Paul to be mad. -- Erasmus, 'Praise of Folly' %% To surrender to ignorance and call it god has always been premature, and it remains premature today. -- Isaac Asimov %% To think is to differ. -- Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, July 1925 %% 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, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% To those accustomed to the precise, structured methods of conventional system development, exploratory development techniques may seem messy, inelegant, and unsatisfying. But it's a question of congruence: precision and flexibility may be just as disfunctional in novel, uncertain situations as sloppiness and vacillation are in familiar, well-defined ones. Those who admire the massive, rigid bone structures of dinosaurs should remember that jellyfish still enjoy their very secure ecological niche. -- Beau Sheil, "Power Tools for Programmers" %% To those who wish to punish others -- or at least to see them punished, if the avengers are too cowardly to take matters in to their own hands -- the belief in a fiery, hideous hell appears to be a great source of comfort. -- Steve Allen, "Steve Allen, on the Bible Religion & Morality" %% To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic. -- Walter Kaufmann, "The Faith of a Heretic" %% To use violence is to already be defeated. -- Chinese proverb %% Today christians . . . stand at the head of [this country] . . . I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy christianity . . . We want to fill our culture again with the christian spirit . . . We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the *poison of immorality* which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of *liberal excess* during the past . . . (few) years. -- The Speeches of Adolph Hitler, 1922-1939, Vol. 1 (London, Oxford University Press, 1942), pg. 871-872 %% Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Krik's classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham's guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in "conserving" this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDs through abstinence -- "Triumph of the authoritarians" by John W. Dean, July 14, 2006 %% Today, Jesus' name is used to divide us, to make us intolerant, bigoted, hateful. There is nowhere Jesus could be born today were he would feel comfortable. Jesus is being betrayed by the people who claim to believe in him. -- F. Forrester church, unitarian minister and author of _God and Other Famous Liberals_, quoted in Life Magazine, Dec. 1994 "Jesus" issue %% Tomorrow will be canceled due to lack of interest. %% Tomorrow's sunrise hasn't happened yet, but it's reasonable to assume that it will. If someday it doesn't, we'll reconsider. -- Jim Austin, Portland, Me., Nov. 24, 2007 (response to an article conflating faith with science) %% Tony Stark, arguably, has the worst plan for using his super abilities of any comic book hero. Stark's super-ability is engineering. A physically super-powered character like Spider-man can only accomplish things that require him to be on the spot; Stark's potential super-deeds can be mass produced. Even a moderately talented engineer could do hundreds of times more for humanity than Spider-man, and Stark is not an ordinary engineer; he is prodigiously talented. He could use his unique engineering prowess to cure heart disease, or to provide mobility to paralysis victims. Instead he chooses to pursue a quixotic crusade against villainy which could be left to dozens, if not hundreds of other costumed superheroes. He's brought himself down from the level of engineering genius to the level of a mere superhero. Instead of designing mass producible solutions to humanity's problems, he designs combat technologies that threaten humanity when they are reproduced. Indeed he spends a great deal of superhero energy trying to put the technology transfer genie back in the bottle. -- comment on http://slashdot.org by hey! (33014) about the "Iron Man" superhero %% Transactional psychologists have verified what most of us have known intuitively all along: that the stronger are a person's motives for certain interpretations of the data confronting him, the more likely are the chances that those will be the interpretations he will come up with, even though they be radically wrong. Said Andre Gide in 'Pretexts,' "Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves . . . It seems as if the mind enjoys nothing more than sinking deeper into error." The person with the self-sealing system that Oppenheimer describes (section 18) cannot be convinced at all. he has become uncannily proficient at transmuting all experiential verification to conform to that which he wants to believe. he now has adequate defenses against countervailing evidence to discount almost anything that would prove detrimental to his cherished beliefs, to revamp information that threatens long-established convictions. Religious faith (which is just such a closed system), if strong enough, will protect a person from the arguments appearing in a book such as this, just as the faith of people who want to believe that their destinies lie in the stars is enough to protect them from the declarations of 186 noted scientists who feel it important to convince them that they are wrong. Bertrand Russell was talking about this kind of "religious" faith when, in 'Human Society in Ethics and Politics', he tells us that he believes that all faiths do harm. He defines faith as the belief in anything for which no evidence exists. If there is evidence, faith is not required. We do not need faith to believe that vinegar is bitter or that water is wet. We use the term faith only when emotion dominates reason. Faith, for Mencken, was a kind of clearing house for all the various conspiracies religionists contrive in order to deny or distort the facts that our senses present to us to make up what we call our existence. Faith, he was sure, is the force that foments the concerted attacks against what can be called a rational moral philosophy. -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% Trillions and trillions of prayers every day asking and begging and pleading for favors. 'Do this' 'Gimme that' 'I want a new car' 'I want a better job'. And most of this praying takes place on Sunday. And I say fine, pray for anything you want. Pray for anything. But . . . what about the divine plan? Remember that? The divine plan. Long time ago god made a divine plan. Gave it a lot of thought. Decided it was a good plan. Put it into practice. And for billion and billions of years the divine plan has been doing just fine. Now you come along and pray for something. Well, suppose the thing you want isn't in god's divine plan. What do you want him to do? Change his plan? Just for you? Doesn't it seem a little arrogant? It's a divine plan. What's the use of being god if every run-down schmuck with a two dollar prayer book can come along and fuck up your plan? And here's something else, another problem you might have; suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? 'Well it's god's will. God's will be done.' Fine, but if it gods will and he's going to do whatever he wants to anyway; why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me. Couldn't you just skip the praying part and get right to his will? -- George Carlin %% True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth. -- "The SNAFU Principle" %% True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else. -- Clarence Darrow %% True religion must be free. Without perfect liberty of mind there can be no true religion. Without liberty the brain is a dungeon -- the mind a convict. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% 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. -- ex-preacher Dan Barker %% Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind . . . -- Percy Bysshe Shelley %% Trying to get an education here is like trying to get a drink from a fire hose. %% Trying to learn to hack on a DOS or [Microsoft] Windows machine or under [Apple] Mac OS is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast. -- Eric Stevens Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker" aka the Hacker-HOWTO %% Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again. -- Bruce Schneier %% Twenty years after the death of Luther there were more catholics than when he was born. And twenty years after the death of Voltaire there were millions less than when he was born. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Interview with New York correspondent, Chicago Times, May 29, 1881, answering criticism by NY ministers in response to his "Great Infidels" lecture %% Two hands working do more than a thousand clasped in prayer. %% Two men who control large religious organizations -- whose tenets are not supposed to be forced upon Americans, as detailed in the plain language of the First Amendment -- don't like the fact that [a] courts in this country keep overturning laws which attempt to force those tenets upon Americans, and [b] can't pack the courts with ideologues willing to usurp the law in favor of their dogma. So they believe that -- in violation of the Constitutional principle of checks and balances -- the legislative branch should cut the funding of the judiciary. These men are not Americans. They may have been born here, they may have citizenship, they may even be buddies with the Preznit and his flunkies... but Tony Perkins and James Dobson have shown, time and again, that their goal is to undermine our very system of government in favor of a radical theocracy. At the very least, their "religious" organizations should lose their tax-exempt status. At the most... well, sedition charges are a good start. They're not merely traitors. They're terrorists... of the Osama bin Laden variety. -- Tom Smith %% Two things are certain about science. It does not stand still for long, and it is never boring. Oh, among some poor souls, including even intellectuals in fields of high scholarship, science is frequently misperceived. Many see it as only a body of facts, promulgated from on high in must, unintelligible textbooks, a collection of unchanging precepts defended with authoritarian vigor. Others view it as nothing but a cold, dry narrow, plodding, rule-bound process -- the scientific method: hidebound, linear, and left brained. These people are the victims of their own stereotypes. They are destined to view the world of science with a set of blinders. They know nothing of the tumult, cacophony, rambunctiousness, and tendentiousness of the actual scientific process, let alone the creativity, passion, and joy of discovery. And they are likely to know little of the continual procession of new insights and discoveries that every day, in some way, change our view (if not theirs) of the natural world. -- Kendrick Frazier, "The Year in Science: An Overview," in 1988 Yearbook of Science and the Future, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. %% Two thousand years in the future ... A major religion centers on the saga of a Savior-figure, a little girl -- seemingly normal but destined for greatness -- who ascended into heaven, traveled to a distant and magical land, spoke to animals and inanimate objects, battled monsters, and ultimately defeated a great illusionist (the Prince of Lies, perhaps?) in a battle of wits and willpower. For centuries, adherents of this great faith have searched for evidence of the literal truth of their beliefs, but none has ever been found. Recently, archaelogists working near the middle of the region once occupied by the great North American empire known from ancient records as "Oosa," in the province of "Kanzs," have discovered the wreckage of a primitive dwelling and a fragmentary sign which linguists have reconstructed as spelling out the partial phrase "othy's House". This proves it! It's all true! Dorothy was real! -- seen on http://slashdot.org/, 2011-03-18 %% UNIX sysadmin is about 50 billion times more fun than [Apple] Mac sysadmin. -- Zephyr %% UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn %% UNIX: Some say the learning curve is steep, but you only have to climb it once. -- Karl Lehenbauer %% USB - the serial killer. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% Uh-oh. I broke 'ls'. This could be bad. -- Nathan Paul Simons %% Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. -- Henry David Thoreau %% Under deadline pressure for the next week. If you want something, it can wait. Unless it's blind screaming paroxysmally hedonistic . . . %% University, n.: Like a software house, except the software's free, and it's usable, and it works, and if it breaks they'll quickly tell you how to fix it, and . . . %% Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously. -- "In the Beginning was the Command Line", Neal Stephenson %% Unless you have a hundred unanswered questions in your mind you haven't read enough . . . -- Daniel J. Bernstein %% Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something. -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% Until religionists can give up their use of the word "truth" to apply to whatever it suits their fancies to so label, to declarations that can in no way be verified by experience and therefore with no restrictions on their proliferation, there will be no reconciliation of science and religion. -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% Untouched people; not necessarily noble savages, but apparently happy ones. They lived in a land of plenty, ready to share their bananas and guavas and coconuts. They were to be envied for their 'primitive simplicity and kind-heartedness'. Where was that 'malady of thought' afflicting industrial England? [Huxley] realized that 'civilization as we call it would be rather a curse than a blessing to them'. Huxley knew the fate in store for them, slamming the 'mistaken goodness of the "Stigginses" of Exeter Hall, who would send missionaries to these men to tell them that they will all infallibly be damned'. -- Adrian Desmond, "Huxley", p. 120, on Huxley encountering natives on a remote island %% Venimus, Vidimus, Dolavimus (we came, we saw, we hacked; adapt, adopt, improvise). -- Hacker/Linux motto %% Very, very simply, here is the premise behind DRM. 1. I know a secret 2. I want to tell you the secret 3. I don't want you to tell anyone else the secret 4. I don't trust you Perhaps you can see now why there's no solution to that scenario. -- comment on http://slashdot.org by edraven (45764) %% Violence is a sword that has no handle -- you have to hold the blade. %% Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Salvor Hardin %% Violence stinks, no matter which end of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan. Sometimes people are just begging for that frypan, and if we weaken for a moment and honor their request, we should regard it as impulsive philanthropy, which we aren't in any position to afford, but shouldn't regret it too loudly lest we spoil the purity of the deed. -- Tom Robbins %% Violence, contrary to popular belief, is not part of the anarchist philosophy. It has repeatedly been pointed out by anarchist thinkers that the revolution can neither be won, nor the anarchist society established and maintained, by armed violence. Recourse to violence then is an indication of weakness, not of strength, and the revolution with the greatest possibilities of a successful outcome will undoubtedly be the one in which there is no violence, or in which violence is reduced to a minimum, for such a revolution would indicate the near unanimity of the population in the objectives of the revolution. ... Violence as a means breeds violence; the cult of personalities as a means breeds dictators--big and small--and servile masses; government--even with the collaboration of socialists and anarchists--breeds more government. Surely then, freedom as a means breeds more freedom, possibly even the Free Society! To Those who say this condemns one to political sterility and the Ivory Tower our reply is that 'realism' and their 'circumstantialism' invariably lead to disaster. We believe there is something more real, more positive and more revolutionary to resisting war than in participation in it; that it is more civilised and more revolutionary to defend the right of a fascist to live than to support the Tribunals which have the legal power to shoot him; that it is more realistic to talk to the people from the gutter than from government benches; that in the long run it is more rewarding to influence minds by discussion than to mould them by coercion. -- Vernon Richards, "Anarchism and violence" in What Is Anarchism?: An Introduction by Donald Rooum, ed. (London: Freedom Press, 1992, 1995) pp. 50-51. %% Virtually all consumer products, above a rudimentary level of complexity, have accessories and "enhancements." One can easily imagine a graph of products with the simplest (fewest accessories) on the left and the most complex (most accessories) at the right. At the very left of our imaginary graph is a screwdriver. Not a Phillips screwdriver, just a plain old-fashioned straight-slot screwdriver. If you buy one of these carefully, you will have it decades from now. Your children will inherit it from you. From the standpoint of marketing, this is a nightmare - any number of advertising executives start up from their pillows in terror, having just imagined that screwdriver in reliable service over years and years, its original brand name slowly wearing off. -- "Consumer Angst", http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/consumerangst.html %% Visual Basic, much like generic beer and America's Funniest Home Videos is an enabling technology for stupid people. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% WHENEVER ANYBODY SAYS he's struggling to become a human being I have to laugh because the apes beat him to it by about a million years. Struggle to become a parrot or something. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988. %% Wake up all you citizens, hear your country's call, Not to arms and violence, But peace for one and all. Crush out hate and prejudice, fear and greed and sin, Help bring back her dignity, restore her faith again. Work hard for a common cause, don't let our country fall. Make her proud and strong again, democracy for all. Yes, make our country strong again, keep our flag unfurled. Make our country well again, respected by the world. Make her whole and beautiful, work from sun to sun. Stand tall and labor side by side, because there's so much to be done. Yes, make her whole and beautiful, united strong and free, Wake up, all you citizens, It's up to you and me. -- Pansy Myers Schroeder %% Want to know what happens after death? Go look at some dead things. %% War begins with one man's lack of soul, intellect and reasoning. -- William Cameron %% War does not determine who is right - only who is left. -- Bertrand Russell %% War in our time has become an anachronism. Whatever the case in the past, war in the future can serve no useful purpose. A war which became general, as any limited action might, would only result in the virtual destruction of mankind. -- General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower %% War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrows. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. %% 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. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature, and has no chance of being free unless made or kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. -- John Stuart Mill %% War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it. -- Desiderius Erasmus %% War is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror. -- Ludwig von Mises %% War is just one more big government program. -- Joseph Sobran %% War is sweet to those who have never experienced it. -- Pindar %% War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off. -- Karl Kraus %% War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals. -- Charles Evans Hughes %% Warmaking doesn't stop warmaking. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago. -- Colman McCarthy %% We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that she will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations. Such is the logic of patriotism. -- Emma Goldman, What is Patriotism? (1908) %% We [catholics] are also under an obligation to keep secrets faithfully. And sometimes the easiest way to fulfill that duty is to say what is false, or to tell a lie. -- Catholic Encyclical X, 195 %% We aim in the domain of politics at republicanism; in the domain of economics at socialism; in the domain of what is today called religion, at atheism. -- August Bebel, Summary of Views %% We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. -- Abraham Lincoln %% We all know [GNU/]Linux is great . . . it does infinite loops in 5 seconds. -- Linus Benedict Torvalds about the superiority of [GNU/]Linux on the Amsterdam Linux Symposium %% We are a people of faith. We have been so secure in that faith that we have enshrined in our Constitution protection for people who profess no faith. And good for us for doing so. That is what the First Amendment is all about. -- Bill Clinton %% We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. -- "The Root of All Evil?", Richard Dawkins %% We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% We are always told that violent anti-choicers are a mere fringe. Obviously, few anti-choicers commit murder or arson. But, as the Matthew Shepard case reminds us, extreme vocabulary creates a climate of moral permission for extreme acts. This is a movement whose main spokespeople, many of them mantled in clerical or political authority, regularly use words like 'baby killers', 'murder', 'holocaust', and 'Nazis', thus legitimizing just about anything. After all, the conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler are heroes. -- Katha Pollitt, "Subject to Debate" column in The Nation, 11/16/1998 (reprinted in Subject to Debate (2001)) %% We are asked to justify these frightful passages, these infamous laws of war, because the bible is the word of god. As a matter of fact, there never was, and there never can be, an argument even tending to prove the inspiration of any book whatever. In the absence of positive evidence, analogy and experience, argument is simply impossible, and at the very best, can amount only to a useless agitation of the air. The instant we admit that a book is too sacred to be doubted, or even reasoned about, we are mental serfs. It is infinitely absurd to suppose that a god would address a communication to intelligent beings, and yet make it a crime, to be punished in eternal flames, for them to use their intelligence for the purpose of understanding his communication. If we have the right to use our reason, we certainly have the right to act in accordance with it, and no god can have the right to punish us for such action. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% We are asked to recognize the existence of a practice of nonsectarian prayer, prayer within the embrace of what is known as the judeo-christian tradition, prayer which is more acceptable than one which, for example, makes explicit references to the god of Israel, or to Jesus christ, or to a patron saint. There may be some support, as an empirical observation, to the statement of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, picked up by Judge Campbell's dissent in the Court of Appeals in this case, that there has emerged in this country a civic religion, one which is tolerated when sectarian exercises are not. Stein, 822 F.2d at 1409; 908 F.2d 1090, 1098-1099 (CA1 1990) (Campbell, J., dissenting) (case below); see also Note, Civil Religion and the Establishment Clause, 95 Yale L.J. 1237 (1986). If common ground can be defined which permits once conflicting faiths to express the shared conviction that there is an ethic and a morality which transcend human invention, the sense of community and purpose sought by all decent societies might be advanced. But though the First Amendment does not allow the government to stifle prayers which aspire to these ends, neither does it permit the government to undertake that task for itself. -- Supreme Court, Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992) %% We are continually told that the bible is the very foundation of modesty and morality; while many of its pages are so immodest and immoral that a minister, for reading them in the pulpit, would be instantly denounced as an unclean wretch. Every woman would leave the church, and if the men stayed, it would be for the purpose of chastising the minister. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses", 1879 %% We are defined by the choices we make. -- Tyler Durden, "Fight Club" %% We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they are never going to be born. We are privileged to be alive, and we should make the most of our time on this world. -- "The Root of All Evil?", Richard Dawkins %% 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 Jay Gould, quoted in "2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt", by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996 %% We are not accountable for the sins of "Adam". -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Myth and Miracle" 1885 %% We are not endeavoring to chain the future but to free the present. We are the advocates of inquiry, investigation, and thought. It is grander to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed. I look for the day when *reason*, throned upon the world's brains, shall be the king of kings and the god of gods. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% We are satisfied that there can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% We are the nearest thing to magicians that has ever existed in reality. Our spells work and are truly powerful, our mistakes cause incomprehensible chaos, and when one of us turns bad then sometimes the whole world can suffer the consequences. No wonder the muggles treat our creations like they're the mysterious products of a magical power beyond their understanding: that's what they are. -- from a comment by meringuoid (568297) on http://slashdot.org on programmers %% We are told by the church that we have accomplished nothing . . . Is it a small thing to make men truly free, to destroy the dogmas of ignorance, prejudice and power, the poisoned fables of superstition, and drive from the beautiful face of earth the fiend of fear? -- D.M. Bennett, _Champions of the Church_ %% We are told in the Pentateuch, that god, the father of us all, gave thousands of maidens, after having killed their fathers, their mothers, and their brothers, to satisfy the brutal lusts of savage men. If there be a god, I pray him to write in his book, opposite my name, that I denied this lie for him. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "A Few Reasons for Doubting the Inspiration of the bible" %% We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both. -- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice from 1916-1939 %% We cannot acknowledge allegience to any human government . . . Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind . . . -- William Lloyd Garrison %% We cannot acknowledge allegience to any human government... Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind... -- William Lloyd Garrison %% We cannot command nature except by obeying her. -- Sir Francis Bacon %% We cannot trample upon their rights, without endangering our own; and no man who will take liberty from another, is great enough to enjoy liberty himself. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, Fifth Interview on Rev. Talmadge, 1882 %% We created god in our own image and likeness! -- George Carlin %% We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea -- organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation. -- Supreme Court Justice Potter Steart %% We did not get our freedom from the church. The great truth, that all men are by nature free, was never told on Sinai's barren crags, nor by the lonely shores of Galilee. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Christian Religion" Part III, The Ingersoll - Black Debate, 1881 %% We do believe that it is better to love men than to fear gods; that it is grander and nobler to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed. We are satisfied that there can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven. We do not expect to accomplish everything in our day; but we want to do what good we can, and to render all the service possible in the holy cause of human progress. We know that doing away with gods and supernatural persons and powers is not an end. It is a means to an end: the real end being the happiness of man. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents. -- William J. Brennan, Texas v. Johnson %% We face the nineties with a Court that relegates First Amendment rights to the level of any law, a Justice Department quite willing to establish first- and second-class citizenship determined by religious belief . . . a christian arrogance and exclusivism reminiscent of earlier centuries of religious persecution. -- Robert S. Alley, "Christian Exclusivism and Second-Class Citizenship", in Free Inquiry %% We found that we didn't have much problem with him [J.C.], it was his followers we found questionable. -- Graham Chapman, discussing making of "Life of Brian" %% We have a right to eat, drink, or inject a substance - any substance - not because we are sick and want it to cure us, nor because a government supported medical authority claims it will be good for us, but simply because the government - as our servant rather than our master - hasn't the right to meddle in our private dietary and drug affairs. -- Thomas Szasz %% We have already compared the benefits of theology and science. When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few. To nearly all the children of men, reading and writing were unknown arts. The poor were clad in rags and skins -- they devoured crusts, and gnawed bones. The day of Science dawned, and the luxuries of a century ago are the necessities of to-day. Men in the middle ranks of life have more of the conveniences and elegances than the princes and kings of the theological times. But above and over all this, is the development of mind. There is more of value in the brain of an average man of to-day -- of a master-mechanic, of a chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four hundred years ago. These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. They were not found in cathedrals or behind altars -- neither were they searched for with holy candles. They were not discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation and experience - and for them all, man is indebted to man. -- Robert Green Ingersoll %% We have an *eclectic* tradition in the United States . . . christians of various stripes are part of this, as are humanists and agnostics, but this does not make the United States a christian nation or even a judeo- christian one. We are a mixed accumulation of our past, and it is the christian dogmatists, not the secularists, who are the major threat to our pluralistic democratic tradition. -- Vern Bullough, "Do We Have a Judeo-christian heritage?" in Free Inquiry %% We have at last ascertained that miracles can be perfectly understood; that there is nothing mysterious about them; that they are simply transparent falsehoods. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Divided Household of Faith", 1888 %% We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your moldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want a 'this year's fact'. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years. Their reputation for 'truth and veracity' in the neighborhood where they resided is wholly unknown to us. Give us a new miracle, and substantiate it by witnesses who still have the cheerful habit of living in this world. Do not send us to Jericho to hear the winding horns, nor put us in the fire with Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego. Do not compel us to navigate the sea with Captain Jonah, nor dine with Mr. Ezekiel. There is no sort of use in sending us fox-hunting with Samson. We have positively lost all interest in that little speech so eloquently delivered by Balaam's inspired donkey. It is worse than useless to show us fishes with money in their mouths, and call our attention to vast multitudes stuffing themselves with five crackers and two sardines. We demand a new miracle, and we demand it now. Let the church furnish at least one, or forever hold her peace. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods" 1872 %% We have lingered long enough on the shores of the Cosmic Ocean. -- Carl Sagan %% We have seen the enemy and he is us. -- Walt Kelly %% We just had a near-life experience. -- Tyler Durden, "Fight Club" %% We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication. -- Dennis Ritchie %% We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge. -- George Will %% We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace. -- George Walker Bush, 09/21/2004 %% We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. -- Carl Sagan %% We make our world signifigant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. -- Carl Sagan in "Cosmos" (1980) %% We may not be able to persuade hindus that Jesus and not Vishnu should govern their spiritual horizon, nor moslems that lord Buddha is at the center of their spiritual universe, nor hebrews that Mohammed is a major prophet, nor christians that shinto best expresses their spiritual concerns, to say nothing of the fact that we may not be able to get christians to agree among themselves about their relationship to god. But all will agree on a proposition that they possess profound spiritual resources. If, in addition, we can get them to accept the further proposition that whatever form the deity may have in their own theology, the deity is not only external, but internal and acts through them, and they themselves give proof or disproof of the deity in what they do and think; if this further proposition can be accepted, then we come that much closer to a truly religious situation on earth. -- Norman Cousins, from his book "Human Options" %% We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. -- Henry Louis Mencken, "Minority Report" %% We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? -- Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene" %% We owe it to ourselves as respectable human beings, as thinking human beings, to do what we can to make humanity more rational . . . humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests. -- Isaac Asimov %% We preach peace, forgiveness, tolerance and love. We practice vengeance, persecution, hatred and domination. My personal beliefs are supported and validated by my convictions. Oh, and never forget . . . my religion is truth, yours is a lie. -- Religion, paraphrased %% We scientists, whose tragic destiny it has been to make the methods of annihilation ever more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented. -- Albert Einstein, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, September 1948 %% We should be agnostic about those things for which there is no evidence. We should not hold beliefs merely because they gratify our desires for afterlife, immortality, heaven, hell, etc. -- Julian Sorell Huxley, (1887-1975) English biologist and author, from "Religion without Revelation" %% We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stay there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. -- Mark Twain %% We the people of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, in order to form a more perfect operating system, establish quality, insure marketplace diversity, provide for the common needs of computer users, promote security and privacy, overthrow monopolistic forces in the computer software industry, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Debian GNU/Linux System. %% We use [GNU/]Linux for all our mission-critical applications. Having the source code means that we are not held hostage by anyone's support department. -- Russell Nelson %% We users of GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems (collectively referred to here as *nix) sometimes indulge in a bit of smugness when we read about the ceaseless wave upon wave of viruses that plague those hapless legions of the damned--Microsoft Windows users. -- "SUBTERFUGUE motivation", http://subterfugue.org/motivation.html %% We warn the North that every one of the leading abolitionists is agitating the negro slavery question merely as a means to attain their ulterior ends . . . a surrender to socialism and communism -- to no private property, no church, no law; to free love, free lands, free women and free children. -- George Fitzhugh, 1857 %% We were blood brothers, pals forever. He was my very best friend. Nobody else could see him. I now know he was just pretend. -- Dan Barker %% We who are unbelievers have so much to lose. The fire in the belly for freedom of conscience can be quelled when threatened, and the lips can be forced to mouth words. But the mind of the unbeliever, once opened to the fact that nothing supernatural exists either to worship or to fear, cannot be stilled without paying a great price. It is all too evident that life is a struggle for power by some human beings over others, and history has shown time and again that the most effective weapon for grabbing that power is religion. Will history show ours to be proof of the maxim that free societies don't last? -- Sandra Feroe, "A Thanksgiving Ideal" Nov. 21, 1998 %% We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction. -- Stephen Jay Gould %% We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know -- or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know. -- Plato %% We will inevitably recede into the backwater of civilization, and those nations that retain opened scientific thought will take over the leadership of the world and the cutting edge of human advancement. I don't suppose that the creationists really plan the decline of the United States, but their loudly expressed patriotism is as simpleminded as their "science." If they succeed, they will, in their folly, achieve the opposite of what they say they wish. -- Isaac Asimov, 'The "Threat" of Creationism', essay in "Science and Creationism," 1984 http://www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/azimov_creationism.html %% We're not going to hell, assholes, we're fucking *in* hell. We live with *you*. -- from http://fuckchristmas.org, to all the christian "victims" %% We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. -- Carl Sagan %% Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative. -- Miyamoto Musashi I think that goes for [software] too. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Weekends were made for programming. -- Karl Lehenbauer %% Well I'd like to tell you all about My dream, it's a place Where strip malls abound and diversion's mere moments away Where culture's defined by the ones least refined And you'll be left behind If you don't fit in ... My rights are denied By those least qualified Trading profit for pride But it's ... it's okay! -- Offspring, "Americana" %% Well begun is half done. -- Aristotle %% Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them . . . Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced only by Masters of the Universal Way of Zen. In it his mind floated freely, able to rummage at will among the bits and pieces of data he had absorbed, undistracted by any outside disturbances. Logical structures no longer inhibited him. Pre-conceptions, prejudices, ordinary human standards vanished. All things, those previously trivial as well as those once thought important, became absolutely equal by acquiring an absolute value, revealing relationships not evident to ordinary vision. Like beads strung on a string of their own meaning, each thing pointed to its own common ground of existence, shared by all. Finally, each began to melt into each, staying itself while becoming all others. And Mind no longer contemplated Problem, but became Problem, destroying Subject-Object by becoming them. Time passed, unheeded. Eventually, there was a tentative stirring, then a decisive one, and Nakamura arose, a smile on his face and the light of laughter in his eyes. -- Wayfarer %% What Bush is doing is wrong, and frankly he should be in jail. The fact that Clinton may well deserve the next cell over is not an excuse, it's an example of how bad the problem realy is. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% What I see in nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. -- Albert Einstein %% What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that god might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or god might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps god prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromise their intellectual integrity lose everything. -- Walter Kaufmann, "Critique of Religion and Philosophy" %% What are among the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism a sin; that when good authority has pronounced what is to be believed, and faith has accepted it, reason has no further duty. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, in Cardiff, "What Great Men Think of Religion" %% What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing. -- Bokonon %% What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. -- Christopher Hitchens, "Less Than Miraculous", Free Inquiry magazine, February-March 2004, Volume 24 %% What christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred. -- Heinrich Heine %% What could be more negative thinking than belief that sex and procreation, without which there could be no life on Earth, are dirty and sinful! Our obsession with sex and morality has produced a sexually sick, sadistic, perverted, frustrated, aggressive, violence-prone society. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% What do I consider a reasonable person to be? I'd say a reasonable person is one who accepts that we are all human and therefore fallible, and takes that into account when dealing with others. Implicit in this definition is the belief that it is the right and the responsibility of each person to live his or her own life as he or she sees fit, to respect this right in others, and to demand the assumption of this responsibility by others. %% What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook. -- Henry David Thoreau %% What does it take for Americans to do great things; to go to the moon, to win wars, to dig canals linking oceans, to build railroads across a continent? In independent thought about this question, Neil Armstrong and I concluded that it takes a coincidence of four conditions, or in Neil's view, the simultaneous peaking of four of the many cycles of American life. First, a base of technology must exist from which to do the thing to be done. Second, a period of national uneasiness about America's place in the scheme of human activities must exist. Third, some catalytic event must occur that focuses the national attention upon the direction to proceed. Finally, an articulate and wise leader must sense these first three conditions and put forth with words and action the great thing to be accomplished. The motivation of young Americans to do what needs to be done flows from such a coincidence of conditions . . . The Thomas Jeffersons, The Teddy Roosevelts, The John Kennedys appear. We must begin to create the tools of leadership which they, and their young frontiersmen, will require to lead us onward and upward. -- Dr. Harrison H. Schmidt %% What does not destroy me, makes me stronger. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% What effect will logic have upon a religious gentleman who firmly believes that a god of infinite compassion sent two bears to tear thirty or forty children in pieces for laughing at a bald-headed prophet? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Voltaire", 1894 %% What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism. -- G.K. Chesterton %% What has not been examined impartially has not been well examined. Skepticism is therefore the first step toward truth. -- Denis Diderot, "Pensees philosophiques" %% What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not. -- James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785. %% What is War Crimes when war in itself is a crime? -- Calvin Austin %% What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. -- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875 %% What is more, it appears to be generally realized that some of the world's foremost philosophers, scientists, and artists have been avowed atheists and that the increase in atheism has gone hand in hand with the spread of education. -- Encyclopedia of Philosophy %% What is striking, however, is the general layout and integration of the system. Debian is a truly elegant [GNU/]Linux distribution; great care has been taken in the preparation of packages and their placement within the system. The sheer number of packages available is also impressive . . . %% What is the easiest way for a skeptic to achieve faith? The question was answered three hundred years ago by Pascal. The unbeliever must act 'as though he believed, take holy water, have masses said etc. This will naturally cause you to believe and will besot you.' (Cela vous abetira-- literally, will make you stupid.) We have to be made stupid, insist Professor Jacques Chevalier, defending his hero against the critics who have been shocked by Pascal's blunt language; we have to stultify our intelligence, because 'intellectual pride deprives us of god and debases us to the level of animals.' Which is, of course, perfectly true. But it does not follow from this truth that we ought to besot ourselves in the manner prescribed by Pascal and all the propagandists of all religions. Intellectual pride can be cured only by devaluating pretentious words, only by getting rid of conceptualized pseudo-knowledge and opening ourselves to reality. Artificial piety based on conditioned reflexes merely transfers intellectual pride from the bumptious individual to his even more bumptious church. At one remove, the pride remains intact. For the convinced believer, understanding or direct contact with reality is exceedingly difficult. Moreover, the mere fact of having a strong reverential feeling about some hallowed thing, person or proposition is no guarantee of the existence of the thing, the infallibility of the person or truth of the proposition. -- Aldous Huxley, "Knowledge and Understanding" %% What is the probability of getting head? Is it not the probability of getting tail? -- Dr. Hossain, MATH382, Probability (talking about flipping a coin) %% What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature. -- Voltaire %% What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -- Bertrand Arthur William Russell, "Skeptical Essays", 1928 %% What it's best at doing, to return to the Daniel Quinn comparison, is flattering the reader, which Brown does by dumbing down anything that looks like a difficult word or concept into mush, while simultaneously hinting that you're awfully clever to have gotten this far. -- seen in a review of "The da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown %% What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people . . . And it became always wider . . . The whole process of this disconnect coming into being was built around diversion . . . Nazism gave us some other dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . . or, rather, provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . Nazism kept us so busy with continuous changes, accusations and 'crises' and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the 'national enemies' (without and within) and the government's 'responses' to them, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us . . . Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted', that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing . . . Each act curtailing freedom . . . is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow . . . You don't want to act, or even talk, alone . . . you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble' or be 'unpatriotic' . . . But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes . . . That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring: the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit (which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms) is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed . . . You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father . . . could never have imagined. -- "They Thought They Were Free", The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) %% What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand? -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error. -- Raymond Aron, "The Opium of the Intellectuals" %% What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you -- that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can't get enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, "Doesn't he look peaceful?" It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old. -- Robertson Davies, "The Rebel Angels" %% What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? -- Ursula K. LeGuin %% What seems so right in the interest of toleration and its cousins - liberty, equality and fraternity - is actually one of the subtlest lies of the 'father of lies.' -- "The Southern Baptist Convention and Freemasonry" by James L. Holly, Page 40 %% What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts. -- Thomas Henry Huxley, "On the Natural Inequality of Man," 1890 %% What would the alternative be? Abortion by prayer? By edict? Upon seeking consensus? After groveling? Women have thought long and hard about this decision before they ever get to my clinic. In fact, most of them have been agonizing for days or even weeks, some to the extent of rescheduling their appointments several times. -- Suzanne T. Poppema, discussing the phrase "abortion on demand", in Why I Am An Abortion Doctor (1996) %% What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? -- Paul Graham, "How to do What you Love" %% What your company does is worthless. If your company spontaneously ceased to exist, there is not a single member of the public who would notice its absence. Nobody depends on what you do, not even your clients. The vast majority of what you produce will be instantly forgotten - the only thing that you can guarantee is that you are lowering the signal-to-noise ratio of life - filling the environment with yet more useless lies. -- "Why you do not want to work for an Ad Agency", http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1343265 %% What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. -- Rep. Elbridge Gerry, Massachusetts, I Annals of Congress at 750 (August 17, 1789) %% What, me worry about the historical Jesus? The gospel writers made up their story; the church fathers invented the virgin birth on the winter solstice; the pope thought up the immaculate conception; so I can imagine any damn thing I please about Jesus, or the spook, or about the big guy himself. -- Theologian Franz Bibfeldt, on how to write religious history %% Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. -- Gandhi %% When I became convinced that the Universe is natural -- that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom . . . For the first time, I was free . . . I stood erect and joyously faced all worlds. And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain . . . And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Why I Am An Agnostic", 1896, quoted in Joseph Lewis' speech "Ingersoll the Magnificent" %% When I became convinced that the Universe is natural-that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world-not even in infinite space. I was free. - free to think, to express my thoughts - free to live to my own ideal - free to live for myself and those I loved - free to use all my faculties, all my senses - free to spread imagination's wings - free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope - free to judge and determine for myself - free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past - free from popes and priests - free from all the "called" and "set apart" - free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies - free from the fear of eternal pain - free from the winged monsters of night - free from devils, ghosts, and gods For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of my thought - no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings. - no chains for my limbs - no lashes for my back - no fires for my flesh - no master's frown or threat - no following another's steps - no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds. And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain. - for the freedom of labor and thought - to those who fell on the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains - to those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs - to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn - to those by fire consumed - to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still. -- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), "Why Am I An agnostic?", 1896 %% When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. -- Dom Helder Camara %% When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough. -- Henry Louis Mencken, "Minority Report" %% When I hear a man is religious, I conclude that he is a rascal, although I have known some instances of very good men being religious. -- David Hume, Scottish philosopher and historian (1711-1776) %% When I look up into the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is I really see there, I am constrained to say, 'there is no god'. -- John Burroughs (1837-1921) American naturalist, _The Light of Day_ %% When I look upon seamen, men of physical science, and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings. When I look upon priests, prophets, and interpreters of dreams, nothing is so contemptible as man. -- Diogenes (412-323 B.C.E.) %% When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough -- often that I'm generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write. -- Paul Graham, "Revenge of the Nerds", on design patterns and why they are a workarounds for a language not being powerful enough %% When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school It's a wonder I can think at all. -- "Kodachrome", Simon and Garfunkel %% When I was seven years old, I was once reprimanded by my mother for an act of collective brutality in which I had been involved at school. A group of seven-year-olds had been teasing and tormenting a six-year-old. "It is always so," my mother said. "You do things together which not one of you would think of doing alone." . . . Wherever one looks in the world of human organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards. The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things together which nobody in his right mind would do alone. -- Freeman Dyson, "Weapons and Hope" %% When I was walking into NEC a couple months ago with my good friend at Red Hat, I asked him why he worked at a [GNU/]Linux company. He told me, "Because it will be the last OS". It took me a while for that to really sink in -- but I think it has a strong chance at becoming true. Any major advances in security, compartmentability, portability, etc. will wind up in [GNU/]Linux. Even if they are developed in some subbranch or separate OS (QNX, Embedded, BSD), the features and code concepts could (and most likely will) find their way into [GNU/]Linux. -- "The 'Last' OS" comment by davejenkins on http://slashdot.org %% When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Clarkes' 1st law %% When a government wishes to deprive its citizens of freedom, and reduce them to slavery, it generally makes use of a standing army. -- Luther Martin, Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention %% When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property. -- Thomas Jefferson %% When a man has been "born again", all the passages of the old testament that appear so horrible and so unjust to one in his natural state, become the dearest, the most consoling, and the most beautiful of truths. The real christian reads the accounts of these ancient battles with the greatest possible satisfaction. To one who really loves his enemies, the groans of men, the shrieks of women, and the cries of babes, make music sweeter than the zephyr's breath. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Talmadgian Catechism", 1882 %% When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect -- Sigmund Freud, "The Future of an Illusion", 1927 %% When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life. -- Sigmund Freud, quoted in "2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt", by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996 %% When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to ensure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession. He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers and unbelievers, into god's sheep and devil's goats, into people who will be glorified and people who are damned. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why", 1881 %% When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society. So when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged. -- Mattie Brinkerhoff, women's suffrage movement leader, in The Revolution, September 2, 1869 %% When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?' -- Don Marquis %% When a man you like switches from what he said a year ago, or four years ago, he is a broad-minded man who has courage enough to change his mind with changing conditions. When a man you don't like does it, he is a liar who has broken his promises. -- Franklin Adams %% When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. -- R.A. Heinlein, "Time Enough For Love" %% When a professor in a college finds a fact, he should make it known, even if it is inconsistent with something Moses said. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses", 1879 %% When anger rises, think of the consequences. -- Confucius %% When belief in a god dies, the god dies. -- Harlan Ellison, "Deathbird Stories" %% When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross. -- Sinclair Lewis (1935) %% When god, from whom I have my reason, demands of me to sacrifice it, he becomes a mere juggler that snatches from me what he pretended to give. -- Denis Diderot, "A Philosophical Conversation," 1777] %% When government does, occasionally, work, it works in an elitist fashion. That is, government is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don't need benefits from government. -- P.J. O'Rourke %% When in doubt, tell the truth. -- Mark Twain %% When it comes to BULLSHIT . . . BIG-TIME, MAJOR LEAGUE BULLSHIT . . . you have to stand IN AWE, IN AWE of the all time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. -- George Carlin %% When license fees are too high, users do things by hand. When the management is too intrusive, users lose their spirit. Hack for the user's benefit. Trust them; leave them alone. %% When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% When people decry civilian deaths caused by the U.S government, they're aiding propaganda efforts. In sharp contrast, when civilian deaths are caused by bombers who hate America, the perpetrators are evil and those deaths are tragedies. When they put bombs in cars and kill people, they're uncivilized killers. When we put bombs on missiles and kill people, we're upholding civilized values. When they kill, they're terrorists. When we kill, we're striking against terror. -- Norman Solomon, "Orwellian Logic 101 ~ A Few Simple Lessons" %% When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown. -- Stephen Jay Gould %% When religion controls government, political liberty dies; and when government controls religion, religious liberty perishes. -- Senator Sam Ervin %% When society is in decline, people are bound to turn to belief in gods; when a man is foolish, he eagerly prays for good luck. -- Wang Chong (A.D. 27-91), early Chinese materialist philosopher, quoted in "China Reconstructs", Feb. 1988, p. 60 %% When somebody whines about "leftists running the media" it's safe to disregard what they have to say since they are so entirely delusional and out of touch with reality. -- comment by Darby (84953) on http://slashdot.org %% When someone works for less pay than she can live on . . . she has made a great sacrifice for you . . . The "working poor" . . . are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. -- "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich, p. 221 %% When the Guru administers, the users are hardly aware that he exists. Next best is a sysop who is loved. Next, one who is feared. And worst, one who is despised. If you don't trust the users, you make them untrustworthy. The Guru doesn't talk, he hacks. When his work is done, the users say, "Amazing: we implemented it, all by ourselves!" %% When the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free, and never was free again. -- Edith Hamilton %% When the masses become better informed about science, they will feel less need for help from supernatural higher powers. The need for religion will end when man becomes sensible enough to govern himself. We will not, therefore, lose our time praying to an imaginary god for things which our own exertions alone can procure. -- Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, Spanish atheist educator accused by catholic clergy of leading a riot in Barcelona and executed without a trial. From "The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School", published posthumously %% When the people failed to worship one of these gods, or failed to feed and clothe his priests, (which was much the same thing,) he generally visited them with pestilence and famine. Sometimes he allowed some other nation to drag them into slavery -- to sell their wives and children; but generally he glutted his vengeance by murdering their firstborn. The priests always did their whole duty, not only in predicting these calamities, but in proving, when they did happen, that they were brought upon the people because they had not given quite enough to them. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense. -- Edward Abbey (from Voice Crying in the Wilderness) %% When the preacher asks us to have faith, he asks for obedience, obedience without question. We must accept unthinkingly whatever he tells us is so. When shia and sunni are asked to murder on the fields of battle, both following leaders who tell them they are then assured a place in heaven, they obey. If the dead could return to set things straight, to tell us that "faith" is nothing more than nonsense institutionalized, the hate and murder of all "religious" conflicts would cease. There would be no crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, and holy wars. There would be no shia and sunni, no lutherans and catholics, no religious sects of any kind, because there would be no "religions." -- Chester Dolan, "Holy Daze: Coming to Grips with "Religion," the Holy Daze of Humanity", "Faith" section, pp.130-135, MOPAH Publications %% When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. -- Plato %% When those living in the United States speak of the incompatibility of science and religion, it is almost invariably the christian religion that has claimed their attention. No other religion in history has marshaled its forces so energetically to oppose and suppress astronomy, physics and the biological sciences. For many sects of christianity, psychology and anthropology have been added as religion's principal adversaries. -- Chester Dolan, "Blind Faith" %% When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. -- Richard Dawkins %% When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. -- Thomas Paine %% When we find out that an assertion is a falsehood, a shining truth takes its place, and we need not fear the destruction of the false. The more false we destroy the more room there will be for the true. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "44 Complete Lectures" %% When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One's convictions should be proportional to one's evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn't -- indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable -- is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and refused to make them his own. -- "An Atheist Manifesto" by Sam Harris %% When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom - freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement. -- Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer" %% When we read that some minor scientist (usually a skilled technical worker but not a thinker in science) has "found god" somewhere, we are not excited. We know this is only a form of words, meaning only that the scientific worker, turning away from science, has rediscovered the stale old assumption of theology, "There is a god." We find invariably (as we should expect) that there is no satisfactory definition or description or identification or location or proof of a god. "god" is merely a word, whether it is used by a preacher or a mystic in a laboratory. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us -- and rightly -- that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed. -- Umberto Eco %% When you get you want in your struggle for self And the world makes you king for a day, Just go to a mirror and look at yourself And see what that man has to say. For it isn't your father or mother or wife Whose judgment upon you must pass; The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life Is the one staring back from the glass. Some people may think you a straight-shootin' chum And call you a wonderful guy, But the man in the glass says you're only a bum If you can't look him straight in the eye. He's the fellow to please, never mind all the rest, For he's with you clear up to the end, And you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test If the man in the glass is your friend. You may fool the whole world down the pathway of life And get pats on the back as you pass, But your final reward will be heartaches and tears If you've cheated the man in the glass. %% When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship. -- Harry Truman %% When you live in a sick society, just about everything you do is wrong. %% When you run in debt, you give to another power over your liberty. -- Benjamin Franklin %% When you say "I wrote a program that crashed [Microsoft] Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say "hey, I got those with the system, *for free*". -- Linus Benedict Torvalds %% When you say 'radical right' today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye. -- Barry Goldwater, The Washington Post (July 28, 1994) %% When you see a cross sticking in the ground, that usually means that someone is buried there, or someone got killed there. Perhaps, by wearing that cross around their neck, what they're saying is that they're dead from the neck up? That would explain a *lot* of things. -- Wayne Aiken, on AACHAT %% When your mother and father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting? -- Farewell to Manzanar Ko Wakatsuki %% When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon . . . does he, in fact, do anything more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe? -- Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) "Systeme de la Nature" (1770) %% Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. -- Abraham Lincoln %% Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're *lying*. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible. -- "A Helpful Guideline:" comment by meringuoid on http://slashdot.org %% Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from god, there is in that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance. Believing himself to be the slave of god, he imitates his master, and of all tyrants, the worst is a slave in power. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why", 1881 %% Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message. -- Umberto Eco %% Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever the right is made dependant on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established . . . morality is then surrendered to the groundless arbitrariness of religion. -- Ludwig Feuerbach %% Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% Whenever religion is involved, terrorists kill more people. -- Dr. Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University, Scotland %% Whenever someone thinks that they can replace SSL/SSH with something much better that they designed this morning over coffee, their computer speakers should generate some sort of penis-shaped sound wave and plunge it repeatedly into their skulls until they achieve enlightenment. -- Peter Gutmann %% Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. --Mark Twain %% Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Where is the moral contumely that we were basting eyeballs-deep in during the Clinton impeachment? Where is the outrage? There isn't any, and you know exactly why--Bush is a Republican, therefore whatever he does is lily-white in the eyes of Republicans. Morality, legality, propriety, everything is subordinate to politics. They'll impeach a sitting President over a blowjob but sit placidly by while a President authorizes torture, secret prisons, indefinite detentions, warrantless wiretaps, etc. So spare me your moral equivocations. I don't care if Clinton got blown on film every Sunday at noon while holding the King James Bible in one hand and a joint in the other--if torture doesn't make your moral compass wake up and take notice, there is something fundamentally wrong with you as a human being. -- misanthrope101 (253915) on http://slashdot.org, on a comment regarding blowjobs vs torture %% Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. -- Frederick Douglass %% Where there is much light there is also much shadow. -- Goethe %% Where there's no emotion, there's no motive for violence. -- Spock, "Dagger of the Mind", stardate 2715.1 %% Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings. -- Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor (1821) %% Whereas the liberal mistake is to think that there is a program or policy to alleviate every problem in the world, the conservative flaw is to be vigilant against concentrations of power in government only--not in the private sector, where power can be wielded more secretly and sometimes more dangerously. -- Robert Kaplan %% Whether in the name of traditional sex roles or in the name of a traditional sexual morality, much opposition to abortion seems really to be about the control of women. -- Laurence Tribe, in Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (1990) %% Whether the bible is true or false, is of no consequence in comparison with the mental freedom of the race. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% Which is more dangerous: fanaticism or atheism? Fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more deadly; for atheism inspires no bloody passion whereas fanaticism does; atheism is opposed to crime and fanaticism causes crimes to be committed. -- Voltaire %% While god routinely punishes the innocent, he perversely rewards the guilty. According to one christian scheme of salvation the worst sinners, no matter how much raping, robbing, swindling, murdering and mutilating they have done in their rotten lifetime, can get into heaven by merely acknowledging god's son Jesus as their savior; they can enjoy eternal bliss right along with good people who have earned it. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% While it cannot be proved retrospectively that any experience of possession, conversion, revelation, or divine ecstasy was merely an epileptic discharge, we must ask how one differentiates "real transcendence" from neuropathies that produce the same extreme realness, profundity, ineffability, and sense of cosmic unity. When accounts of sudden religious conversions in TLEs [temporal-lobe epileptics] are laid alongside the epiphanous revelations of the religious tradition, the parallels are striking. The same is true of the recent spate of alleged UFO abductees. Parsimony alone argues against invoking spirits, demons, or extraterrestrials when natural causes will suffice. -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual Possession", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 3, pg. 255 %% While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded. Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity. -- Sigmund Freud, "Moses and Monotheism", 1932 %% While utterly discarding all creeds, and denying the truth of all religions, there is neither in my heart nor upon my lips a sneer for the hopeful, loving and tender souls who believe that from all this discord will result a perfect harmony; that every evil will in some mysterious way become a good, and that above and over all there is a being who, in some way, will reclaim and glorify every one of the children of men; but for those who heartlessly try to prove that salvation is almost impossible; that damnation is almost certain; that the highway of the universe leads to hell; who fill life with fear and death with horror; who curse the cradle and mock the tomb, it is impossible to entertain other than feelings of pity, contempt and scorn. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The gods", 1872 %% While walking down a crowded City street the other day, I heard a little urchin To a comrade turn and say, Say, Chimmey, lemme tell youse, I'd be happy as a clam If only I was de feller dat Me mudder t'inks I am. She t'inks I am a wonder, An' she knows her little lad Could never mix wit' nuttin' Dat was ugly, mean or bad. Oh, lot o' times I sit and t'ink How nice, 'twould be, gee whiz! If a feller was de feller Dat his mudder t'inks he is." My friends, be yours a life of toil Or undiluted joy, You can learn a wholesome lesson From that small, untutored boy. Don't aim to be an earthly saint With eyes fixed on a star: Just try to be the fellow that Your mother thinks you are. -- Will S. Adkin, "If I Only Was the Fellow" %% Whistling is the shrill, annoying sound of air blowing through a hollow human head. -- seen on http://negativepositive.org/Things-that-need-to-die.html %% Who can estimate the misery that has been caused by this most infamous doctrine of eternal punishment? Think of the lives it has blighted -- of the tears it has caused -- of the agony it has produced. Think of the millions who have been driven to insanity by this most terrible of dogmas. This doctrine renders god the basest and most cruel being in the universe. Compared with him, the most frightful deities of the most barbarous and degraded tribes are miracles of goodness and mercy. There is nothing more degrading than to worship such a god. Lower than this the soul can never sink. If the doctrine of eternal damnation is true, let me share the fate of the unconverted; let me have my portion in hell, rather than in heaven with a god infamous enough to inflict eternal misery upon any of the sons of men. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Heretics and Heresies", 1874 %% Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses", 1879 %% Who does not trust enough will not be trusted. -- Lao Tsu %% Who is he that shall control me? Why may not I act and speak and write and think with entire freedom? What am I to the universe, or, the universe, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of wrong and right, of opinion and custom? And must I wear them? -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, in "Emerson: The Mind on Fire" p. 51 %% Who knows the origin of religion? Certainly not the one who believes in it. Understanding and belief are quite antagonistic. The man who understands religion does not believe in it, the man who believes in it does not understand it. -- Chapman Cohen, "Essays in Freethinking" %% Who should I thank? My so-called "colleagues," who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit "fooling around with computers," go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers? My God, no one could blame me -- no one! -- if I went off the edge and just lost it completely one day. I couldn't get through the day as it is without the Prozac and Jack Daniels I keep on the shelf, behind my Tops-20 JSYS manuals. I start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. A 10 oz. Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. They look at me funny; they think I twitch a lot. I'm not twitching. I'm controlling my impulse to snag my 9mm Sig-Sauer out from my day-pack and make a few strong points about the quality of undergraduate education in Amerika. If I thought anyone cared, if I thought anyone would even be reading this, I'd probably make an effort to keep up appearances until the last possible moment. But no one does, and no one will. So I can pretty much say exactly what I think. Oh, yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself. -- Olin Shivers, Cambridge, September 4, 1994 (scsh reference manual acknowledgements) %% Who so itcheth to philosophy must set to work by putting all things to doubt. -- Giordano Bruno, "The Threefold Leas and Measure of the Three Speculative Sciences and the Principle of Many Practical Arts" %% Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell? -- Richard Dawkin %% Whoever claims that economic competition represents 'survival of the fittest' in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics. -- George Reisman %% Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche %% Whoever imagines himself a favorite with god holds others in contempt. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why", 1881 %% Whoever would overthrow the liberty of the nation, must begin by subduing the freedom of speech . . . -- Cato Letters %% Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist. -- Emerson %% Why I am an atheist: 1. Atheists do not believe in higher powers. 2. God is the highest power. 3. Therefore, god must be an atheist. 4. We should all strive to be like god. 5. We should all be atheists. %% Why am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don't find them believable. As for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the other foot. Atheists don't claim to know anything with certainty -- it's the believers who know it all. -- Barbara Smoker %% Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a 'War' on it? -- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc %% Why do the folks who insist on keeping "god" in "one nation under god" want to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"? -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Why is it that christianity more than any other of the world's religions has succumbed to the racist disease? -- John Austin Baker, the former Bishop of Salisbury UK, Theology and Racism, quoted by Edward Patey, Dean of Liverpool Cathedral in "Questions for Today", 1986, p81 %% Why is it that when it's us, it's an 'abortion' and when it's chicken it's an 'omelet'? Are we so much better than chickens all of a sudden? -- George Carlin %% Why is pot against the law? It wouldn't be because anyone can grow it, and therefore you can't make a profit off it, would it? -- Bill Hicks %% Why not, for example, offer a brand-new Mustang convertible to every girl who consents to having her Fallopian tubes tied in a Gordian knot? . . . It would have the additional benefit of eliminating from the gene pool those stupid enough to consent to such a deal. -- Edward Abbey %% Why should a woman ask pardon of god for having been a mother? Why should that be considered a crime in Exodus, which is commanded as a duty in Genesis? Why should a mother be declared unclean? Why should giving birth to a daughter be regarded twice as criminal as giving birth to a son? Can we believe that such laws and ceremonies were made and instituted by a merciful and intelligent god? If there is anything in this poor world suggestive of, and standing for, all that is sweet, loving and pure, it is a mother holding in her thrilled and happy arms her prattling babe. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses", 1879 %% Why should an atheist pay more taxes so that a church which he despises should pay no taxes? That's a fair question. How can the apologists for the church exemption answer it? -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% Why should men in the name of religion try to harmonize the contradictions that exist between nature and a book? Why should philosophers be denounced for placing more reliance upon what they know than upon what they have been told? -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Some Mistakes of Moses", 1879 %% Why should the residence of a preacher be untaxed? Useful citizens must pay taxes on their homes. Yet the preacher -- actually and notoriously the least useful member of the community -- lives in a tax-free dwelling. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The church Is a Burden, Not a Benefit, In Social Life" %% Why shouldn't I work for the NSA? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at the NSA and somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it, maybe I break it. I'm really happy with myself, because I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or in the Middle East and once they have that location they bomb the village where the rebel army is hiding. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with, just got killed. Now the politicians are saying "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area," because they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there getting shot just like it wasn't them when their number got called because they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there taking shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from, and the guy that put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, because he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes that the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies use the little skirmish to scare up oil prices. It's a cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course, and maybe they took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fucking play slalom with the icebergs. It ain't too long until he hits one, spills the oil, and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work, he can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fucking job interviews which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. Meanwhile, he's starving because any time he tries to get a bite to eat the only Blue Plate Special they're serving is North Atlantic Scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holding out for something better. I figure, fuck it. While I'm at it, I might as well just shoot my buddy in the ass, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard. I could be elected president. -- From the movie "Good Will Hunting" (Matt Damon's character speaking to an NSA recruiter) %% Why use Linux over Windows or Mac? That's like asking: "Why live in a democratic republic over an aristocratic [fascist state]?" -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% Why was I born with such contemporaries? -- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde %% Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only by incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infinitesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness . . . -- Leslie Stephen, "An Agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876 %% Wish and hope succeed in discerning signs of paranormality where reason and careful scientific procedure fail. -- James E. Alcock, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12 %% Wish not to seem, but to be, the best. -- Aeschylus %% With his administration dogged by criminal allegations, President Bush called a special Cabinet meeting Tuesday to ensure that his staff's complex web of alibis is consistent at every level, an anonymous source reported. "Okay, team, let's make sure we're all on the same completely fabricated page here," Bush reportedly said while aides distributed thick binders containing the administration's latest official side of things. "The e-mail server crashed during Katrina, the dog chewed up our files on the Plame leak, and no one ever told me that the illegal wiretapping was illegal. Right, boys?" Added Bush: "Remember, we're all really on a picnic at Camp David right now." Bush has held 17 Cabinet meetings to get the story straight since 2001, surpassing the previous record, held by the Reagan administration. -- theonion.com (spoof, not real news (but sadly, it could be)) %% With its fears and superstitions and prejudices, religion poisons the mind of any one who believes in it -- and even the best man, under the influence of religion, cannot reason wholesomely. Atheism, on the contrary, opens the mind to the clean winds of truth and establishes a fresh-air sanity. -- E. Haldeman-Julius, "The Meaning Of atheism" %% With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free. -- "In the Beginning was the Command Line", Neal Stephenson %% With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to moonies, scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort. -- Richard Dawkins, "Viruses of the Mind" %% With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves. -- Milton Friedman Lecture "The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community" (1983); cited in Filters Against Folly (1985) by Garrett Hardin ISBN 067080410X %% With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves. -- Milton Friedman Lecture "The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community" (1983); cited in Filters Against Folly (1985) by Garrett Hardin ISBN 067080410X %% With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. -- Robert H. Jackson [roberthjackson.org], Attorney General (1940-1941), Supreme Court Justice (1948-1954), from a speech given in 1940 %% With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. -- Robert H. Jackson [roberthjackson.org], Attorney General (1940-1941), Supreme Court Justice (1948-1954), from a speech given in 1940 %% With the name of god they imagine that they can establish fraternity among men, and on the contrary, they create pride, contempt; they sow discord, hatred, war; they establish slavery. For with god came the different degrees of divine inspiration; humanity is divided into men highly inspired, less inspired, uninspired. All are equally insignificant before god, it is true; but compared with each other, some are greater than others; not only in fact - which would be of no consequence, because inequality in fact is lost in the collectivity when it cannot cling to some legal fiction or institution - but by the divine right of inspiration, which immediately establishes a fixed, constant, petrifying inequality. The highly inspired must be listened to and obeyed by the less inspired, and the less inspired by the uninspired. Thus we have the principle of authority well established, and with it the two fundamental institutions of slavery: church and state. -- Mikhail Bakunin, "Church and State", 1872, p. 53 %% With the news that Nancy Reagan has referred to an astrologer when planning her husband's schedule, and reports of Californians evacuating Los Angeles on the strength of a prediction from a sixteenth-century physician and astrologer Michel de Notredame, the image of the U.S. as a scientific and technological nation has taking a bit of a battering lately. Sadly, such happenings cannot be dismissed as passing fancies. They are manifestations of a well-established "anti-science" tendency in the U.S. which, ultimately, could threaten the country's position as a technological power . . . The manifest widespread desire to reject rationality and substitute a series of quasirandom beliefs in order to understand the universe does not augur well for a nation deeply concerned about its ability to compete with its industrial equals. To the degree that it reflects the thinking of a significant section of the public, this point of view encourages ignorance of and, indeed, contempt for science and for rational methods of approaching truth . . . It is becoming clear that if the U.S. does not pick itself up soon and devote some effort to educating the young effectively, its hope of maintaining a semblance of leadership in the world may rest, paradoxically, with a new wave of technically interested and trained immigrants who do not suffer from the anti-science disease rampant in an apparently decaying society. -- Physicist Tony Feinberg, in "New Scientist," May 19, 1988 %% Within a couple weeks of learning Lisp I found programming in any other language unbearably constraining. -- Paul Graham %% Without "The Law of Moses" would we all be wandering around like little gods, stealing, raping, and spilling blood whenever our vanity was offended? -- Dan Barker, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible. -- Frank Zappa %% Women may spend their whole lives looking for true love. If you wish for true love, learn to love yourself. -- Zen Proverb %% Women wonder why men aren't romantic; it's like wondering why your wonderfully playful dog who you kicked in the head last night when it tried to greet you at the door is looking rather sullen. -- Rob Earhart %% Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving. -- Mortimer Adler %% Working with Julie Andrews is like getting hit over the head with a valentine. -- Christopher Plummer %% Wouldn't it be terrible if I quoted some reliable statistics which prove that more people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking. -- W.C. Fields %% Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. -- Mark Twain %% Writers who use a computer swear to its liberating power in tones that bear witness to the apocalyptic power of a new divinity. Their conviction results from something deeper than mere gratitude for the computer's conveniences. Every new medium of writing brings about new intensities of religious belief and new schisms among believers. In the 16th century the printed book helped make possible the split between catholics and protestant. In the 20th century this history of tragedy and triumph is repeating itself as a farce. Those who worship the Apple computer and those who put their faith in the IBM PC are equally convinced that the other camp is damned or deluded. Each cult holds in contempt the rituals and the laws of the other. Each thinks that it is itself the one hope for salvation. -- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988 %% Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better. -- Richard Matthew Stallman %% Yes, I am a real piece of work. One thing we learn at Ulowell is how to flame useless hacking non-EE's like you. I am superior to you in every way by training and expertise in the technical field. Anyone can learn how to hack, but Engineering doesn't come nearly as easily. Actually, I'm not trying to offend all you CS majors out there, but I think EE is one of the hardest majors/grad majors to pass. Fortunately, I am making it. -- "Warrior Diagnostics" Being both an EE and an asshole at the same time must be a terrible burden for you. This isn't really a flame, just a casual observation. Makes me glad I was a CS major, life is really pleasant for me. Have fun with your chosen mode of existence! -- Jim Morrison %% Yes, the long war on christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where christians can worship freely, in broad daylight, openly wearing symbols of their religion, perhaps around their necks. And maybe - dare I dream it - maybe one day there could even be an openly christian president. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively. -- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show %% Yes, there are fucking craters in NYC and PA. There was one here in DC, too. Explain to me why the fact that there are craters from terrorist attacks on our own soil should prevent me from forming my own opinions on how best to prevent this from happening again. Should I not dare to speak my mind on this matter, for fear of emboldening and comforting the enemy? Should I hold my peace, stick out my jaw and go along with what those in power say we should do? At what point am I allowed to step back and say, "No, I don't think this is right", "that's pretty clearly against what our country stands for", or "holy shit, you're crazy"? -- from a comment by American AC in Paris (230456) on http://slashdot.org on terrorism %% Yes, with its tolerant society, low crime rate, and free health care, Canada is a hell on earth for conservatives. -- Samantha Bee on The Daily Show %% You and I as individuals can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but only for a limited period of time. Why should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation? -- Ronald Reagan %% You are in control of your life. Don't ever forget that. You are what you are because of the conscious and subconscious choices you have made. -- Barbara Hall %% You are trapped in a maze of screens and ssh sessions, all alike. It is dark, and you are likely to log off the wrong account. -- Nep. %% 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, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% 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, "Losing Faith in Faith" %% You can go off and delude yourself all you want, but when you start threatening nonbelievers, when you start damaging the education systems, when you start considering the evil and horror bestowed upon humankind by your religious beliefs in the past and you refuse to accept any responsibility for them, that's when things get a bit scary in the real world of which you and I are a part. -- Dan Fake %% You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are. -- Colonel Adolphus Busch %% You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. -- Clarence Darrow %% You can't have everything. Where would you put it? -- Steven Wright %% You can't take something off the Internet, that's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool. -- Joe Garelli, NewsRadio %% You cannot possess me for I belong to myself But while we both wish it, I give you that which is mine to give You cannot command me, for I am a free person But I shall serve you in those ways you require and the honeycomb will taste sweeter coming from my hand I pledge to you that yours will be the name I cry aloud in the night and the eyes into which I smile in the morning I pledge to you the first bite of my meat and the first drink from my cup I pledge to you my living and my dying, each equally in your care I shall be a shield for your back and you for mine I shall not slander you, nor you me I shall honor you above all others, and when we quarrel we shall do so in private and tell no strangers our grievances This is my wedding vow to you This is the marriage of equals. -- Morgan Llywelyn, Celtic Wedding Vow %% You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist. -- Indira Gandhi %% You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder. -- Albert Einstein %% You complain about the present and blame it on the past I'd like to find your inner child and kick its little ass -- "Get Over It", Eagles %% You don't become a failure until you're satisfied with being one. %% You get what you pay for. -- Gabriel Biel Only a fool thinks price and value are the same. -- Antonio Machado %% You give me space to belong to myself yet without separating me from your own life. May it all turn out to your happiness. -- Goethe %% You hate it when "your team" looks bad, don't you? This isn't about partisan politics. Would you have the same dismissive reaction if it were a Democrat in office right now? Your "Arr, we hate bush, arr," comment gives your game away. No one is saying they hate Bush. We hate what the government is doing, and we'd hate it if it were a Democrat doing it. -- spun (1352) on http://slashdot.org on a comment on government spying %% You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% You have no right to erect your toll-gate upon the highways of thought. -- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Ghosts", 1877 %% You have painted a world of people who are christian because they are weak-willed puppets, desperate for whatever will give them a sense of purpose and security, who fear nothing more than a stable individual. -- Jim in Boulder %% You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need. -- Vernon Howard %% You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time, But I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime. -- Dan Barker %% You know something is horribly wrong with [Microsoft Windows] NT servers when [crackers] act like they have found candy every time they find one. -- Seen on http://www.hackernetwork.com/ %% You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, The Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the US of arrogance, and Germany doesn't want to go to war. %% You know what sucks? Even if every incompetent asswipe in the White House is arrested, they all still get to live in America. Whereas the nicest, most decent Iraqi people have to live *in Iraq*. -- "Get Your War On", page 51, published 10/30/05 %% You know who I pray to? Joe Pesci. Joe Pesci. Two reasons; first of all, I think he's a good actor. Ok. To me, that counts. Second; he looks like a guy who can get things done. Joe Pesci doesn't fuck around. Doesn't fuck around. In fact, Joe Pesci came through on a couple of things that god was having trouble with. For years I asked god to do something about my noisy neighbor with the barking dog. Joe Pesci straightened that cock-sucker out with one visit. -- George Carlin %% You make money promoting religion; you only spend money promoting atheism. -- C. W. Dalton, "The Right Brain and Religion" %% You mean how Bush outed Plame and thus caused the undercover company that watched Iran's nukes to fold? That kind of leak? -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% You mean you need drugs to hallucinate? %% You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi %% You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. -- Charles A. Beard %% You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. -- Aldous Huxley %% You say that human rights are something we are born with. Something inherent, inalienable, natural, perhaps even god-given. Something we have simply by right of being alive is something we will hold cheaply and assume will always be there, like the air we breathe. Our rights are not god-given or inherent to ourselves. Nor are they granted to us by the benevolence of our rulers. Our rights were taken from our rulers, by force. Among all our ancestors were rebels and traitors, terrorists and pirates, mutineers and heretics and unionists and blackguards and revolutionaries and blasphemers and barbarians, and it is their struggle that we have to thank for the freedom we enjoy today. They fought against kings and barons, against tycoons and industrialists, against priests and popes, and they set themselves and their descendants free. When you give up a freedom to the state, or to the establishment, or to the company, you aren't giving up something that is yours to give away that you've had all your life and which you got for nothing. You're giving up something bought by the blood of countless rebels over the centuries. You're betraying the sacrifices made by your ancestors. A right we think is inalienable we will neglect and soon lose. A right we know was won by our ancestors through hardship and struggle we will defend forcefully. -- "On the Source of Rights", comment on http://slashdot.org by meringuoid %% You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. -- "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig %% You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?" -- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah" %% You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here . . . I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me. -- Richard Phillips Feynman, "Genius, the life and science" %% You think you want a stable kernel interface, but you really do not, and you don't even know it. What you want is a stable running driver, and you get that only if your driver is in the main kernel tree. You also get lots of other good benefits if your driver is in the main kernel tree, all of which has made Linux into such a strong, stable, and mature operating system which is the reason you are using it in the first place. -- http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html, executive summary %% Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind; it is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over love of ease. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear, and despair -- these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being's heart the love of wonder, the sweet amazement at the stars and the starlike things and thoughts, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what next, and the joy and the game of life. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair. So long as your heart receives messages of beauty, cheer, courage, grandeur and power from the earth, from man, and from the Infinite, so long you are young. -- Samuel Ullman %% You want to know why extraordinarily smart people do silly things? It is because they don't live in the same world as you do. They live in a world full of abstract complexity and wonder, and they don't notice or care about the tedium that is your day-to-day life. So what if they drop cell phones in the toilet and microwave forks? That has nothing to do with being "smart". They just don't care. Why learn what doesn't matter? That's what you really hate, isn't it? It isn't just that some things are easier for them. It is that they dismiss what you consider important the way you dismiss the games of children. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% You will find men like him in all of the world's religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now. -- Arthur C. Clarke, "Childhood's End" %% You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religiosity of the naive man. For the latter, god is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands, so to speak, in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe. But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation . . . There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection . . . It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages. -- Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934 %% You worry too much about your job. Stop it. You're not paid enough to worry. %% You'll never find a dead christian in a foxhole who didn't pray. %% You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas. -- http://xkcd.com/568, "The Uncomfortable Truths Well" %% You're asking the government to control individual morality. This is a government that can't buy a toilet seat for under $600. -- Peter McWilliams, author of Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country %% You're not entitled to your own interpretation of the facts. Climate change is real. Tax cuts aren't an economic panacea. Obama's health care plan will not kill people. The Great Depression was not prolonged by the New Deal. Evolution by natural selection, not intelligent design, explains the complexity of life. -- setting a few things straight, a comment from slashdot.org %% You've achieved success in your field when you dont know whether what youre doing is work or play. -- Warren Beatty %% You've got to be careful quoting Ronald Reagan, because when you quote him accurately it's called mudslinging. -- Walter Mondale %% Young women need to know that abortion rights and abortion access are not presents bestowed or retracted by powerful men (or women) -- Presidents, Supreme Court justices, legislators, lobbyists -- but freedoms won, as freedom always is, by people struggling on their own behalf. -- Katha Pollitt, "Subject to Debate" column in The Nation, 5/1/2000 (reprinted in Subject to Debate (2001)) %% Your business model is not my problem. %% Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah. The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in awhile and watch your answers change. -- Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul %% Your overconfident arrogance would be annoying if the tortured remains of your natural curiosity were not pitiful. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% [Abortion opponents] love little babies, as long as they're in somebody else's uterus. -- Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former U.S. Surgeon General, Redbook Magazine, 8/1994 %% [Apple Mac] OS X is nice, but you feel handcuffed to a desk. [Microsoft Windows] XP also makes you feel cuffed, but then beaten. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% [Apple Mac] OS-X: proprietary software with a $599 to $2999 dongle attached. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% [Capitalism] is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous--and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed. -- John Maynard Keynes %% [GNU/]Linux is as much about being communist, as is the phrase, "of the people, by the people, and for the people". -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% [GNU/]Linux supports the notion of a command line or a shell for the same reason that only children read books with only pictures in them. Language, be it English or something else, is the only tool flexible enough to accomplish a sufficiently broad range of tasks. -- Bill Garrett %% [GNU/]Linux: The OS people choose without $200,000,000 of persuasion. -- Mike Coleman %% [I]n our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous. -- Justice Robert H. Jackson, American Communications Assn. v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 438; 70 S.Ct. 674, 704 (1950) %% [In] Democratic societies . . . the state can't control behavior by force. It can to some extent, but it's much more limited in its capacity to control by force. Therefore, it has to control what you think . . . One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there's a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, then you can have a debate. -- Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent, Propaganda in the US vs in the USSR, October 24, 1986 %% [Microsoft Windows] NT 5.0 is the last nail in the UNIX coffin. Interestingly, UNIX isn't in the coffin . . . It's wondering what the heck is sealing itself into a wooden box six feet underground. -- Jason McMullan %% [Microsoft Windows], n: 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition. %% [Microsoft] Windows: Where do you want to go today? [Apple] Mac OS: Where do you want to be tomorrow? [GNU/]Linux: Are you coming or what? -- from Linux Journal %% [My] deep religiosity . . . found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books. -- Albert Einstein, as quoted in Einstein, history, and Other Passions, p. 172 %% [My] purpose . . . is to transform theologians into anthropologists, lovers of god into lovers of man, candidates for the next world into students of this world . . . I negate the fantastic hypocracy of theology and religion only in order to affirm the true nature of man. -- Ludwig Feuerbach %% [N]o philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of atheism. -- Annie Besant, "The gospel of atheism" %% [T]he effect of the religious freedom Amendment to our Constitution was to take every form of propagation of religion out of the realm of things which could directly or indirectly be made public business, and thereby be supported in whole or in part at taxpayers' expense. That is a difference which the Constitution sets up between religion and almost every other subject matter of legislation, a difference which goes to the very root of religious freedom[...] This freedom was first in the Bill of Rights because it was first in the forefathers' minds; it was set forth in absolute terms, and its strength is its rigidity. It was intended not only to keep the states' hands out of religion, but to keep religion's hands off the state, and, above all, to keep bitter religious controversy out of public life by denying to every denomination any advantage from getting control of public policy or the public purse. -- Justice Robert H. Jackson, in dissent in Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing TP., 330 U.S. 1 (1947) at 26, 27. %% [T]he greatest single programming language ever designed. -- Alan Kay, on Lisp %% [T]he ideal of progress, freedom of thought, and the decline of ecclesiastical power go together. -- J. B. Bury, "A History of Freedom of Thought," 1913, from Menendez and Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom %% [T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom. -- Barry Goldwater %% [The Establishment Clause and Religious Freedom Clause] of our Federal Constitution ha[ve] never been wholly pleasing to most religious groups. They are all quick to invoke its protections; they are all irked when they feel its restraints. This Court has gone a long way, if not an unreasonable way, to hold that public business of paramount importance as maintenance of public order, protection of the privacy of a home, and taxation may not be pursued by a state in a way that even indirectly will interfere with religious proselyting.[ . . . ] But we cannot have it both ways. Religious teaching cannot be a private affair when the state seeks to impose regulations which infringe on it indirectly, and a public affair when it comes to taxing citizens of one faith to aid another, or those of no faith to aid all. If these principles seem harsh in prohibiting aid to catholic education, it must not be forgotten that it is the same Constitution that alone assures catholics the right to maintain these schools at all when predominant local sentiment would forbid them. [ . . . ] Nor should I think that those who have done so well without this aid would want to see this separation between church and state broken down. If the state may aid these religious schools, it may therefore regulate them. Many groups have sought aid from tax funds, only to find that it carried political controls with it. Indeed, this Court has declared that 'It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate that which it subsidizes.' Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, 131. -- Justice Robert H. Jackson, in dissent in Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing TP., 330 U.S. 1 (1947) at 27, 28. %% [The Establishment Clause and Religious Freedom Clause] of our Federal Constitution ha[ve] never been wholly pleasing to most religious groups. They are all quick to invoke its protections; they are all irked when they feel its restraints. This Court has gone a long way, if not an unreasonable way, to hold that public business of paramount importance as maintenance of public order, protection of the privacy of a home, and taxation may not be pursued by a state in a way that even indirectly will interfere with religious proselyting.[ . . . ] But we cannot have it both ways. Religious teaching cannot be a private affair when the state seeks to impose regulations which infringe on it indirectly, and a public affair when it comes to taxing citizens of one faith to aid another, or those of no faith to aid all. If these principles seem harsh in prohibiting aid to catholic education, it must not be forgotten that it is the same Constitution that alone assures catholics the right to maintain these schools at all when predominant local sentiment would forbid them. [ . . . ] Nor should I think that those who have done so well without this aid would want to see this separation between church and state broken down. If the state may aid these religious schools, it may therefore regulate them. Many groups have sought aid from tax funds, only to find that it carried political controls with it. Indeed, this Court has declared that 'It is hardly lack of due process for the Government to regulate that which it subsidizes.' Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, 131. -- Justice Robert H. Jackson, in dissent in Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing TP., 330 U.S. 1 (1947) at 27, 28. %% [The First Amendment] requires the state to be a neutral in its relations with groups of believers and non-believers. -- Justice Black, lead opinion, Everson v. Board of Education, 330 US 1 (1947) %% [W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. -- Isaac Asimov, "The Relativity of Wrong" %% [When a young person loses faith in his religion because he begins to study science and its methodology] it isn't that [through the obtaining of real knowledge that] he knows it all, but he suddenly realizes that he doesn't know it all. -- Richard Phillips Feynman, "The Meaning of It All," p. 36 %% `Peace upon earth!` was said. We sing it, And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We`ve got as far as poison gas. -- Thomas Hardy, 'Christmas:1924' %% cult: (n) a small, unpopular religion. religion: (n) a large, popular cult. -- seen on http://slashdot.org %% met her at party and I took her home she is the saddest girl that I have ever known she wakes me up in the middle of the night just to tell me everything will be alright amy smiles at me and tells me everything will be alright i tell myself the same damn thing everyday. -- Everclear, "Amphetamine" %% the 9/11 attacks were not aimed at American values, which are of no interest to the Islamists one way or another. They were an operation that was broadly intended to raise the profile of the Islamists in the Muslim world, but they had the further quite specific goal of luring the United States into invading Muslim countries. -- Gwynne Dwyer %% to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting. -- Edward Estlin Cummings %% wE hAVe YoUR UNIX. PlaCE tWEnty THOusaNd DolLarS IN UnMArkeD hUNdreD DollaR BiLLs in OuR PaypAL AccouNT By JuNE 1St or wE WiLL kiLL -9 IT. -- "ransom note", comment on "Ransom Love on United Linux, SCO UNIX" on http://slashdot.org by jeffehobbs %% we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it. -- "The Cluetrain Manifesto", Christopher Locke %% we will invent new lullabies, new songs, new acts of love, we will cry over things we used to laugh & our new wisdom will bring tears to eyes of gentile creatures from other planets who were afraid of us till then & in the end a summer with wild winds & new friends will be. %%