Moderation / Criticism / Exposition / Exposés

David Aaronovitch

• Catholics try, rather unconvincingly, to show how conferring sainthood is different in principle to the pagan apotheosis (the process that made Claudius, for instance, into a God), but the distinction doesn't quite wash. … For people with God on their side, monotheists are a touchy lot. … in Exodus, Moses comes back down off the mountain with the ten commandments, only to find that the wicked Israelites have (with the connivance of his brother, Aaron) built a golden calf to worship and are busy having an orgy round it. So Moses gets the tribe of Levi to go with "sword at side" and massacre 3,000 calf-worshippers. And we are supposed to celebrate such a violation of the freedom to worship. [never mind ignoring the whole "Thou shalt not kill" thing, but then it was in God's name so it was all right]… Why are they so touchy? The problem is partly that all monotheisms are, by their nature, anti-pluralistic. They've got the one true God, and the very latest valid version of his thoughts. It is asking a lot of monotheisms to coexist with other faiths and views. Paganism, on the other hand, is much better suited to modern ideas of tolerance and human rights. Under polytheism you can choose your own god overtly. And it is hard to imagine a group of water-worshippers getting upset because one of their priests was gay. In fact, in shamanistic cultures, homosexuality is much-valued among the holy men. … Actually, it is all about sex. Pagan religions tend to be about a respect for, and a connection with, nature. So, as the Catholic Encyclopaedia notes, it was in the pagan fertility cults associated with the "dying and rising god" that the "worst perversions existed". Old Ishtar, Cybele (later Artemis, later Diana) and Astarte all had their temple whores, and their lewd rites. … Lewd rites: that's exactly what I'd like more of on Thought For The Day. [The Guardian, 15 July 2003]
• Why Jerry [Springer] is such a good show is that it does, in fact, treat what seems to be a light thing – popular culture – seriously. But doesn't it, on the way, cause offence, and cause it a little selectively? … Could we imagine a Prophet in diapers? The Bezhti affair gives this question real salience. The editor of Granta, Ian Jack, writing following the Sikh demonstrations that forced the play's closure, seemed to suggest that some lines were unlikely to be crossed, and crystallised the argument: 'The state has no law forbidding a pictorial representation of the Prophet,' he wrote, 'but I never expect to see such a picture. On the one hand, there is the individual's right to exhibit or publish one; on the other hand, the immeasurable insult and damage to life and property that the exercise of such a right would cause. In this case, we understand that the price is too high.' Back came a furious Salman Rushdie, pointing out that there was a tradition of depictions of the Prophet, and then asking, 'should we now censor ourselves because the current potentates of the Islamic faith are more repressive than their predecessors? Do we have no principles of our own?' This seems to be one of the biggest questions of the moment, given additional topicality because of the proposed 'incitement to religious hatred' law. … When Sikh leader Mohan Singh pointed out that only 5,000 people would have seen Bezhti and asked, 'are you going to upset 600,000 Sikhs in Britain and maybe 20 million outside the UK for that?' he laid down a challenge that it is hard to refuse. And the answer is, 'yes, we probably ought to'. What we are offended by depends mostly on us, not on the person doing the offending. Some Christians decided to be offended, but Jerry also features tap-dancing klansmen and The Producers, famously, features balletic storm-troopers. Blacks and Jews could easily decide that such levity was appalling. Instead they've decided that it's not just tolerable, but wonderful. The subjectivity of offensiveness explains why our race laws are not based on suppressing offensive expression, but actions calculated to incite hatred. … And, if we keep our nerves and carefully explain to all citizens that being offended is an occupational hazard in a free society, then my guess is that in 10 years' time – if it's good enough – Bezhti will be playing to audiences of unoffended Sikhs all over Britain, and Germaine Greer: The Naked Ballet will be premiering on BBC16. [The Guardian, 09 January 2005]

Edward Abbey

• A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

Ahmed Aboutaleb, Mayor, Rotterdam

• It is incomprehensible that you can turn against freedom, but if you do not like freedom, in Heaven's name pack your bag and leave. There may be a place in the world where you can be yourself. Be honest with yourself and do not go and kill innocent journalists. And if you do not like it here because humorists you do not like make a newspaper, may I then say you can fuck off. This is stupid, this so incomprehensible. Vanish from the Netherlands if you cannot find your place here. All those well-meaning Muslims here will now be stared at. [07 January 2015] Note this major is himself a Muslim.

AbuManga

• As an ex-muslim myself, I am baffled by the number of Muslims who believe it is acceptable that apostates should be punished. It is beyond being absurd: why not just let God punish me? Why would he need someone else to do the dirty work for him? It is obvious that the killing of apostates is just a way of containing free thought and preventing its spread within the community. [A Question Of Belief, The Guardian, 30 April 2008] Ah, but they're doing God's work, and they know what that is because someone wrote it down. It's the only reason they have for doing anything, after all, for their lives are so empty otherwise.
• I'm an ex-muslim who doesn't have time for any religion but should I now be given the choice between going to a Christian funeral service or a Muslim one, I'd go for the former. The reason is simple: Christian funerals seem to be about celebrating the life of the defunct, remembering her/him, playing their favourite music, as opposed to the cold, unemotional, Islamic rite which mainly consists of asking God for (yet again) more mercy and less punishment. [Of God, Tea And Auntie Jenny, The Guardian, 21 March 2008]
• I think the problem is not the lack of suitable black role models but the belief that your role models can only be of the ethnicity that you happen to be part of. There are a lot of people that I look up to and I couldn't care less about the colour of their skin or about their ethnic background or religious beliefs. Their achievements in themselves are enough to inspire me. The formula is very simple: work hard and you'll get somewhere. I am black by the way. [Less Notorious BIG, More PhDs, The Guardian, 23 September 2008]
• Religion stifles curiosity, the driving force behind scientific and technological advancement. I remember asking myself, when growing up as a Muslim, why study Nature and the Universe and how everything came about when we "know" that God created everything? All we're left with are nonsensical claims about scientific "truths" in the Quran and about Mecca being the centre of the Earth. An Egyptian friend of mine, who has a PhD in Engineering from one of the UK's top universities once asked me, after his house got broken into : "How can this happen? There are (framed) Quran verses all over the house"(!!!) [Pave With Good Inventions, The Guardian, 25 June 2008]
• Inayat, as an ex-muslim these are the questions I used to ask myself and maybe you should too: - why would an omniscient god create us to judge us afterwards? He knows the future and whether we will be good or evil people long before we were born, so it would be quite unfair of him to punish me for let's say drinking or even not believing in him. Islam juggles the issue of free will and fate (or "maktoub" i.e. "written") with difficulty. - would it make sense to be punished eternally in the most gruesome way (remember that this is the flip side of eternal life) for a finite, time-limited sin, no matter how great? - what is God/Allah getting out of this? What is he trying to prove and to whom? I was a muslim for the first 25 years of my life and I can tell you this: once you realise that all these stories that used to scare us as kids are really man-made myths, life suddenly becomes even more beautiful and enjoyable. [Is Death The End?, The Guardian, 18 March 2008]
• One should not forget to mention that "Islamic" science, philosophy and arts bloomed within a context that would be considered liberal and secular even by today's standards. Unfortunately the Muslim World (if there is such a thing) today is completely devoid of such propitious conditions. We're left to bask in past glories and vacuous talk of "Scientific Miracles of the Quran", (i.e how everything from the atom to the Big Bang theory and even Evolution, while we're at it, has been mentioned in the Holy Book). Conservatism, superstition and religious prevalence in Muslim countries contribute to stifling scientific progress and freethinking. Why search for answers when the Quran provides them all? Why develop technology to make our lives better if God wanted it to be this way? There was some great science done by great scientists who happen to be Muslim, in Muslim countries. It is not, however, "Islamic Science"; not more than gravity is "Christian" and general relativity is "Jewish". [It's Time To Herald The Arabic Science That Prefigured Darwin And Newton, The Guardian, 30 January 2008]

Martha Ackelsberg

• Hierarchies make some people dependent on others, blame the dependent for their dependency, and then use that dependency as a justification for further exercise of authority.

Lord Acton

• Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. [26 February 1877]

Clark Adams

• If atheism is a religion, then health is a disease.

Douglas Adams

• 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?

Henry Brooks Adams

• The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved.

John Adams

• As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? [letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, 27 December 1816]
• … : But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it. [Letter to Abigail Adams, 07 July 1775]
• As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext, arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. [Treaty Of Peace And Friendship With Tripoli, Article XI]
• The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolised learning. And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes. [letter to John Taylor]
• God has infinite wisdom, goodness and power; he created the universe; his duration is eternal, a parte ante and a parte post. His presence is as extensive as space. What is space? An infinite spherical vacuum. He created this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory; and with deliberate design of making nine-tenths of our species miserable for ever for his glory. This is the doctrine of Christian theologians, in general, ten to one. Now, my friend, can prophecies or miracles convince you or me that infinite benevolence, wisdom, and power, created, and preserves for a time innumerable millions, to make them miserable forever, for his own glory? Wretch! What is his glory? Is he ambitious? Does he want promotion? Is he vain, tickled with adulation, exulting and triumphing in his power and the sweetness of his vengeance? Pardon me, my Maker, for these awful questions. My answer to them is always ready. I believe no such things. My adoration of the author of the universe is too profound and too sincere. The love of God and his creation – delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existence – though but an atom, a molecule organique in the universe – are my religion. [letter to Thomas Jefferson, 14 September 1813]

Wayne Adkins

• So ask yourself what you believe. Is it that every species of animal once survived for a year on a single wooden boat? That the earth is only 10,000 years old? That God divided people by race and language because people were "too united"? That Samson killed thousands of men with a jawbone because he didn't cut his hair? That unicorns once existed? That Jonah lived in a whale for three days? That after 2,000 years of waiting, Jesus is going to return? Why do you believe these things? It's time to grow up and put the God fairy-tale where it belongs, in your past alongside Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and the monster under your bed. [24 April 2005] 10,000 years? Don't be silly, we all know it's 6,000!

'Adonis' (Ali Ahmad Said Asbar)

• The Muslims today – forgive me for saying this – with their accepted interpretation, are the first to destroy Islam, whereas those who criticize the Muslims – the non-believers, the infidels, as they call them – are the ones who perceive in Islam the vitality that could adapt it to life. These infidels serve Islam better than the believers. [11 March 2006]
• … the religious interpretations that compel Muslim women to wear the veil in secular countries where church and state have long been separated and where equality of the sexes is firmly established, reveals a mentality that is not content merely with veiling woman, but seeks to shroud man, society, life in general – to pull the veil over the eyes of reason itself. [Index On Censorship, 4/2003]
• There can be no living culture in the world if you cannot criticize its foundations – the religion. We lack the courage to ask any question about any religious issue. For example, as a Muslim, I cannot say a single word about the Prophet Moses. The Prophet Moses did not say anything to me as a Muslim, whereas the Israeli Jew can criticize Moses and all the prophets in the Torah, and he can even question the divinity of the Torah. [26 November 2006]

Theodore Adorno

• If voting could change the system, it would be illegal.

Tanveer Ahmed

• As long as Muslims view their religion as sitting above history and culture – with the Koran as the literal word of God, which in their view makes Islam undebatable – there will always be Hilalis who can point to certain texts and argue for a social and legal structure consistent with 7th-century Arabia. Let's not forget that a senior British cleric lavished praise on Hilali in response to this incident, saying Australia was lucky to have him, and suggesting he was "one of the greatest Islamic scholars in the world". This is a man who knows the Koran in intimate detail and his views are consistent with a strict reading of the Muslim holy book. And if you believe the Koran is the literal word of God, how is anything other than a strict interpretation appropriate? All the world's religions have passages that are abhorrent or inappropriate to the modern age. But they were revolutionary in their time and can still inspire us today. If Islam is seen in its context, as a product of history and not above it, there could be a meaningful debate about whether a version of the religion, inspired by but not chained to its past, can and contribute to modernity and human progress. The Hilali incident and the loud chorus of his defenders suggest this is still some way off. [The Australian, 30 October 2006]

Zalikha Ahmed, Director, Apna Haq Refuge, Yorkshire

• We have to be careful with the police, especially the Asian ones. We don't visit the station where certain Asian officers are on because some of them are perpetrators and one of them on the record said he would not arrest someone who used force on his wife. [The Telegraph, 29 June 2008]

Decca Aitkenhead

• Christian faith in its modern Church of England incarnation is a stunningly senseless belief system. A few weeks ago, an almighty row broke out about the teaching of creationism in a Gateshead school. "Rational" Christians fell over themselves to make it plain that they were much too sensible to believe such fairy tales. "Modern" churchgoers were frantic to distance themselves from the crazies and their mad ideas about God creating the world in six days. What a preposterous suggestion! Where was the science in that? Everyone knew the story of Genesis was just a rhetorical flourish. God created evolution. Now, not a month later, the same Christians ask us to believe the story of Easter. One churchman, mourning the Queen Mother, spelt it out: "Hers was a faith that rested strongly on the glorious story of Easter," he assured us. And what did the story tell us? "Death is not the last word." In other words, we are supposed to believe that we will live for ever – rather than stop and ask, for instance: "Where is the science in that?" The disputes among Christians regarding interpretation are presented as evidence of what a tolerant, robust and enlightened church we have. Arguments over whether to take Genesis or the resurrection – or the feeding of the 5,000, or the healing of the blind, or all the other miracles in the Bible – as factually accurate accounts, or as spiritual metaphors, exhaust an enormous amount of Christians' intellectual energy. But who cares? What difference does it make if the world took a week to build, or billions of years; if the body of Jesus rose from the grave, or only his spirit? Attributing God's authorship to either version of events comes down to the same thing: you believe in a supernatural power. If you believe in God, you believe in a supernatural power which does not have to obey the laws of science. Trying to discredit it by pointing out scientific implausibility is futile. Believers shouldn't need science to justify their belief in God. They have faith. I'm with the creationists on this point – or, at least, I'm as much with them as with the self-styled "rational" Christians. Christianity is non-rational. It is a historical invention, and once the assumption that everyone should believe in it is removed, no amount of reshuffling the details can alter its essential absurdity. Trying to defend religion by invoking science is like claiming that three plus four equals ice cream. The monarchy is built on no sounder foundation. Modern royalists may couch their defence of the crown in secular terms – constitutional continuity, keeping Britain special, generating tourist revenue – but God's role remains as central now as it ever did. Without a divine being to anoint the royal family, how can we be expected to think of them as different? [The Guardian, 02 April 2002]

Sadiq Jalal al-Azm

• But it is obvious that the literal text of the Koran simply cannot be applied in modern society. Take for instance the corporal punishments prescribed in the Koran. Radical Islamists want to impose them, but they are a minority. The majority of Muslims have split personalities on this matter: They insist that this is the penal law of Islam and at the same time they admit that it is inapplicable. [Radio Netherlands, 27 March 2007]
• In the Muslim world, Islamists present themselves as an alternative for western culture, but they do not really have an alternative: Their slogan 'Islam is the solution' is an illusion. Islam simply cannot solve the problems of the 21st Century. That becomes clear as soon as the Islamists come to power: All islamist regimes end up in dramatic failure. That some Islamists today turn violent and even suicidal, is only an indication of their failure to realise their plans. Eventually Muslims will have to wake up to the reality that they are no longer the masters of history, but a deprived and underdeveloped minority in the global community. Only when Muslims face this reality, they will be able to proceed. [Radio Netherlands, 27 March 2007]

Aaron Alexovich

• i have this goofy idea in my head that doing a good job working on something i love is more important than cracking open the skulls of my competitors and feasting upon the runny brainmeats within. i know, i know… I'm such a commie. but in a dimension where barbra streisand and george w. bush are both considered to be at the pinnacle of their respective fields, playing the ranking game seems, to me, pretty devoid of 'meaning'. [Serenity Rose, vol 2]
• according to our best bumper sticker analysis, america is currently the country holding the coveted NUMBER ONE position among nations. (of course you remember when the U.N. prize patrol drove up to the white house and presented the president with that oversized novelty check. good times, good times…) it must suck to live someplace like australia, where everyone's constantly miserable on account of they aren't NUMBER ONE. not like here, where we're all just vomiting all over ourselves we're so fucking happy all the time. [Serenity Rose, vol 2]
• the 10 commandments according to my television (by a potato, aged 16)
  1. thou shalt not resist booze.
  2. thou shalt not disparage money.
  3. thou shalt not refuse sexual relations, as sexual relations are the only important thing in the whole wide world ever.
  4. thou shalt never be average in the looks department. (ugly is right out)
  5. thou shalt never deny the existence of some sort of god or something.
  6. thou shalt never fail to defend your friends and family (those similiar to you) regardless of the facts.
  7. thou shalt never fail to attack your enemies (those dissimiliar to you) regardless of the facts.
  8. thou shalt have a whole mess of spawn (min. 2)
  9. thou shalt never be alone.
  10. america rocks!!
  [Serenity Rose, vol 1]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

• Everyone followed the cartoon crisis, or the crisis about the cartoon drawings of Mohammed in Denmark. That led to an explosion of violence because large groups of Muslims still will not accept criticism of their religion. Over and over again, when in the name of Islam, human blood is shed, Muslims are very quiet. When drawings are made or some perceived slight or offences given by writing a book, or making a drawing, or in some way criticising the dogmas of Islam, people take to the streets. We have all these leaders of the organisation of Islam, the countries who oppressed on people, coming to demand the people apologise. And I think it's this discrepancy that more and more people see as violence and intolerance and the lack of freedom inherent in the creed of Islam. [ABC Interview, 05 August 2008]
• It is often said that Islam has been "hijacked" by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates. But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done? … I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam's image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up. Islamic justice is a proud institution, one to which more than a billion people subscribe, at least in theory, and in the heart of the Islamic world it is the law of the land. But take a look at the verse above*: more compelling even than the order to flog adulterers is the command that the believer show no compassion. It is this order to choose Allah above his sense of conscience and compassion that imprisons the Muslim in a mindset that is archaic and extreme. If moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the girl from Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate? When a "moderate" Muslim's sense of compassion and conscience collides with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful thinking. [New York Times, 07 December 2007] * Qur'an 24:2 = "The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication,- flog each of them with a hundred stripes: Let not compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by God, if ye believe in God and the Last Day: and let a party of the Believers witness their punishment."

Imam Ali

• Look into what is said, not at who says it.

Alikhat

• What do I dislike about theism?…
  Let me count the ways…
  I dislike the hypocrisy, the corruption, the greed and the lies.
  I dislike the veneration of ignorance, the glorification of idiocy, the wild-eyed hatred of progress and the fear of education, which send the faithful shrieking, vampire-like, from the light of knowledge.
  I dislike the way in which prejudice is passed off as piety.
  The way superstition is peddled as wisdom.
  The way intolerance is raised to the lofty heights of "Truth".
  I dislike how hatred is taught as love, how fear is instilled as kindness, how slavery is pressed as freedom, and how contempt for life is dressed up and adored as spirituality.
  I dislike the shackles religions place on the mind, corrupting, twisting and crushing the spirit until the believer has been brought down to a suitable state of worthlessness.
  So lost and self-loathing, so bereft of hope or pride, that they can look into the hallucinated face of their imaginary oppressor and feel unbounded love and gratitude for the additional suffering it has declined, as yet, to visit upon them.
  I dislike people's need for a communal delusion, like drug addicts who unite just to share the same needle.
  I dislike the way reason is reviled as a vice and reality is decreed to be a matter of convenience.
  The way common sense and ordinary human decency get re-named "holy law" and advertised as the sole province of the faithful.
  I dislike religions' wholesale theft of any number of ancient mythologies, only to turn around and proclaim how "unique their doctrine is.
  I dislike how intelligence is held as suspect and inquiry is reviled as a high crime.
  I dislike the pillaging of the impoverished, the extortion of the gullible, the manipulation of the ignorant and the domination of the weak.
  I dislike the invention of sins for the satisfaction of those who desire to punish.
  I dislike the demonization of unbelievers,
  The ill-concealed hate of proselytisers,
  The hysterical rants of holy rollers,
  The wigged-out warnings of psychic healers,
  The dismantling of public education via religious school vouchers,
  The erosion of civil rights by theocratic right-wingers,
  The righteous wrath of gun-toting true believers,
  The destruction wrought by holy warriors,
  The blood-drenched fatwas of ayatollas, and the apocalyptic prophesies of unmedicated messiahs.
  Most of all, though, I dislike the certain knowledge that religion, in one grotesque form or other, will be with us so long as there is a single dark, cobwebbed corner of the human imagination that a believer can stuff a god into.
  (And, oh yeah, what do I like about theism? Some nice art, some pretty music and some photogenic buildings.)
  [alt.atheism, 20 November 1998]

Ethan Allen

• While we are under the tyranny of Priests … it will ever be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith. [Reason The Only Oracle Of Man, 1784]
• In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue. [Reason The Only Oracle Of Man, 1784]
• There is not any thing, which has contributed so much to delude mankind in religious matters, as mistaken apprehensions concerning supernatural inspiration or revelation; not considering that all true religion originates from reason, and can not otherwise be understood, but by the exercise and improvement of it. [Reason The Only Oracle Of Man, 1784]
• Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principles that they are labouring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument. [Reason The Only Oracle Of Man, 1784]

Paula Allen

• Being an activist means being aware of what's happening around you as well as being in touch with your feelings about it – your rage, your sadness, your excitement, your curiosity, your feeling of helplessness, and your refusal to surrender. Being an activist means owning your desire. [An Activist Love Story]

Eric Alterman

• The public supports the [Iraq] war, of course: Once the bombs begin to fall, Americans support every war, believing it unpatriotic to do otherwise. [The Nation, 11 January 1999]

John Amaechi

• It's the inconsistency [of bible-bashers] I can't stand. If you're going to quote Leviticus, then don't eat shellfish or wear mixed fabrics. Poke your eye out if you look at women other than your wife … then come to me. [The Guardian, 28 June 2007]
• Here in the US they say, "He's black and English and a basketball player and clever and gay…" It's all a bit overwhelming. They can only deal with one thing at a time and that one thing now is the gay bit. It's disappointing, because you spend all that time studying, researching, training, and after all that work I'm just that "big gay bloke". [The Guardian, 28 June 2007]

Walid Amayreh, Editor, Hebron Times

• It is lamentable that the United States which values press freedom at home is bullying the Palestinian Authority to suppress freedom in Palestine. What happened to the American First Amendment, or maybe it doesn't apply to non-Americans? [responding to CIA 'recommendations' his paper be closed for being critical of the US & Israel, Muslim News, 29 March 2002]

Henri Frédéric Amiel

• We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalise our own inequities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity. [Journal Intime, 1866]

Martin Amis

• It will also be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly. How many of them know, for example, that their government has destroyed at least 5% of the Iraqi population? How many of them then transfer that figure to America (and come up with 14m)? Various national characteristics – self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in western Europe, an assiduous geographical incuriosity – have created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away. Most crucially, and again most painfully, being right and being good support the American self to an almost tautologous degree: Americans are good and right by virtue of being American. Saul Bellow's word for this habit is "angelisation". On the US-led side, then, we need not only a revolution in consciousness but an adaptation of national character: the work, perhaps, of a generation. … Our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been called "species consciousness" – something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredulous misery, I have been trying to apply such a consciousness, and such a sensibility. Thinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear. [The Guardian, 18 September 2001]

Anaxagorus

• Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun a hot rock. [c475 BCE]

David Anderson

• Perhaps the greatest outrage about the new New York City government's policy of random bag searches in the subway is the lack of outrage about it. … We hear comparisons between this policy and airport searches. For a start, catching planes is optional, for most New Yorkers, catching public transport isn't. … courts have held that magnetometers and metal detectors are not "searches". By any standard, a policeman poking through your handbag or back pack is a search. … The final horror here is that there's nothing to suggest this is the government's last demand. Freedom is usually destroyed in a gradual manner, it is less noticeable then. It is a short step from random subway bag searches, to random street searches, from making it optional to making it compulsory, from not asking for ID, to demanding it. And this latest policy has been put in place without even any terrorist actions against the United States! Imagine how few rights we'll have left when something does happen here? What freedom do we have when the government can do exactly what it wishes because it has manufactured a climate of fear like this administration has, and what freedom do we deserve when we as a society and as individuals just lie down and take it? [Counterpunch, 26 July 2005]

Gillian Anderson

• How would you feel about a co-star who earns more than you for no discernable reason and feels he's worth it? [speaking of David Duchovny]

Anemones

• Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

Kofi Annan's Astonishing Facts [New York Times, 29 September 1998]

• The richest fifth of the world's people consumes 86 percent of all goods and services while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3 percent. Indeed, the richest fifth consumes 45 percent of all meat and fish, 58 percent of all energy used and 84 percent of all paper, has 74 percent of all telephone lines and owns 87 percent of all vehicles.
• Since 1970, the world's forests have declined from 4.4 square miles per 1,000 people to 2.8 square miles per 1,000 people. In addition, a quarter of the world's fish stocks have been depleted or are in danger of being depleted and another 44 percent are being fished at their biological limit.
• The Ganges River symbolises purification to Hindus, who believe drinking or bathing in its waters will lead to salvation. But 29 cities, 70 towns and countless villages deposit about 345 million gallons of raw sewage a day directly into the river. Factories add 70 million gallons of industrial waste and farmers are responsible for another 6 million tons of chemical fertiliser and 9,000 tons of pesticides.
• The three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 48 least developed countries.
• The average African household today consumes 20 percent less than it did 25 years ago.
• The world's 225 richest individuals, of whom 60 are Americans with total assets of $311 billion, have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion – equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the entire world's population.
• Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics – $2 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide basic education for everyone in the world.
• Of the 4.4 billion people in developing countries, nearly three-fifths lack access to safe sewers, a third have no access to clean water, a quarter do not have adequate housing and a fifth have no access to modern health services of any kind.
• Americans each consume an average of 260 pounds of meat a year. In Bangladesh, the average is six and a half pounds.
• By 2050, 8 billion of the world's projected 9.5 billion people – up from about 6 billion today – will be living in developing countries.
• Of the estimated 2.7 million annual deaths from air pollution, 2.2 million are from indoor pollution – including smoke from dung and wood burned as fuel which is more harmful than tobacco smoke. 80 percent of the victims are rural poor in developing countries.
• Two thirds of India's 90 million lowest-income households live below the poverty line – but more than 50 percent of these impoverished people own wristwatches, 41 percent own bicycles, 31 percent own radios and 13 percent own fans.
• Sweden and the United States have 681 and 626 telephone lines per 1,000 people, respectively. Afghanistan, Cambodia, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have only one line per 1,000 people.
• Europeans spend $11 billion a year on ice cream – $2 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide clean water and safe sewers for the world's population.
• At the end of 1997 nearly 31 million people were living with HIV, up from 22.3 million the year before. With 16,000 new infections a day – 90 percent in developing countries – it is now estimated that 40 million people will be living with HIV in 2000.
• More than 110 million active landmines are scattered in 68 countries, with an equal number stockpiled around the world. Every month more than 2,000 people are killed or maimed by mine explosions.
• Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion a year on pet food – $4 billion more than the estimated annual additional total needed to provide basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world.
• It is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and clean water and safe sewers for all is roughly $40 billion a year – or less than 4 percent of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.

Anon / Unknown

• It's your hell, you burn in it.
• Only sheep need a shepherd.
• Blasphemy is a victimless crime.
• I'll go my way and you go yahweh.
• Don't vote, it only encourages them.
• If forgiveness is divine, why is there a hell?
• INRI = Idiots Need Reassuring Ideologies.
• Fundamentalism means never having to say "I'm wrong."
• The Religious Right aren't, and Scientific Creationism isn't.
• Anyone who says God is on their side is dangerous as hell.
• Science flew men to the moon. Religion flew men into buildings.
• Ubi dubium ibi libertas. (Where there is doubt, there is freedom.)
• Christian: "I'll pray for you." Atheist: "Then I'll think for both of us."
• Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. (There is no salvation within the church.)
• The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
• Fundamentalism = fund (to give money) + amentalism (without brains).
• It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets elected.
• Faith is that quality which enables us to believe what we know to be untrue.
• The only difference between a delusion and a religion is the number of believers.
• Proof that cats are smarter than dogs: you cannot get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
• Power corrupts; Absolute power corrupts absolutely; God is all-powerful. Draw your own conclusions.
• Traveller: "God has been mighty good to your fields, Mr. Farmer." Farmer: "You should have seen how he treated them when I wasn't around."

Anonymous Gay Vicar In Northern England

• Come on – it's 2003, and anyone who has done any half-decent theological thinking in the last 50 years knows that Leviticus is irrelevant and St. Paul, for all his redemption, never quite escaped the expectations of his culture. Only the utterly sex-obsessed would show the slightest interest in what I do in bed. I have a great home life and a great supportive relationship – permanent, faithful and stable – and Christian people rejoice in that. Including our parishioners, apparently. Three years ago a move to a new post was cancelled at the last minute because the bishop in the new area insisted on asking questions that Issues forbids him to ask, and which in any case should never be asked of any Englishman, gentleman or priest. As I told them the news before the service, making something up about problems with the appointment, they cheered because I would be staying. And afterwards, to the surprise of both of us, they were hugging my partner and saying: "You must be so upset," because nobody had ever said, but they knew. It should be getting better – but it isn't, it's getting worse. … The thoroughly English, thoroughly Anglican policy of "don't ask, don't tell" has been torn up by the Carey bishops who seem bent on turning the national church into some weird puritanical sect: the only officially anti-homosexual organisation in the country, and the only organisation with an exemption – that's right, an exemption – from the new Human Rights Act, for the very special purpose of retaining their right to persecute and eliminate their gay staff, one by one. … We know who we are, we know what it is to be fully human, we know what it is to discover love, we know that love is costly, we know what it is to know our Saviour and to have our lives transformed – and we seek to share God's compassion in a needy world. And so to find some calm at the eye of the storm, and get on with the week ahead … [The Guardian, 24 June 2003]

Anonymous Iranian woman

• Indignant Muslims all over the world justify the violent reactions to cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad by emphasizing the sanctity of Allah's messenger. Islam's devotees argue that these cartoons have desecrated a symbol of their faith, a pillar of their belief. As members of free, democratic and civilized societies, we too have our sacred principles: liberty, dignity and humanity (including the right to be secure against cruel and unusual treatment). We believe that ALL human beings not only are entitled to these rights, but are obliged to respect and protect these basic values. Muslims demanded apology, prosecution, and even assassination of artists and editors who allowed the publication of these cartoons. I too demand the apology and prosecution of those who are behind the belligerent violation of human rights in Islamic nations. I demand appropriate actions to be taken against those responsible for the arrest, torture, and death of political and religious dissidents. Where is our rage after William Sampson and Zahra Kazemi were subjected to medieval torture and, in the case of the latter, murdered viciously in the prisons of Islamic world? I demand apology for the amputations that are carried out in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Severing hands and legs and removing eyes as forms of punishment are deeply offensive to the collective conscience of humanity; it is a desecration of dignity, and it fills us with disgust. I demand prosecution of all those who commit heinous crimes in the name of honour. I want accountability from the parents of the Jordanian girl who burned and disfigured their own daughter "because she was dating a boy." I want the father of Nobahar, the young Iranian woman who gave birth to a baby boy out of wedlock, to be tried for torching his own daughter to death, and poisoning his own infant grandson. I demand that all prisoners of conscience be released from the dungeons of Islamic countries where they are kept in dreadful and inhumane conditions. I am outraged by clerics in the Middle East and elsewhere who preach violence against Westerners. The cartoons in question are harmless (unless, of course, the offended Muslims decide to bring harm upon themselves by resorting to violence). Preaching death and violence, as has been proven by the deadly terrorist attacks, is going to cost the lives of innocents. This is but a small fraction of abuses committed almost daily by governments and people in the Muslim world. These actions are far more ruthless than depicting a sacred character in a few cartoons. It is time we stood up to these perpetrators of brutality. I am offended. And I demand justice. [March 2006]

Anonymous Young Muslim Man

• These people, ladies and gentleman, have a good look at them. They actually believe if you kill women and children, you will go to heaven. This is not ideology. It's a mental illness. [speaking of radical Islam, Trinity College, Dublin, October 2006]

Peter A. Angeles

• What was God doing (in His Time) for an eternity into His past before He Created the Universe Ex Nihilo? God existed by Himself through an Eternity before the Creation without needing a Universe. Why did He suddenly desire to create the Universe? [The Problem Of God: A Short Introduction, 1986]
• To say that this Timeless God began Time along with the Universe at a time when there was no Time implies that at that moment when He initiated this Unique Event He was engaged in a Time, or at a time in order to bring this Event about. He did something. What brought that Event about? [The Problem Of God: A Short Introduction, 1986]

Natalie Angier

• Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive. We all may talk about religion as a powerful social force, but unlike other similarly powerful institutions, religion is not to be questioned, criticised or mocked. [Confessions Of A Lonely Atheist, New York Times Magazine, 14 January 2001]
• I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channelled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren't, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection. [Confessions Of A Lonely Atheist, New York Times Magazine, 14 January 2001]

Susan B. Anthony

• I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. [1896]

Hussein Ahmed Amin, former Egyptian Diplomat

• Such behaviour comes to undermine the image of Islam and even to make some Muslims sceptical whether their faith can face the challenges of modernism. [protesting the Afghanistan Taliban's destruction of the 1500 year-old statues of Buddha, March 2001]

Bert Archer

• Would we allow teachers in publicly funded schools to tell students that they should believe Zeus, a god who lives on a mountain in Greece, gave birth to a daughter from his head? It can be taught as a myth, sure; as an underpinning to much rich culture. But as fact? I hope we'd turf whoever tried. Because it's not true. True, many good and brilliant people believed it once. … Our constitution says that one religion gets its own schools, where its belief in impossible things can be propagated. But it's mostly nonsense. If there were even one shred of provable truth, the world would shake. But of course there isn't. … It's circular logic, and I don't want to subsidize it. Ordinarily, all this twaddle would be protected under the general principle of freedom of expression. But there are limits on this freedom, and uttering a threat is one of the most basic. When your boss of bosses is believed to hold the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and when you are believed to speak for that boss, the words you utter carry special weight. … In the case of priests and imams, the weight they carry when they speak in religious terms puts them in a different category from anyone else standing on a soapbox or writing in a newspaper. We do, occasionally, see religion reasonably: when a religion is new we call it a cult. We then seek to protect our children from it. If children are born to cultists, we feel sorry for them, but there is little we can do. It ought to be the same for all cults, no matter how old or popular they are. Lamentable a use of the right though it may be, parents ought to be able to spread whatever untruths to their children, under the rubric of faith, they see fit. We shouldn't stand in their way. But we certainly shouldn't approve, or, as we so often do, applaud it as some sort of moral good. It is the opposite of moral good. Misleading children is quite bad, whether the justification is that you're Catholic, Anglican, Muslim or Jewish. A baseless belief, so long as it doesn't harm others, is a benign social ill. When it does harm others, it must be exposed for what it is and dealt with. With religious leaders of all stripes, most recently Catholic bishops, Muslim leaders and President Bush, all seeking to abrogate the rights of people in love with people of the same gender in the name of their beliefs, it does no one any good to continue to treat religion with the exceptionalism it's used to. People are allowed to believe whatever they like, and listen to whatever crackpot they choose. But when those crackpots issue veiled threats to try to sway government policy, we should lose whatever tolerance we had for the general foolishness of religions and those who follow their leaders. [07 August 2003]

William Archer

• 'Theocracy' has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained, tyranny.
• I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring. [Theology & War]

Aristophanes

• Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?

Aristotle

• Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail.
• Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
• A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side. [Politics]
• The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, or of the few, or of the many, are perversions. For the members of a state, if they are truly citizens, ought to participate in its advantages. [Politics]

Don Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta

• Knowledge has to be socialised to democratise power.

Malene Arpe

• They were upset. Their feelings were bruised. As sullenly explained by Pakistani regional chief minister Akram Durrani, "Nobody has the right to insult Islam and hurt the feelings of Muslims." Hurt feelings? Are you fragging kidding me!? It used to be mommy would get you a cookie when your feelings got hurt if nobody wanted to play with you because you wore the wrong clothes or had stupid hair. It is sort of cute and appropriate when you're a toddler. It's not so cute when grown men call for shows to be shut down or for the hands of artists to be chopped off, because they've been offended! … And let us not forget the music teacher in Colorado who showed students clips of the opera Faust. It "glorifies Satan," an outraged and offended parent said. Well, of course it does, dear. … Just spare us the nonsense about the hurt feelings and the offence taken. What are you? Five? … Consider carefully the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. … Or check out those videos of people getting their heads sawed off. … If being offended is such a necessity to your enjoyment of life or your sense of self, think about the censorship you implicitly advocate. Consider that you may not be the one who gets to decide what is offensive and should be banned. [Toronto Star, 12 February 2006]

Timothy Garton Ash

• One is still gobsmacked by things American Republicans say. Take the glorification of the military, for example. In his speech [Fort Bragg, 28 June 2005], Bush insisted "there is no higher calling than service in our armed forces". What? No higher calling! How about being a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, an aid worker? Unimaginable that any European leader could say such a thing. [The Guardian, 30 June 2005]
• The erosion of liberty. Four words sum up four years. Since the attacks of September 11 2001, we have seen an erosion of liberty in most established democracies. If he's still alive, Osama bin Laden must be laughing into his beard. For this is exactly what al-Qaida-type terrorists want: that democracies should overreact, reveal their "true" oppressive face, and therefore win more recruits to the suicide bombers' cause. We should not play his game. In the always difficult trade-off between liberty and security, we are erring too much on the side of security. Worse still: we are becoming less safe as a result. [The Guardian, 17 November 2005]
• The court argued that "by attacking the symbols of the Muslim religion, he also insulted Muslim believers". That sentence perfectly exposes the problem of principle: a blurring of the line between attacking the believers and criticising the belief. For we must remain free to criticise any belief, even in extreme terms. Religion is not like skin colour. There is no rational argument against the colour of someone's skin. There are important, rational arguments to be made against Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Scientology or any other belief system. Such prosecutions, even if their purpose is to defend the human beings, will have a chilling effect on discussion of the beliefs. [The Guardian, 12 May 2011]
• On the contrary, in free countries every faith must be allowed – and every faith must be allowed to be questioned, fundamentally, outspokenly, even intemperately and offensively, without fear of reprisal. Richard Dawkins, the Oxford scientist, must be free to say that God is a delusion and Alistair McGrath, the Oxford theologian, must be free to retort that Dawkins is deluded; a conservative journalist must be free to write that the Prophet Muhammad was a paedophile and a Muslim scholar must be free to brand that journalist an ignorant Islamophobe. That's the deal in a free country: freedom of religion and freedom of expression as two sides of the same coin. We must live and let live – a demand that is not as minimal as it sounds, when one thinks of the death threats against Salman Rushdie and the Danish cartoonists. The fence that secures this space is the law of the land. [The Guardian, 21 December 2006]

Thomas R. Asher

• Americans' anxiety has been magnified by our insularity. We are notoriously, often proudly, uninformed about the rest of the world. Our ignorance is geographic, cultural and historical; indeed, we regard the study of history, especially non-American history, as largely irrelevant. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]
• American's self-absorption and narcissism are reinforced by a steady media stream of propagandist euphemism: the Bush slogan 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' was used as a 24/7 'news' banner by at least two TV networks. We stand for 'liberty' yet tolerate the USA Patriot Act, a blunt expansion of arbitrary police powers; the 'Axis of Evil' obscures a world of nuance; we 'liberate' Iraq and will bring 'democracy' to the Middle East; a skimpy 'coalition of the willing' morphs into 'the allies', a false echo of World War II, accepted uncritically by most US media, including the authoritative New York Times. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]

Alan Ashley-Pitt

• 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.

Isaac Asimov

• Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
• Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
• Anger is the common substitute for logic among those who have no evidence for what they desperately want to believe. [The Tyrannosaurus Prescription]
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 popularised version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
• 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.
• 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. [on why he opposes religion]
• 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. [The Armies Of The Night]
• I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
• 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. [Canadian Atheists Newsletter, 1994]
• 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.

Lodewijk Asscher, Alderman, Amsterdam

• A primary school in Amsterdam-Noord has decided no longer to teach about living on a farm. Various pupils began to demolish the classroom when the pig came up for discussion. Apparently it has gone that far. These children, 9, 10 years old, have not been given even the most elementary rules at home about why they must go to school. [De Volkskrant, 27 April 2007]

Prof. Catherine Atherton

• As a subscriber of long standing I was outraged by the low quality of the letters from subscribers expressing outrage at the cover of issue 1121. Mind you, if you'd published that cover in parts of the US that voted heavily for Bush, – known to the rest of us over here as "Jesusland", "Dumbfuckistan", or, more simply, "The former slave states" – you'd have all been strung up double quick and no mistake. [replying to letters of protest at Private Eye's Christmas issue (#1121) which complained at the use of Breugel's Adoration Of The Magi with a caption of "Apparently, it's David Blunkett's.", Private Eye #1123, 07-20 January 2005]

Brooks Atkinson

• 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. [Once Around The Sun,1951]

Rowan Atkinson

• The freedom to criticise ideas – any ideas even if they are sincerely held beliefs – is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. And the law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed. It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness – and the other represents oppression. [commenting on the proposal to introduce a law that would outlaw incitement to racial hatred (covered by existing laws), but whose knock-on effect would be to ban all criticism of religion and its believers, 07 December 2004]

Marcus Aurelius

• The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong doer.
• Receive wealth or prosperity without arrogance; and be ready to let it go.
• No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.
• The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.
• The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
• Imagine every man who is grieved at anything or discontented to be like a pig which is sacrificed and kicks and screams.
• He who does wrong does wrong against himself. He who acts unjustly acts unjustly to himself, because he makes himself bad.
• There is but one thing of real value – to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men.
• All existing things soon change, and they will either be reduced to vapour, if indeed all substance is one, or they will be dispersed.
• What kind of people are those whom men wish to please, and for what objects, and by what kind of acts? How soon will time cover all things, and how many it has covered already.
• 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.
• Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.

Aviva

• You mean you like the thought that you've been created especially to worship your creator, and after you die you'll honour it throughout eternity? That's your purpose in existence – to be a cosmic cheering squad for a deity so vain and insecure that it needs constant reassurance that it's supreme? No thank you! [alt.atheism]

Francis Bacon

• Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
• It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty. [Of Great Places, Essays, 1625]
• Truth can never be reached by just listening to the voice of an authority.
• Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

Roger Bacon

• The whole clergy is given up to pride, luxury, and avarice. [Compendium Studii Philospohiae, 1272]

Raif Badawi, sentenced to 1000 lashes for posting the following (and more similar) on Facebook.

• The combination of the sword and the Quran are more dangerous than a nuclear bomb.
• Why we consider any rational explanation of Islam specifically, as a blasphemy, disbelief and heresy?
• The lack of an explanation what comes after death and the question of whether there is another life drives people out of sanity and encourages them to believe and hold on to myths and legends.
• It is well known to observers of Muslims in Saudi Arabia that they do not respect others' beliefs; furthermore they treat them as blasphemers. Every non Muslim is a blasphemer and even every Muslim of a faith different than the Hanbali is an outlaw, so how can we create a human culture and good relationships with 4.5 billion out of 6 billion people do not follow Islam.
• Actually, this venerable preacher has drawn my attention to a truth that had been hidden from me and my dear readers - namely, the existence of the so-called "Sharia astronomer". What a wonderful appellation! In my humble experience and in the course of my not inconsiderable research into the universe, its origins and the stars, I have never once come across this term. I advise NASA to abandon its telescopes and, instead, turn to our Sharia astronomers, whose keen vision and insight surpass the agency's obsolete telescopes. Indeed, I advise all other scholars the world over, of whatever discipline, to abandon their studies, laboratories, research centres, places of experimentation, universities, institutes etc. and head at once to the study groups of our magnificent preachers to learn from them all about modern medicine, engineering, chemistry, microbiology, geology, nuclear physics, the science of the atom, marine sciences, the science of explosives, pharmacology, anthropology etc. - alongside astronomy, of course. God bless them! They have shown themselves to be the final authority with the decisive word in everything, which all mankind must accept, submit to and obey without hesitation or discussion.

Joe Bageant

• As the elections proved for once and for all, Christian fanatics are plenty thick in the good ole U S of A these days and can no longer be written off as Dogpatch religionists. Historically, they have always been around and in about the same numbers too, just less visible. But currently they are hopped up about god giving them their own president and even their own political party. … It is one thing for them to have it in for their enemies, and quite another to have their own president, cabinet, Supreme Court, and newly established Department of Fatherland Surveillance backing them up. … And as usual, the fundies have blood in their eye, this time for liberal humanism, free thought, Trojan rubber products and the number 666. … Meanwhile, it's hard to tell who is controlling whom. Do the Christian Fundamentalists in this country now have significant control of the Republican Party? Or were they simply duped into backing the latest U.S. capitalist imperialist grab for empire and exploitation of ordinary working Americans. My guess is that the big Republican capitalists do not give a fuck, so long as they can grab the money and run when the lights are shot out, and that the Christians don't care as long as they get a shot at swapping the Constitution with the Bible. On one hand the Republicans want to own the world. On the other the godwacks want to dominate it, or destroy it if they can't: "Ya bow to my god buddy, or we blow this whole pop stand off the map… take everybody out… startin' with the Middle East." As near as I can tell, fundamentalists in every religion have this in common – destroying the world to bring on their brand of paradise. The majority of Americans disagree with Christian or Jewish fundamentalist ideas, but there is no way to call the fundies on it because their agenda is couched in religious language and symbols. And we all know for crap sake that America stands for religious freedom. Even fruitcake religious freedom. So we do not challenge the Christian or right wing Zionist freaks among us (It's open season on Muslims however.) We few who do challenge religion are declared satanic secular humanists, anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic. All of which works well for only one group – the rightwing political crazies who, in their quest for oil, capital, territory, or whatever, use god rhetoric to drive these zealots like a pack of blind slobbering dogs. This story is so old that it is sometimes hard to have much faith in the human race at all, isn't it? … When your mythology happily calls for the end of the world to bring on a paradise no one has ever seen, well, it makes for some piss poor politics. I think we can all agree on that. And as if that weren't enough of a headache for the rest of us, it calls for our conversion to their delusion, elsewise be destroyed as infidels. You are either with them or against them. Most of us would rather be away from them, but the world is too small to run from these days. At the same time, the faithful presume themselves to be aggrieved holy victims, every last damned one of them. And when you are a victim, whether it be of the removal of the Ten Commandments from your white cracker court house by onanist liberal heathens "frum up nawth," or the refusal of the Great Satan Kansas School board to add humus and sheep's eyes to the school lunch program, you are entitled to revenge in the form of taking down the entire world. What the hell? God is gonna do it anyway at the end time, which anybody who reads the Good Book knows is any day now. Just look around at the amount of thigh showing these days, or the lesbians jumping little school girls in the Oklahoma high school restrooms (according to republican Senate candidate Tom Coburn.) Sure signs of the end times. About the only thing all three gods agree on is that exposed belly buttons and young folks having too much fun leads to the end of the world. So blow it the fuck up now. Start a nuclear war, then watch Jesus return to earth and turn feckless liberal eyeballs to jelly. Just like in the Left Behind series. And even if these turn out not to be the end times (again) what the hell good is a religion if you don't get to kill somebody or at least have a certified infidel to make miserable? [Hung Over In The End Times, Dissidentvoice, 16 November 2004]

Vanessa Baird

• If you believe – as more than half of the US population does – that your particular religion is the one and only true faith sanctioned by the Almighty, you are carrying around with you one hell of a pious power charge. And while not all religions evangelize, the two most widely held to in the world today – Christianity and Islam – seem to have had great difficulty distinguishing between spreading the word and spilling the blood. Today we are witnessing a new evangelical crusade coming from the West which has been dubbed 'evangelical capitalism'. This is more than laissez-faire economics: it sees 'the hand of God' in economic liberty, which in reality turns out to be the unfettered freedom of huge corporations to dominate national and global markets. The gospel according to Halliburton. Pitch this against the surge of Saudi-financed Wahabist fundamentalism imposing its all-conquering version of the only true Islam, and it's hard not to get trampled underfoot. … For some nothing can redeem religion, except possibly its demise. … Many humanists and sceptics take a less hostile view and respect the existence of diverse philosophies and belief systems. But if such faiths do not themselves respect human life or basic rights, then respect for religion is likely to be withdrawn. [New Internationalist, August 2004]

Carolyn Baker

• Axiomatic in the worldview of the fundamentalist, born-again Christian is: "I have the truth, I'm right; you don't have the truth, you're wrong." As a result, critical thinking, research, or intellectual freedom of exploration are not only unnecessary, they are dangerous and potentially heretical. … Moreover, because of one's "superior" spiritual status, one has the so-called "divine authority" to subvert, by whatever means necessary, the very machinery of government in order to establish a theocracy in which one's worldview is predominant. Scoop Independent News, 12 May 2005]
• The mainstream media does not seem to comprehend the inherent danger of the religious right let alone report it accurately. All of us need to challenge the addictive tyranny of Christian fundamentalism at every turn – for the sake of our sanity and for the sake of our civil liberties. We don't allow street junkies into the halls of Congress, the Supreme Court, or the pulpits of America to admonish us how we should live and why we should demolish our Constitution. In fact, we confront the insanity and criminality of such individuals. Similarly, it's time to confront the domination drug for what it is – a grave and perverse spiritual and moral illness. [Online Journal, 19 May 2005]
• One of the most significant aspects of my abandonment of Christian fundamentalism was the awareness that born-again Christians worship the Bible and not God. They argue that the only way to know God is through the Bible. They are forced to believe this because if they concede that God might speak through an inner voice, through a tree, or through a particular life experience, their entire belief system is toast. When I realized that contrary to their much-touted Ten Commandments, Bible worship is nothing less than "having other gods before me," I finally realized the depth of the hypocrisy of their system. Part of my, and anyone's recovery from fundamentalism is a commitment to develop a relationship with a Higher Power – whatever that may be – and not with a book. [Online Journal, 19 May 2005]
• The convert to fundamentalist Christianity must be convinced that his / her thinking is irreparably in error. The underlying message is: "You don't believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God because your mind has been occupied by Satan. This has happened principally because you are a human being, but also because you have made the enormous mistake of trying to think for yourself. Of course you think there are contradictions in the Bible because Satan controls your mind. If you surrender your mind to Jesus (actually to me / us / the enlightened flock of believers), you will understand that there are no contradictions in the Bible and that your life should be guided only by the Bible and nothing else. What you cannot now understand, you must take on faith, and more will be revealed to you later. It may not be revealed on this earth, but by accepting Christ as your personal saviour and having faith, you will be guaranteed eternity in heaven where everything you never understood will be completely revealed to you." Curiously, as stated in the above definition of addiction, under ancient Roman law, addiction was grounds for slavery. I found this detail particularly significant because obviously, addicted people are "enslaved" people. [Online Journal, 19 May 2005]
• The religious right of twenty-first century America is anti-American, inherently violent, and a cruel, tyrannical, punitive, force of death and destruction. In its mindset, adult human lives do not matter because the human condition itself is inherently evil resulting in eternal and everlasting punishment in hell unless its members are redeemed in a prescribed manner by the fundamentalist God/man/saviour, Jesus Christ. Moreover, with an embarrassingly adolescent flamboyance, Dominionists shamelessly rape, pillage, and desecrate the earth because in the first place, their Bible has given them authority over all things human and in the second place, their "imminent" apocalyptic rapture, transporting them from the human "veil of tears" to live happily ever after in heaven, entitles them to do so. Meanwhile, we the unredeemed, the unbelievers, the poor, the feminists, the gay and lesbian, the disabled, the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted, and those who are conscientiously following divergent spiritual paths of their choice, are suffering in the wake of Christian fundamentalism's devastation of the economy, the earth, and the human race. But this is what we deserve for not becoming born-again devotees of their Jesus. And we deserve even worse-to burn in hell for all of eternity. Hence, we are expendable, inconsequential, and a force to be conquered, broken, imprisoned, or killed. [Scoop Independent News, 12 May 2005]

Robert A. Baker

• What happens when the same number of people pray for something as pray against it? How does God decide whose prayer to answer? Does the total number of people praying for or against something matter? How about the righteousness of the supplicants? Are positive prayers answered more frequently than negative ones? Does God take the positive ones and Satan the negative? Does the intensity of the praying have any effect on the outcome? Does the length of time one devotes to praying have any effect on the frequency with which one's prayers are answered? Do the words and phrases used in the prayer – either positive or negative – have any bearing on the success rate? Does the nature of the thing or things prayed for have any bearing on the prayer's success rate – either positive or negative prayers? Why or why not? [Skeptical Briefs, September 1997]

Tom Baker

• Philosophy asks questions but religion provides answers. The function of religion is to console us, so we swallowed all that guff. [TV Times, 07-11 July 2003] The first part is based on Anemones
• I mean if you can believe in the Christian religion you can believe in anything, you know it's so utterly preposterous. [UK TV show about Dr. Who]

Joan Bakewell

• The Pope is, of course, held to be infallible by the Catholic church. Islam's response to all this – "if you dare to say we're a violent religion, then we'll kill you!" – compounds not only the idiocy of rival dogmas but also the dangers. Islam's sharia law invests the law of the land with its own religious and often brutal priorities. Apostasy is punishable by death, as is homosexuality. Christian observance is put under increasing pressure. Dawkins is right to be not only angry but alarmed. Religions have the secular world running scared. This book is a clarion call to cower no longer. primed by anger, redeemed by humour, it will, I trust, offend many. [review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, The Guardian, 23 September 2006]
• But why are religions so tough on women? In the Victorian heyday of muscular Christianity, the rules of feminine dress would have met the highest standards of the Qur'an. It was in religiously devout America that Janet Jackson's breast caused so much fuss. Only as we have become more secular have we shed our clothes and our inhibitions. Who are these gods that they should require their own creatures to be ashamed of their bodies? Granted, there are limits of polite society. An attempt to have topless newsreaders was only ever a porno joke. But the notion that the supposed creator is offended by the natural beauty of his own creation is well nigh blasphemous. Shaima Rezyee was at the crossroads of a punitive tradition that fears and resents women and the new tradition of global music and universal entertainment that celebrates them. If religious extremists of all faiths now want to put the clock back, they will have to reconfigure the role of women as we have, within my lifetime, come to enjoy it. The control of dress might seem a petty matter, but it is loaded with significance. It is for individual women to decide for themselves where along the cultural spectrum – from the easy ways of western display to the comfort of regular concealment – they choose to live. [on the murder of TV and radio presenter Shaima Rezyee, The Guardian, 17 June 2005]

Mikhail Bakunin

• Religion is a collective insanity.
• Theology is the science of the divine lie.
• We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact.
• … if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. [God And The State]
• If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. [God And The State]
• Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker. [God And The State]
• No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.
• [An anarchist] takes his stand on his positive right to life and all its pleasures, both intellectual, moral and physical. He loves life, and intends to enjoy it to the full. [The Philosophy Of Freedom]
• Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
• All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. [God And The State]
• Until now all human history has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honour of some pitiless abstraction – God, country, power of State, national honour, historical rights, judicial rights, political liberty, public welfare. [God And The State]
• What I preach then is, to a certain extent, the revolt of life against science, or rather against the government of science, not to destroy science – that would be high treason to humanity – but to remand it to its place so that it can never leave it again. [God And The State]
• God admitted that Satan was right; he recognised that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he had induced them to commit; for, immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said (see Bible [Genesis 3:22]): "Behold, the man is become as one of the gods, to know good and evil; prevent him, therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life, lest he become immortal like Ourselves." [God And The State]
• What is permitted to the State is forbidden to the individual. Such is the maxim of all governments. Machiavelli said it, and history as well as the practice of all contemporary governments bear him out on that point. Crime is the necessary condition of the very existence of the State, and it therefore constitutes its exclusive monopoly, from which it follows that the individual who dares commit a crime is guilty in a two-fold sense: first, he is guilty against human conscience, and, above all, he is guilty against the State in arrogating to himself one of its most precious privileges. [Ethics : Morality Of The State]
• Every time a State wants to declare war upon another State, it starts off by launching a manifesto addressed not only to its own subjects but to the whole world. In this manifesto it declares that right and justice are on its side, and it endeavours to prove that it is actuated only by love of peace and humanity and that, imbued with generous and peaceful sentiments, it suffered for a long time in silence until the mounting iniquity of its enemy forced it to bare its sword. At the same time it vows that, disdainful of all material conquest and not seeking any increase in territory, it will put and end to this war as soon as justice is re-established. [Ethics : Morality Of The State]
• The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. And since all States, ever since they came to exist upon the earth, have been condemned to perpetual struggle – a struggle against their own populations, whom they oppress and ruin, a struggle against all foreign States, every one of which can be strong only if the others are weak – and since the States cannot hold their own in this struggle unless they constantly keep on augmenting their power against their own subjects as well as against the neighbourhood States – it follows that the supreme law of the State is the augmentation of its power to the detriment of internal liberty and external justice. [Ethics : Morality Of The State]
• For there is no terror, cruelty, sacrilege, perjury, imposture, infamous transaction, cynical theft, brazen robbery or foul treason which has not been committed and all are still being committed daily by representatives of the State, with no other excuse than this elastic, at times so convenient and terrible phrase Reason of State. A terrible phrase indeed! For it has corrupted and dishonoured more people in official circles and in the governing classes of society than Christianity itself. As soon as it is uttered everything becomes silent and drops out of sight: honesty, honour, justice, right, pity itself vanishes and with it logic and sound sense; black becomes white and white becomes black, the horrible becomes humane, and the most dastardly felonies and most atrocious crimes become meritorious acts. [Ethics : Morality Of The State]
• "The state then is the most flagrant negation, the most cynical and complete negation of humanity." It rends apart the universal solidarity of all men upon earth, and it unites some of them only in order to destroy, conquer, and enslave all the rest. It takes under its protection only its own citizens, and it recognizes human right, humanity, and civilization only within the confines of its own boundaries. And since it does not recognize any right outside of its own confines, it quite logically arrogated to itself the right to treat with the most ferocious inhumanity all the foreign populations whom it can pillage, exterminate, or subordinate to its will. If it displays generosity or humanity toward them, it does it in no case out of any sense of duty: and that is because it has no duty but to itself, and toward those of its members who formed it by an act of free agreement, who continue constituting it on the same free bases, or, as it happens in the long run, have become its subjects. [Ethics : Morality Of The State]
• The immense advantage of positive science over theology, metaphysics, politics, and judicial right consists in this – that, in place of the false and fatal abstractions set up by these doctrines, it posits true abstractions which express the general nature and logic of things, their general relations, and the general laws of their development. This separates it profoundly from all preceding doctrines, and will assure it for ever a great position in society: it will constitute in a certain sense society's collective consciousness. … Positive science, recognizing its absolute inability to conceive real individuals and interest itself in their lot, must definitely and absolutely renounce all claim to the government of societies; for if it should meddle therein, it would only sacrifice continually the living men whom it ignores to the abstractions which constitute the sole object of its legitimate preoccupations. [God And The State]
• Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty – Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the 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. [God And The State]
• Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity. God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognised as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church. … 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. [God And The State]

James Baldwin

• Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. [Letter From A Region In My Mind, New Yorker, 17 November 1962]

Balor

• Freedom of religion also should include freedom FROM religion. This is coming from a Protestant. I believe in my beliefs. I don't believe in forcing my beliefs on others, because, frankly, it isn't going to make them believe… Conversion by force ain't conversion… it's oppression. [alt.atheism, August 1999]

Judith Bandsma

• Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give a man a religion and he'll starve to death praying for a fish.

Benjamin R. Barber

• The victory of the dollar over every other conceivable interest, public or private, entails not just a crass commercialism in the place where quality information and diversified entertainment should be, but also a monopoly antipathetic to democratic society and free civilisation, if not also to capitalism itself. [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]
• The ancient capitalist economy in which products are manufactured and sold for profit to meet the demand of consumers who make their unmediated needs known through the market is gradually yielding to a postmodern capitalist economy in which needs are manufactured to meet the supply of producers who make their unmediated products marketable through promotion, spin, packaging, and advertising. [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]
• Choosers are made, not born. For free markets to offer real choice, consumers must be educated choosers and programming must proffer real variety rather than just shopping alternatives. Much of McWorld's strategy for creating global markets depends on a systematic rejection of any genuine consumer autonomy or any costly program variety – deftly coupled, however, with the appearance of infinite variety. [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]
• The elementary theory of markets argues that with the dismantling of state communication monopolies, monopoly will go while the public interest stays; in fact, the public interest has gone and monopoly has persisted, in new privatised and thus unaccountable forms. There is nothing wrong with profit. As the engine of capitalism, it is a good thing for shareholders, consumers, and society at large. but it has turned out to exercise a sovereignty no less coercive but far less public-spirited than the state's. It imposes a uniformity all its own, but one hidden behind the screen of free-market competition. [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]
• Go into a Protestant church in a Swiss village, a mosque in Damascus, the cathedral at Reims, a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, and though in every case you are visiting a place of worship with a common aura of piety, you know from one pious site to the next you are in a distinctive culture. Then sit in a multiplex movie box — or, much the same thing, visit a spectators sports arena or a mall or a modern hotel or a fast-food establishment in any city around the world — and try to figure out where you are. You are nowhere. You are everywhere. Inhabiting an abstraction. Lost in cyberspace. You are chasing pixels on a Nintendo: the world surrounding you vanishes. You are in front of or in or on MTV: universal images assault the eyes and global dissonances assault the ears in a heart-pounding tumult that tells you everything except which country you are in. Where are you? You are in McWorld. [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]
• Markets are simply not designed to do the things democratic polities do. They enjoin private rather than public modes of discourse, allowing us as consumers to speak via our currencies of consumption to producers of material goods, but ignoring us as citizens speaking to one another about such things as the social consequences of our private market choices (too much materialism? too little social justice? too many monopolies? too few jobs? what to do we want?). They advance individualistic rather than social goals, permitting us to say, one by one, "I want a pair of running shoes" or "I need a new VCR" or "buy yen and sell D-Marks!" but deterring us from saying, in a voice made common by interaction and deliberation, "our inner city community needs new athletic facilities" or "there is too much violence on TV and in the movies" or "we should rein in the World Bank and democratise the IMF!" Markets preclude the "we" thinking and "we" action of any kind at all, trusting in the power of aggregated individual choices (the invisible hand) to somehow secure the common good. Consumers speak the elementary rhetoric of "me," citizens invent the common language of "we." [Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995]

Dan Barker

• If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray? [Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist, 1992]
• You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time, But I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime. [Friendly Neighbourhood Atheist]
• 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. [Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist, 1992]
• 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
• 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! [Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist, 1992]
• Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender. [Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist, 1992]
• 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.
• 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. That implies that everyone else (such as the opposing football team, driver, student, parent) is de-selected, unfavoured by God, and that I am special, above it all. [Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist, 1992]

Ronald J. Barrier, National Spokesperson, American Atheists

• In the unreal world of supernaturalism, myth is more productive than fact. Myth-conception is an endless function of faith. Who it hurts or how much it costs is incidental. As long as religious purposes are served, ethics, inquiry and reason are abandoned. Does anyone care about truth? Are we becoming a country of mindless followers, content to wallow in a world full of concocted hysteria and senseless sensationalism? Is it that easy to believe fantastic claims rather than it is searching for truth? The truth is not always comfortable. Ascertaining truth takes work, lots of it. But let's not waste what little precious time we have. Let's not quibble over facts. Truth is anathema to religious exploitation and hysteria. And so is reason. [30 August 1998]

Simon Barrow, Ekklesia

• Creationists and IDers keep saying, 'teach the controversy'. But there is no such controversy among those with a proper grasp of science and theology. The call for 'debate' is a phony way of keeping discredited ideas alive and distorting the search for truth. [10 April 2006]
• Churches do not need the protection of blasphemy laws, which violate free expression in plural cultures. They can expect and hope to be safeguarded against violence and intimidation, and will also feel called to express solidarity with all people (whatever their faith or lack of it) who experience threat and oppression. But in following Christ they will not want or need to claim special forms of protection denied to others. This is not where their security can or should lie. [Redeeming Religion In The Public Square, 24 July 2006]
• According to polls some 45 percent of US citizens now deny evolutionary theory and advocate 'creationism', a farrago of nonsense based on an ideologically fallacious misreading of the Genesis narratives. Millions also believe that America's right to remake the world militarily in its own image is divine will. For this new 'moral majority' ethics begins in the bedroom, stalks the classroom and apparently ends as soon as someone is able to accumulate, kill and pollute on behalf of 'God's nation'. [13 January 2005]
• At the moment Christianity seems obsessed with sex and self-preservation. Institutionally, it has lost touch with the radical nature of the Gospel and has become, for many, an irrelevant cultural artefact. The result is massive decline. The idea of 'a Christian nation' is collapsing – but this notion, which some church leaders still try to cling on to, has nothing to do with the person of Jesus, whose message remains a huge challenge to both religious and political establishments. … Sadly, many would affirm Gandhi's observation that "we like your Christ, but not your Christians". The onus on churches now is to wake up and dream a new future after Christendom. [23 December 2006]
• People of faith should embrace this truth. But they must also recognise that it has a cost, and be prepared to pay it. In a plural society Christians are no longer sole owners of their symbols and words. They can be used against us, too. We can get angry if we like. But such energy might be better used offering practical alternatives to a culture of contempt, violence and 'porn-utopia'. Above all our willingness to embrace sometimes painful free speech should flow from understanding that following Jesus isn't about taking offence or demanding control. Rather, it means learning how to absorb hurts so that they can be turned into concrete expressions of love – not fear. [15 June 2006]
• What people are rejecting is religion as a coercive, arbitrary and esoteric force over and against full human flourishing and understanding. Rightly understood, the Gospel rejects this too. Christians should be seeking to renew their intellectual, spiritual and social justice traditions through openness and hospitality towards others, rather than by being defensive or expecting special favour. The idea that we are all going to agree if religion goes away is as naïve as the view that you cannot have morality without religion. Difference is here to stay. The challenge is how to establish ground rules for fairness and equal treatment in social life and public debate. All people, whether religious or non-religious, as conventionally defined, have a role to play in that. [24 November 2006]
• The response of some Christian groups to natural and human disasters like AIDS, the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina provides ample evidence of the disturbingly dark and irrational side of faith to which Dawkins refers. Indeed their talk of God using such occurrences to punish those they do not like serves to remind us just how vindictive, superficial, confused and facile our presumptions about God can be. The difficulty is compounded by widespread public ignorance of even the basic categories of religious language (that it is inescapably metaphorical, for example), by the prominence of forms of religion that justify themselves through narrow zeal, and by the struggle of more thoughtful theologians to communicate in a sound-bite media culture. [04 November 2006]
• Creationism and ID are in no way comparable to scientific theories of origins and have no place in the modern science classroom. They also distort mature Christian understandings of the universe as coming into being through the whole world process, not through reversals or denials of that process. The roots of creationism, whether in its 'hard' form, or in attenuated ID ideas, lie not in science but in misinterpretations of the Bible. Claims that such notions can be justified from a 'literal' reading of Genesis are nonsensensical. This book has not one, but two 'creation stories'. They differ widely in detail, are highly figurative, and were written to combat fatalistic Ancient Near East cosmogonies by stressing the underlying goodness of the world as a gift of God, not to comment on modern scientific matters. [25 September 2006]
• The comprehensive and integrated equalities agenda across Britain's public institutions is no threat to freedom of religion, diversity or tolerance. On the contrary, equal treatment is a cornerstone of fair access and open expression for all – including people of faith and those of non-religious outlook. It is sad that some faith organisations seem fearful of equal rights, especially when it applies to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons. But there is a clear distinction to be made between the moral stipulations of a community of commitment, and the obligation on public institutions to ensure far treatment. Religious bodies do not have to take public money, run schools and work in cooperation with community and public services. But if they do so, they need to occupy the same level playing field as others. [07 September 2007]
• What is entailed here is not a simple disagreement about taste (that in itself is no bad thing), but the attempt by some Christians – and those of allied convictions – to impose their view on such matters through public policy. This attempt comes in two forms. The old-fashioned kind is about making Britain "a Christian country" once again. In other words, seeking to restore religious hegemony in public life. The new-fashioned kind claims to be about "the rights of communities rather than individuals", but is actually about some members of a community imposing their claims on others within and without that community. This is symptomatic of widespread confusion about the distinction between maintaining religious liberty on the one hand and seeking religious control on the other. Some evangelical groups, for instance, wish to defend their right to offend other faiths or outlooks, but protest strongly when anyone does the same to their beliefs. [13 January 2005]
• Church reactions to the Equality Act, which most people see as a matter of consistency and fairness, hark back to the Christendom era when the action of government was based solely or largely on principles determined by the churches. However, we are no longer in that era. Britain is a plural society in which the great majority of the population are no longer regular Christian adherents. The churches can therefore no longer assume that their definitions of what is right will be accepted by everybody, especially when public money is going into service intended for the whole community. Church agencies are reported to have adopted children to remarried divorcees, to lone parents who are gay, and to cohabiting couples. These all contravene official church teaching. If you are an atheist, a Muslim or a Buddhist you can adopt, but not if you are a faithful Christian couple who happen to be homosexual. People are bound to argue that this is discrimination, not religious principle. [30 January 2007]
• Most of those who condemn Jerry Springer - The Opera have little evident appreciation for irony, satire or the comedic portrayal of darkness, danger and confusion. Either that or they think that their fellow adults need nannying away from such things on pain of corruption. Many of them probably still think that Monty Python's Life Of Brian is blasphemous, failing to understand that what is being laughed at in the film is not Jesus but mindless messianism, political or religious. I still cringe when I recall those TV debates when the Python movie first came out, with self-styled Christian campaigners completely missing the theological point that was only too apparent to the filmmakers they were attacking. Talk about irony. To put it bluntly, the religiously offended are bad at interpreting texts – which is why they also make unreliable, rigid and unimaginative expositors of the Bible. The Word made flesh, taking on the mess of humanity, is too much for them to bear. They prefer something safe, prescriptive and sanitised. [13 January 2005]
• Blasphemous libel is difficult to define and privileges only the established church. It is unfair in a plural society, harms free speech, discriminates against people of other or no religion, and has recently (and rightly) been described by the former Archbishop of Canterbury as "redundant". Ekklesia opposes a law of blasphemy not on pragmatic grounds alone, but centrally on theological ones. Christian faith (and indeed any faith) is corrupted when its allegiance or defence is legally required by the state. Instead of being a liberating tradition rooted in God's favour-free love, it becomes a matter of coercion and oppression. It is not without significance that Jesus himself was tried and executed by a coalition of political and religious forces who objected to his subversive message. Moreover, blasphemy laws in other parts of the world (Pakistan is a good example) have become a threat to life and limb not just for Christians, but for a variety of minority groups. [24 October 2005]
• Making profession of religious belief mandatory for participation in a supposedly open public body which receives statutory funding is surely unjust, objectionable and unacceptable in a plural society. It also violates of the freedom of belief which many Christians and others hold to be key to the integrity of faith as something that can never be imposed, because it is a matter of grace and gift. I hope people of faith will join with non-religious people in courteously but persistently pointing out to the Scout Association, and to the statutory bodies that give them public money, how wrong and unacceptable their stance is - a clear and regrettable abrogation of 'Scout's honour'. The exclusion of the non-religious is also classic example of the 'Christendom mentality' that faith should be made normative in public life, irrespective of the beliefs and convictions of others. Such an approach is deeply counter-productive. It brings genuine, free religious conviction into disrepute, associating it with compulsion and injustice, rather than love, truthfulness and peaceableness. [speaking about the Scouts, 02 February 2007]

Alan Barth

• Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions. [The Loyalty Of Free Men, 1951]

Bruce Bartlett

• Just in the past few months, I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do. This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts, he truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence. But you can't run the world on faith. [New York Times, 17 October 2004]

Jonathan Bartley, Ekklesia

• The simple fact that so many Parliamentarians have a religious faith that amounts to far more than a cultural veneer, and that this number is being added to, clearly calls into question the claims by some Bishops and Church leaders that Christianity is being marginalised in public life. [commenting on the appointment of Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor (who shifted around known paedophiles) to the House of Lords, 27 February 2009]

Basilides

• Those who confess Jesus as the crucified one are still enslaved to the God of the Jews. He who denies it has been freed and knows the plan of the unbegotten Father.

Pierre Bayle

• In matters of religion it is very easy to deceive a man, and very hard to undeceive him. [Dictionary, 1697]

Bert B. Beach, Religious Liberty Executive, Seventh-Day Adventist

• Freedom of religion also implies the right not to have or profess a religion. This is sometimes overlooked. It is a sad commentary on religion that religionists, probably quite well-meaning at times, have throughout history tried to force fellow human beings into a required religious mould. Apart from the very wrong theological assumptions involved, this is a flagrant violation of the dignity of the human person. Coerced religion is demeaning and of little value. [Bright Candle Of Courage, 1989]

Simone de Beauvoir

• I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.

August Bebel

• Christianity is the enemy of liberty and of civilisation. It has kept mankind in chains. [Reichstag speech, 31 March 1881]
• 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. [Woman And Socialism]

John Beevers

• I do not know that Christianity holds anything more of importance for the world. It is finished, played out. The only trouble lies in how to get rid of the body before it begins to smell too much. [World Without Faith, 1935]

Catherine Bennett

• With rival churches monitoring balance and airtime with a jealous watchfulness that used to be the monopoly of the Scottish Nationalists, an intervention by the cardinal is inevitably followed, pronto, by one from the chief rabbi depicting abortion as "mere convenience", and then, not to be outdone, by the increasingly familiar figure of Iqbal Sacranie telling us that we should be "alarmed". Nowadays the melancholy, long withdrawing roar is all but drowned out by the angry squawks of marginal churches demanding that this play be banned, or this book pulped, or that musical taken off, or this broadcaster mobbed, or that charity boycotted, such is the intolerable hurt and offence that would otherwise be sustained by sensitive practitioners of their particular faith. As pre-election debate degenerates into a Thought for the Day abortion special, it can be seen that the indulgence shown by this government to those who demand public recognition of their private spiritual beliefs when it should have been advocating disestablishment – and in particular its decision to present fundamentalists with their own special schools and a dedicated zealot's law so that no one can ever be rude about them – are already having an effect. So too, no doubt, is Tony Blair's promotion of his own faith-based, prayer-fuelled politics. [The Guardian, 17 March 2005]
• It is strange, isn't it, to think that this fine-looking couple [the Travoltas], recently seen experiencing spiritual ecstasy in East Grinstead, presumably believe in Scientologist founder Ron L Hubbard's story of Xenu, the galactic tyrant who froze his victims and stored them in the Earth's volcanos? It can't be more absurd to venerate a turtle than to follow Hubbard (who also prohibits psychiatry and making a noise in childbirth). Or a Kabbalist who thinks "all created things are directly affected by their Hebrew names, as well as by the component letters of their names". Or a Muslim who believes in a paradise full of willing virgins. Or a Christian who thinks God's got it in for Jerry Springer: the Opera. When he hasn't got it in for Pakistanis, New Orleans or the unfortunate US minister recently electrocuted in the act of baptism. If, as Madonna says, she has been ridiculed for professing her beliefs, her best expedient would be to stop professing them, at length, to a British public that is already wearied by haranguing, complaints and demands from rival believers whose only common ground is their indifference to the fact that most other people don't share their faith. On men, on sex, even on the correct raising of a mannerly nine-year-old, I would be delighted to hear anything Madonna has to say. Concerning religion, we can only hope she soon alights on the joys of trappism, and subsequently takes all the other faith communities in this country with her. [The Guardian, 03 November 2005]
• In parts of Bradford, there must be great rejoicing over Blunkett's updating of Voltaire's defend-to-the-death doctrine, which might be summarised as follows: "I don't know whether I agree with you or not, as I have devised a law denying you the right to speak." At last, 12 years after they first burned copies of the Satanic Verses, Rushdie's fiercest opponents finally have a chance to ban the book in Britain for ever. Maybe Rushdie, his publishers and distributors will end up with seven years in prison! To adherents of the less popular or established creeds and cults, Blunkett's bold repudiation of the Enlightenment offers no end of benefits. Once he has, in effect, extended the blasphemy laws to include all religions, Christians will no longer have the monopoly on taking offence. To be sure, British Christians have not often acted on the opportunity to persecute their detractors – there has been only one prosecution for blasphemy in more than 70 years – but that is no reason why more thin-skinned believers should not move to have their critics tried and imprisoned. … Blunkett's law may be of no immediate benefit to red-haired people, fat people, Welsh people, estate agents, journalists and politicians, to name just a few routinely ridiculed and slighted minorities, but they should also take heart. Soon they, too, may see their tormentors in court, accused of saying horrid things. Why should the objects of religious hatred be privileged over all the other victims of insults and harsh words? But the principal beneficiaries of Blunkett's law will be lawyers, so much so that the more enterprising among them may wish to establish new specialist chambers, just as Mrs Blair did with Matrix in time for the human rights act, especially dedicated to wrangling, at tremendously lucrative length, over the subtle distinctions between ridicule and inciting hatred, speaking your mind and inciting hatred, writing a novel and inciting hatred and following your religion and inciting hatred. Of course, Blunkett's law is not good news for everyone. Imagine how tricky, if not impossible, it is going to be for the clerics who must soon find forms of worship that do not demean or insult all those who belong to other, contradictory faiths. Think of the difficulties for the new, faith-based schools. And then, spare a thought for all those who still cherish the right to say what one thinks in a free society. Rowan Atkinson has already drawn attention to the threat Blunkett's law would constitute to comedians – which may have had some people racking their brains for examples of sketches or sitcoms making fun of Muslims, an Islamic equivalent to the Vicar of Dibley, say, or Father Ted. The lack of any recent instances of comical Mullah-baiting suggests that the charge of Islamophobia has not, for some time, been lightly sought. Blunkett's enforced extension of this self-censorship may not, in practice, even be much of a blessing to the Muslims it is designed to protect. They also enjoy freedom of expression. Until quite recently, more colourful Muslim enthusiasts such as Omar Bakri Mohammed, formerly of Saudi Arabia, joyfully exercised that freedom, calling for, among other things, a holy war in Britain. Won't they, too, miss it when it's gone? [The Guardian, 18 October 2001] No, they won't, because they don't want freedom of any kind for their people, and they are the ones who set the rules and decide what is 'permissible'. These are precisely the people who want it.

Bernard Berenson

• 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?

Isaiah Berlin

• As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any. I do not at all ask what it is, but I suspect that it has none and this is a source of great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some cosmic all-embracing libretto or God are, believe me, pathetically mistaken.

David K. Berninghausen

• In order to get the truth, conflicting arguments and expressions must be allowed. There can be no freedom without choice, no sound choice without knowledge. [Arrogance Of The Censor, 1982]

Dennis Bernstein, Radio KPFA

• Any US journalist, columnist, editor, college professor, student-activist, public official or clergy member who dares to speak critically of Israel or accurately report the brutalities of its illegal occupation will be vilified as an anti-Semite. His reward for was to receive emails: You mother-fucking-asshole-self-hating Jewish piece of shit. Hitler killed the wrong Jews. He should have killed your parents, so a piece of Jewish shit like you would not have been born. God willing, Arab terrorists will cut you to pieces Daniel Pearl-style, AMEN!!!, God willing a Palestinian will murder you, rape your wife and slash your kids' throats.", and I hope that you, Barbara Lubin and all other Jewish Marxist Communist traitors anti-American cop haters will die a violent and cruel death just like the victims of suicide bombers in Israel..

Ernest Bevin

• There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented. … The common man, I think, is the great protection against war. [Speech in the House of Commons, 23 November 1945]

John Bice

• In e-mail discussions, religionists often ask why, as an atheist, I bother to behave morally. It's as though, to them, the only thing stopping humanity from morphing into sadistically selfish malevolent monsters is belief in an invisible being who holds us responsible for fulfilling his/her/its moral expectations. Usually, I turn the question around and ask, "Would your behavior change if you no longer believed in the existence of god? Is belief in that "eye in the sky," the only thing that keeps you from raping, pillaging, plundering and killing your parents or children?" If so — which I don't believe for a moment — what a sad contrast it would be to the ethical behavior of nonbelievers who adhere to social and personal moral standards with no expectation of otherworldly reward. An entirely god-dependent morality is nothing but child-like obedience, a shallow ethical framework informed only through fear of punishment or anticipation of reward. [The State News, 17 April 2007]
• The details of the [Xenu] story are outrageously funny. … Amusement aside, weird beliefs are important to consider. Most significantly, these beliefs demonstrate how extraordinarily gullible and irrational people can be. If approached at the right time, with the right message, by a charismatic spokesperson, people are capable of all sorts of bizarre and utterly unsubstantiated beliefs. However, it's important to stress that this observation isn't limited to fringe cult beliefs. As bumper-sticker philosophy points out, "religions are just cults with more members." One reason the beliefs of Scientologists seem so bizarre, in addition to the fact they are freakishly nutty, is because they are exotic and unfamiliar. It's important to bear in mind, however, that Scientology doctrine is no more absurd than many other widely embraced religious concepts. The core beliefs of well-known world religions are equally devoid of supporting evidence, and are just as farfetched and fanciful. What's the difference, rationally speaking, between believing in body-infesting souls and ancient galactic confederations, or in the stories of virgin birth, Vishnu, the Garden of Eden, transubstantiation, Noah's ark, judgment day, or the baseless concept of the Trinity? The answer: not much. … Tom Cruise and Scientology offer amusing reminders that a critical and rational examination of one's core beliefs just might be a good idea. Any story or concept requiring religious faith to be accepted, due to a complete lack of substantiating evidence, ought to be approached with a healthy skepticism. [Statenews, 28 June 2005]

Joe Biden

• I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad, and I was telling the president of my many concerns [growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields]. 'Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?' Bush stood up and put his hand on [my] shoulder. 'My instincts,' he said. 'My instincts.' I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!' [March 2004, quoted in New York Times, 17 October 2004]

Ambrose Bierce

• Faith. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. [The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
• Heathen. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel. [The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
• Pray. To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. [The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]
• Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. [The Devil's Dictionary, 1911]

Scott Bidstrup

• There is a saying in Buddhism that where the student is ready, the teacher is provided. Such a concept certainly affirms the power of God to bring the word of God to the sincere seeker. Why then, does the fundamentalist almost always assume that God needs him to go out and spread God's word? If God is omnipotent, He doesn't need anyone to proselytise on His behalf. He's quite capable of steering the seeker in the direction of His word all by Himself.
• It is my opinion that the reason education in America has floundered to such a degree is that a man who understands his rights, who can think critically and analytically, and who can challenge what he is taught is a politically dangerous individual. Such a person understands oppression. He knows the meaning of tyranny. He can figure out for himself when he is being cheated, robbed, and systematically denied his rights and the material wealth he himself has created.

Steve Biko

• The most powerful weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Richard Birnie

• How large a share of vanity must spur the piety of the missionary. There is something melodramatic in landing on some Fiji island, in baptising, debauching and ultimately murdering the unsuspecting savage; then in taking his land in the name of the Most High. [Essays: Social, Moral And Political, 1879]

William Blake

• I went to the Garden of Love, / And saw what I never had seen; / A Chapel was built in the midst, / Where I used to play on the green. // And the gates of this Chapel were shut, / And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door; / So I turned to the Garden of Love / That so many sweet flowers bore. // And I saw it was filled with graves, / And tombstones where flowers should be; / And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, / And binding with briars my joys and desires. [The Garden Of Love, Songs Of Experience, 1794]

William Blum

• The "trickle down" theory is based on the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals. [Irreverent Observations]
• If business and industry leaders were truly responsible, there would be no FDA, OSHA, NLRB, FTC, FDIC, FCC, SEC, FAA, EPA, or many other agencies that protect us from those who cannot otherwise be held accountable. [Irreverent Observations]
• Romanians cut the Communist Party symbol out of the national flag during the 1989 revolution. At the May Day parade in Moscow, 1990, one marcher carried a Soviet flag with the hammer and sickle cut out as a symbol of his repudiation of Soviet rule, and was not arrested. American leaders call such people freedom fighters. Yet, if these people came to this country and wanted to protest by burning an American flag, if the same leaders had their way, they would be punished. [Irreverent Observations]
• But in any event, defining the issue as a choice between the A-bomb and a land invasion is an irrelevant and wholly false dichotomy. By 1945, Japan's entire military and industrial machine was grinding to a halt as the resources needed to wage war were all but eradicated. The navy and air force had been destroyed ship by ship, plane by plane, with no possibility of replacement. When, in the spring of 1945, the island nation's lifeline to oil was severed, the war was over except for the fighting. By June, Gen. Curtis LeMay, in charge of the air attacks, was complaining that after months of terrible firebombing, there was nothing left of Japanese cities for his bombers but "garbage can targets". By July, U.S. planes could fly over Japan without resistance and bomb as much and as long as they pleased. Japan could no longer defend itself. After the war, the world learned what U.S. leaders had known by early 1945: Japan was militarily defeated long before Hiroshima. It had been trying for months, if not for years, to surrender; and the U.S. had consistently rebuffed these overtures. A May 5 cable, intercepted and decoded by the U.S., dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue for peace. Sent to Berlin by the German ambassador in Tokyo, after he talked to a ranking Japanese naval officer, it read: Since the situation is clearly recognised to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavour an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard. As far as is known, Washington did nothing to pursue this opening. [Needless Slaughter, Useful Terror, Spring 1995]

Napoleon Bonaparte

• All religions have been made by men. [letter to Gaspard Gourgaud, 28 January 1817]
• Hostile newspapers are more to be dreaded than a hundred thousand bayonets.
• If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.
• Everything is more or less organised matter. To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same.

Pamela Bone

• The holy books on which Jews, Christians and Muslims rely were written at a time when ideas about human rights and the scope of scientific knowledge were very different from today. We are expected to respect religious texts that contain invitations to genocide, rape and slavery. We are supposed to respect all religions when the central tenet of every religion is that its holy book is the right one and all others are in error or at best incomplete. Unbelievers are those who declare, "God is the Messiah, the son of Mary," says the Koran. "Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people." We are supposed to respect beliefs that if they were held by one person, rather than millions of people, the person holding them would be judged insane. Catholics are enjoined to believe that during the mass a piece of wafer is transformed not into a symbol of the body of Christ, but into the actual body of Christ. … As the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved, it is no more moral to believe than not to believe. The best hope for a less religious and thus safer world is for religion – all religion – to be open to rational and stringent examination and criticism, and yes, to ridicule. [The Australian, 15 August 2006]

G. Richard Bozarth

• It becomes clear now that the whole justification of Jesus' life and death is predicated on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without the original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam's fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None. [The Meaning Of Evolution, American Atheist, 20 September 1979]
• Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus' earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus was not the redeemer that died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing. [The Meaning Of Evolution, American Atheist, 20 September 1979]

Charles Bradlaugh

• The word heretic ought to be a term of honour…
• If special honour is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of humankind. [25 September 1881]
• 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." [National Review, 25 November 1883]

Katy Brand

• I was a Christian when I started my [theology] degree and wasn't when I finished, so that tells you something. It clarified some things. It turns out the Bible wasn't written by God with a giant silver pencil. There might have been a certain amount of human error in there. It made me re-evaluate things. [Metro, 29 August 2008] A perfect example of why the more repressive religions are opposed to any form of discourse or examination, or even education, because that involves thinking rather than the blind obedience called believing.

Poppy Z. Brite

• The Christian Right always needs scapegoats, and the rise of AIDS since the mid-eighties has made a convenient scapegoat of anyone whose sexuality encompasses more than breeding in the missionary position. [Ex Cathedra, 05 November 1995]

David Brooks

• To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy. [The Necessity Of Atheism]

Andrew Brown

• I do not see how anyone could come fresh to the Bible and see any regard for human life at all in the early parts. From the extermination of every living thing outside the ark to the ethnic cleansing of the promised land, the story is one of utter disregard to human life except when it suits God's purposes.

James A. C. Brown

• Education teaches people how to think, while propaganda teaches people what to think. [Techniques Of Persuasion, 1963]
• Propaganda by censorship takes two forms: the selective control of information to favour a particular viewpoint, and the deliberate doctoring of information in order to create an impression different from that originally intended. [Techniques Of Persuasion, 1963]

Roy W. Brown

• Not only does the concept of defamation of religion have no validity in international law, the resolution is unnecessary because the problem it purports to address, increasing discrimination and incitement to hatred experienced by Muslims, is already dealt with under international law. Article 20 of the ICCPR specifies the steps that states must take to outlaw incitement to hatred or violence. So it is clear that the OIC have another reason for pushing these resolutions; namely, extending restrictions on freedom of expression that already exist in the Islamic states – blasphemy laws – into international law, and thereby silencing critics of Islam in the rest of the world. [The slow death of freedom of expression, Index On Censorship, 26 March 2009]

Scott Brown

• There are many extraordinary tales from antiquity, including women with snakes for hair, creatures whose gaze turns you to stone, creatures with equine bodies and human torsos, many accounts of people rising from the dead, lots of tales of magic, and numerous accounts of physical encounters with fantastic beings. Ancient people were a superstitious, scientifically primitive lot, and believed in many things that today we know are silly. I find it bizarre that so many people see nothing suspicious about the extraordinary or supernatural claims of the bible, yet don't hesitate to express disbelief in equally well documented claims of minotaurs, basilisks, and wizards.

Yasmin Alibhai Brown

• To speak at all these days, to attempt to tell any kind of truth, means offending someone. The words which carry no offence of any kind may carry as little meaning. [The Enemy Within, Free Expression Is No Offence, 2005]
• I've heard powerful Muslims say this, they want the same power that the Jewish board of deputies has. "Look at how they've used anti-Semitism, we can use Islamophobia". I've heard them say this. But I think there's another much more dangerous thing than that. By and large the lowest achieving community in this country – whether we're talking about schools Universities, occupations professions and so on – are by and large, the majority are Muslims. When you talk to people about why this is happening, the one reason they give you, the only reason, is Islamophobia. Uh uh. It is not Islamophobia that makes parents take 14 year old bright girls out of school to marry illiterate men, and the girl has again to bring up the next generation who will again be denied not just education but the value of education. What Islamophobia does is it just becomes a convenient label – a figleaf, a reason – that is so comfortable for Muslims whenever they have to look at why they aren't in the places that they have to be. [Are Muslims Hated?, 30 Minutes, Channel 4, 08 January 2005]

Lenny Bruce

• If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

Giordano Bruno

• Ma pur' si muove! (And nevertheless it does move!) [last words whilst he was being burned alive, 16 February 1600] Sometimes incorrectly attributed to Galileo, though even here it's apocryphal.
• Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it. [quoted by Gaspar Schopp of Breslau in a letter to Conrad Rittershausen, written on the day of Bruno's burning at the stake]
• 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. [1548]
• There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things.

E. A. Wallis Budge

• … it is clear that the early Christians bestowed some of her [Isis'] attributes upon the Virgin Mary. There is little doubt that in her character of the loving and protecting mother she appealed strongly to the imagination of all the Eastern peoples among whom her cult came, and that the pictures and sculptures wherein she is represented in the act of suckling her child Horus formed the foundation for the Christian figures and paintings of the Madonna and Child. Several of the incidents of the wanderings of the Virgin with the child in Egypt as recorded in the Apocryphal Gospels reflect scenes in the life of Isis as described in the texts found on the Metternich Stele, and many of the attributes of Isis, the God-mother, the mother of Horus, and of Neith, the goddess of Saïs, are identical with those of Mary the Mother of Christ. [The Gods Of The Egyptians, vol 2, 1904]

Pearl S. Buck

• Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation. [Advice To Unborn Novelists]
• 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.

Buckle

• As long as men refer the movements of the comets to the immediate finger of God, and as long as they believe that an eclipse is one of the modes by which the deity expresses his anger, they will never be guilty of the blasphemous presumption of attempting to predict such supernatural appearances. Before they could dare to investigate the causes of these mysterious phenomena, it is necessary that they should believe, or at all events that they should suspect, that the phenomena themselves were capable of being explained by the human mind. [History Of Civilization, vol I]

Buddha

• Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, accept it and live up to it.

Luis Buñuel

• God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

Luther Burbank

• This should be enough for one who lives for truth and service to his fellow passengers on the way. No avenging Jewish God, no satanic devil, no fiery hell is of any interest to me.
• The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed! I don't want to have anything to do with such a God.

Rob Burcham

• I sometimes see religion as the mother of all chain letters. It promises great things but if you break the chain, horrible misfortune will fall upon you. Most people won't risk breaking the chain.

Marilyn Burge

• Fundies lie. Fossils don't.
• Atheism is no more a religion than abstinence is a form of drinking.

Anthony Burgess

• I gain the impression that few of the protesting Muslims in Britain know directly what they are protesting against. Their Imams have told them that Mr. Rushdie has published a blasphemous book and must be punished. They respond with sheeplike docility and wolflike aggression. They forget what the Nazis did to books – or perhaps they do not: after all, some of their co-religionists approved of the Holocaust – and they shame a free country by denying free expression through the vindictive agency of bonfires. [The Independent, 16 January 1989]
• If members of Britain's community of some two million Muslims do not want to read Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, all they have to do is abstain from buying it or taking it out of the local library. They should not seek to impose their feelings about its contents – or, more probably, what they have been told about them – on the rather larger non-Islamic part of the population. Their campaign to have the book banned, on the grounds that it blasphemes Islam, led to a demonstration over the weekend in Bradford in which, following the example of the Inquisition and Hitler's National Socialists, a large crowd of Muslims burnt some copies of the book. [The Independent, 16 January 1989]

Edmund Burke

• Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
• When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fail, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. [Thoughts On The Cause Of The Present Discontents, 1770]

W. Burkert

• Only dead dogma is preserved without change, doctrine taken seriously is always being revised in the continuous process of reinterpretation. [Lore And Science In Ancient Pythagoreanism, 1972]

William S. Burroughs

• Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
  Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
  Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
  Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
  Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
  Thanks for the American dream,
  To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
  Thanks for the KKK.
  For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches.
  For decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
  Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.
  Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
  Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
  Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind the own business.
  Thanks for a nation of finks.
  Yes, thanks for all the memories - all right let's see your arms!
  You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
  Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
  [A Thanksgiving Prayer]

Richard Burton

• What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, "We shall wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth?" Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity. [speaking of Winston Churchill before portraying him]
• The more I read about man and his maniacal ruthlessness and his murderous envious scatological soul, the more I realise that he will never change. Our stupidity is immortal, nothing will change it. The same mistakes, the same prejudices, the same injustice, the same lusts wheel endlessly around the parade ground of the centuries. Immutable and ineluctable. I wish I could believe in a god of some kind but I simply cannot. [personal diary, 1969]

Samuel Butler

• Belief, like any other moving body, follows the path of least resistance.
• People are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised.
• What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, "I bet that my Redeemer liveth."
• Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them seriously.

General Smedley Butler

• I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service in the country's most agile military force, the Marines. I served in all ranks from second lieutenant to major general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. Thus I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers and Co. in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honours, medals, and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel that I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents. [New York Times, 21 August 1931]

Lord Byron

• If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom. [Byron's Letters And Journals, vol. 3, 27 November 1813]
• We have fools in all sects, and impostors in most; why should I believe mysteries no one can understand, because written by men who chose to mistake madness for inspiration and style themselves Evangelicals?
• A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer? [Detached Thoughts 96]

Julius Caesar

• Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervour, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar. Actually, not by him at all, and certainly not by the equally-often cited William Shakespeare (who didn't write in this style). It seems to have appeared around 2001, and does in any case use anachronisms.

Agnès Callamard

• Article 19's analysis of this [Danish cartoon] case is that, in the absence of a specific intention to promote hatred, criminal or other censorship measures against the newspaper would not be legitimate. We recognise that the cartoons were offensive to many Muslims, but offence and blasphemy should not be threshold standards for curtailing freedom of expression. Blasphemy laws protect beliefs as opposed to people. Restrictions on freedom of expression which privilege certain ideas cannot be justified. At the same time, international human rights law does protect the right of everyone to hold beliefs, and to be free of violence or discrimination. [The Guardian, 02 February 2006]

Bruce Calvert

• Believing is easier than thinking. Hence so many more believers than thinkers.

Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian Archbishop

• 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.

Joseph Campbell

• My favourite definition of religion is 'a misrepresentation of mythology'. And the misrepresentation consists precisely in attributing historical references to symbols which properly are spiritual in their reference. [An Open Life, 1988]
• The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian saviour 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. [The Mythic Image, 1981]

Candyapple

• Yes, oddly, the perfect and final word of Allah changed over time, to the extent that Quranic scholars had to invent the concept of abrogation, whereby the later, bloodthirsty, horrible verses Muhammad made up when he was in Medina and had power override the earlier, peaceful ones he made up in Mecca when he was trying to attract followers and had very few. Yes, the perfect final word of God which is applicable at all times and in all places is full of contradictions, depending on where Muhammad was at the time. Funny, that. [The Guardian, Sudan Death Row Woman Meriam Ibrahim Detained Again, 24 June 204]

Keith Cantrell

• When I was chastised by a scientist for making a stupid, trivial mistake in my evaluation of life, I was happy because it meant someone was looking out for the truth. This is paramount. Nothing else really matters in the world of science, or the universe for that matter. If it's not true, it's not real. So, where is this leading? Well, I've noticed that you never find this kind of self-correction going on in religion. Especially Christianity. I've never heard a fundamentalist or creationist ever say, "OOPS, sorry, I made a mistake! The world wasn't made in 6 days after all!" Even if you point out the lack of evidence for their claims they will still stubbornly insist that God's Word is absolutely true and infallible. This baffles me because no one can be that certain of their conclusions. Even scientists who spend their lives poring over the tiny details of a thesis will admit that they aren't certain about some things. Not so, the pious Christian. They claim that God said it and that settles it! Well, let God speak for himself. If he did create the world in six days only 6000 years ago, he can tell me himself. I don't need to be berated by Bible thumpers warning me about hellfire and damnation if I don't believe! [Useless-Knowledge.com, 07 February 2005]

George Carlin

• I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don't have as many people who believe it. [Brain Droppings]
• 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% rate.

Robert Todd Carroll

• There is nothing dull about a life without fairies, Easter bunnies, devils, ghosts, magic crystals, etc. Life is only boring to boring people. [ The Sceptic's Dictionary]

Linda Carter

• No one has the right to dictate, particularly in this country, to force your own personal views upon the populace — religious views. I think that is suppressive, oppressive, and anti-American. We are the loyal opposition. That's the whole point of this country: freedom of speech, personal rights, personal freedom. … Separation of church and state is the one thing the creators of the Constitution did agree on — that it wasn't to be a religious government. People should feel free to speak their minds about religion but not dictate it or put it into law. What I don't understand, honestly, is how anyone can even begin to say they know the mind of God. Who do they think they are? I think that's ridiculous. I know what God is in my life. … People need to speak up. Doesn't mean that I'm godless. Doesn't mean that I am a murderer. What I hate is this demonization of everybody but one position. You're un-American because you're against the war. It's such bullshit. Fear. It's really such a finite way of thinking about God to think that your measley little mind can know the mind of God. It's a very little God that way. I think that God's bigger. I don't presume to know his mind. Or her mind. [Philadelphia Magazine, 11 September 2008]

Bartolomé de las Casas

• The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians. [A Short Account Of The Destruction Of The Indies, 1552]
• Once he [the native Cuban lord Hatuey] was tied to the stake, a Franciscan friar who was present, a saintly man, told him as much as he could in the short time permitted by his executioners about the Lord and about our Christian faith, all of which was new to him. The friar told him that, if he would only believe what he was now hearing, he would go to Heaven there to enjoy glory and eternal rest, but that, if he would not, he would be consigned to Hell, where he would endure everlasting pain and torment. The lord Hatuey thought for a short while and then asked the friar whether Christians went to Heaven. When the reply came that good ones do, he retorted, without need for further reflection, that, if that was the case, then he chose to go to Hell to ensure that he would never again have to clap eyes on those cruel brutes. This is just one example of the reputation and honour that our Lord and our Christian faith have earned as a result of the actions of those 'Christians' who have sailed to the Americas. On one occasion, when the locals had come some ten leagues out from a large settlement in order to receive us and regale us with victuals and other gifts, and had given us loaves and fishes and any other foodstuffs they could provide, the Christians were suddenly inspired by the Devil and, without the slightest provocation, butchered, before my eyes, some three thousand souls – men, women and children – as they sat there in front of us. I saw that day atrocities more terrible than any living man has ever seen nor ever thought to see. [A Short Account Of The Destruction Of The Indies, 1552]

Fidel Castro

• The world economy is today a huge casino. Recent analyses indicate that for every dollar that goes into trade, over one hundred end up in speculative operations completely disconnected from the real economy. As a result of this economic order, over 75 percent of the world population lives in underdevelopment, and extreme poverty has already reached 1.2 billion people in the Third World. So, far from narrowing the gap is widening. The revenue of the richest nations that in 1960 was 37 times larger than that of the poorest is now 74 times larger. The situation has reached such extremes that the assets of the three wealthiest persons in the world amount to the GDP of the 48 poorest countries combined. The number of people actually starving was 826 million in the year 2001. There are at the moment 854 million illiterate adults while 325 million children do not attend school. There are 2 billion people who have no access to low cost medications and 2.4 billion lack the basic sanitation conditions. No less than 11 million children under the age of 5 perish every year from preventable causes while half a million go blind for lack of vitamin A. The life span of the population in the developed world is 30 years higher than that of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa. A true genocide! … As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger. [International Conference On Financing For Development, Monterrey, 18-22 March 2002]

Celsus

• Many other persons would appear such as Jesus was, to those who were willing to be deceived.
• Is it not a wretched inference from the same acts, to conclude that the one is a God, and the others sorcerers?
• In all of these beliefs you have been deceived; yet you persist doggedly to seek justification for the absurdities you have made doctrines. [On The True Doctrine]
• The Christians excite their initiates to the point of frenzy with flute music like that heard among the priests of the goddess Cybele.
• One ought first to follow reason as a guide before accepting any belief, since anyone who believes without testing a doctrine is certain to be deceived. [On The True Doctrine]
• It is clear to me that the writings of the Christians are a lie, and that your fables are not well-enough constructed to conceal this monstrous fiction:
• They are forever repeating: 'Do not examine. Only believe, and thy faith will make thee blessed. Wisdom is a bad thing in life, foolishness is to be preferred.'
• There is nothing new or impressive about their ethical teaching; indeed, when one compares it to other philosophies, their simple-mindedness becomes apparent. [On The True Doctrine]
• Let's assume for a minute that he foretold his resurrection. Are you ignorant of the multitudes who have invented similar tales to lead simple minded hearers astray? [On The True Doctrine]
• What an absurdity! Clearly the Christians have used the myths of Danae and the Melanippe, or of the Auge and the Antiope in fabricating the story of Jesus' virgin birth. [On The True Doctrine]
• Although a thing may seem to you to be evil, it is by no means certain that it is so; for you do not know what is of advantage to yourself, or to another, or to the whole world.
• If Jesus desired to show that his power was really divine, he ought to have appeared to those who had ill-treated him, and to him who had condemned him, and to all men universally.
• The Christians babble about God day and night in their impious and sullied way; they arouse the awe of the illiterate with their false descriptions of the punishments awaiting those who have sinned.
• These things are stated much better among the Greeks (than in the Scriptures), and in a manner which is free from all exaggerations and promises on the part of God, or the Son of God.
• If only it were possible that all the inhabitants of Asia, Europe, and Libya, Greeks and Barbarians, all to the uttermost ends of the earth, were to come under one law! but any one who thinks this possible, knows nothing.
• The resurrection of the dead, and the divine judgment, and of the rewards to be bestowed upon the just, and of the fire which is to devour the wicked, are stale doctrines and there is nothing new in your teaching upon these points.
• Christians weave together erroneous opinions drawn from ancient sources, and trumpet them aloud, and sound them before men, as the priests of Cybele clash their cymbals in the ears of those who are being initiated in their mysteries.
• God does not need to amend His work afresh. But it is not as a man who has imperfectly designed some piece of workmanship, and executed it unskilfully, that God administers correction to the world, in purifying it by a flood or by a conflagration.
• The great God, after giving his spirit to the creator, demands it back again. What god gives anything with the intention of demanding it back? For it is the mark of a needy person to demand back (what he has given), whereas God stands in need of nothing.
• After all, the old myths of the Greeks that attribute a divine birth to Perseus, Amphion, Aeacus and Minos are equally good evidence of their wondrous works on behalf of mankind – and are certainly no less lacking in plausibility than the stories of your followers. [On The True Doctrine]
• If these idols are nothing, what harm will there be in taking part in the feast? On the other hand, if they are demons, it is certain that they too are God's creatures, and that we must believe in them, sacrifice to them according to the laws, and pray to them that they may be propitious.
• Moreover, their cosmogony is extremely silly. The narrative of the creation of man is exceedingly silly. Perhaps Moses wrote these words with no serious object in view, but in the spirit of the writers of the old Comedy, who have sportively related that 'Proetus slew Bellerophon,' and that 'Pegasus came from Arcadia.'
• Taking its roots 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 are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant.
• So too their fantastic story – which they take from the Jews – concerning the flood and the building of an enormous ark, and the business about the message being brought back to the survivors of the flood by a dove (or was it an old crow?). This is nothing more than a debased and nonsensical version of the myth of Deucalion, a fact I am sure they would not want to come light. [On The True Doctrine]
• Now it will be wondered how men so desperate in their beliefs can persuade others to join their ranks. The Christians use sundry methods of persuasion, and invent a number of terrifying incentives. Above all, they have concocted an absolutely offensive doctrine of everlasting punishment and rewards, exceeding anything the philosophers (who have never denied the punishment of the unrighteous or the reward of the blessed) could have imagined.
• God is the God of all alike; He is good, He stands in need of nothing, and He is without jealousy. What, then, is there to hinder those who are most devoted to His service from taking part in public feasts. If these idols are nothing, what harm will there be in taking part in the feast? On the other hand, if they are demons, it is certain that they too are God's creatures, and that we must believe in them, sacrifice to them according to the laws, and pray to them that they may be propitious.
• Certain Christians, having misunderstood the words of Plato, loudly boast of a 'super-celestial' God thus ascending beyond the heaven of the Jews. These things are obscurely hinted at in the accounts of the Persians, and especially in the mysteries of Mithras, which are celebrated amongst them. He who would investigate the Christian mysteries, along with the aforesaid Persian, will, on comparing the two together, and on unveiling the rites of the Christians, see in this way the difference between them.
• Plato is not guilty of boasting and falsehood, giving out that he has made some new discovery, or that he has come down from heaven to announce it, but acknowledges whence these statements are derived. Accordingly, we do not say to each of our hearers, 'Believe, first of all, that He whom I introduce to thee is the Son of God although he was shamefully bound, and disgracefully punished, and very recently was most contumeliously treated before the eyes of all men. Believe it even the more (on that account)'.
• The Christians say that God has hands, a mouth, and a voice; they are always proclaiming that 'God said this' or 'God spoke'. 'The heavens declare the work of his hands,' they say. I can only comment that such a God is no God at all, for God has neither hands, mouth nor voice, nor any characteristics of which we know. Their absurd doctrines even contains references to God walking about in the garden he created for man; and they speak of him being angry, jealous, moved to repentance, sorry, sleepy – in short as being in every respect more a man than a God.
• The more modest among the Jews and Christians endeavour somehow to give these stories an allegorical signification, although some of them do not admit of this, but on the contrary admit that they are exceedingly silly inventions. The allegorical explanations, however, which have been devised are much more shameful and absurd than the fables themselves, inasmuch as they endeavour to unite with marvellous and altogether insensate folly things which cannot at all be made to harmonize.
• It is equally silly of these Christians to suppose that when their God applies the fire (like a common cook!) all the rest of mankind will be thoroughly scorched, and that they alone will escape unscorched – not just those alive at the time, mind you, but (they say) those long since dead will rise up from the earth possessing the same bodies as they did before. I ask you: Is this not the hope of worms? For what sort of human soul is it that has any use for a rotted corpse of a body? [On The True Doctrine]
• Not only do they misunderstand the words of the philosophers; they even stoop to assigning words of the philosophers to their Jesus. For example, we are told that Jesus judged the rich with the saying 'It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god.' Yet we know that Plato expressed this very idea in a purer form when he said, 'It is impossible for an exceptionally good man to be exceptionally rich.' Is one utterance more inspired than the other? [On The True Doctrine]
• The old mythological fables which attributed a divine origin to Perseus, and Amphion, and Aeacus, and Minos were not believed by us. Nevertheless, that they might not appear unworthy of credit, they represented the deeds of these personages as great and wonderful, and truly beyond the power of man; but what hast thou done that is noble or wonderful either in deed or in word? Thou hast made no manifestation to us, although they challenged you in the temple to exhibit some unmistakable sign that you were the Son of God.
• Are these distinctive happenings unique to the Christians, and if so, how are they unique? Or are ours to be accounted myths and theirs believed? What reasons do the Christians give for the distinctiveness of their beliefs? In truth there is nothing at all unusual about what the Christians believe, except that they believe it to the exclusion of more comprehensive truths about God. They believe in eternal punishment; well, so do the priests and initiates of the various religions. The Christian threaten others with this punishment, just as they are themselves threatened. [On The True Doctrine]
• Again, if God, like Jupiter in the comedy, should, on awaking from a lengthened slumber, desire to rescue the human race from evil, why did He send this Spirit of which you speak into one corner (of the earth)? He ought to have breathed it alike into many bodies, and have sent them out into all the world. Now the comic poet, to cause laughter in the theatre, wrote that Jupiter, after awakening, despatched Mercury to the Athenians and Lacedaemonians; but do not you think that you have made the Son of God more ridiculous in sending Him to the Jews?
• And again, let us resume the subject from the beginning, with a larger array of proofs. And I make no new statement, but say what has been long settled. God is good, and beautiful, and blessed, and that in the best and most beautiful degree. But if he come down among men, he must undergo a change, and a change from good to evil, from virtue to vice, from happiness to misery, and from best to worst. Who, then, would make choice of such a change? It is the nature of a mortal, indeed, to undergo change and remoulding, but of an immortal to remain the same and unaltered. God, then, could not admit of such a change.
• God either really changes himself, as these assert, into a mortal body, and the impossibility of that has been already declared; Or else he does not undergo a change, but only causes the beholders to imagine so, and thus deceives them, and is guilty of falsehood. Now deceit and falsehood are nothing but evils, and would only be employed as a medicine, either in the case of sick and lunatic friends, with a view to their cure, or in that of enemies when one is taking measures to escape danger. But no sick man or lunatic is a friend of God, nor does God fear any one to such a degree as to shun danger by leading him into error.
• You surely do not say that if the Romans were, in compliance with your wish, to neglect their customary duties to gods and men, and were to worship the Most High, or whatever you please to call him, that he will come down and fight for them, so that they shall need no other help than his. For this same God, as yourselves say, promised of old this and much more to those who served him, and see in what way he has helped them and you! They, in place of being masters of the whole world, are left with not so much as a patch of ground or a home; and as for you, if any of you transgresses even in secret, he is sought out and punished with death.
• All things, accordingly, were not made for man, any more than they were made for lions, or eagles, or dolphins, but that this world, as being God's work, might be perfect and entire in all respects. For this reason all things have been adjusted, not with reference to each other, but with regard to their bearing upon the whole. And God takes care of the whole, and (His) providence will never forsake it; and it does not become worse; nor does God after a time bring it back to himself; nor is He angry on account of men any more than on account of apes or flies; nor does He threaten these beings, each one of which has received its appointed lot in its proper place.
• By far the most silly thing is the distribution of the creation of the world over certain days, before days existed: for, as the heaven was not yet created, nor the foundation of the earth yet laid, nor the sun yet revolving, how could there be days? Moreover, taking and looking at these things from the beginning, would it not be absurd in the first and greatest God to issue the command, Let this (first thing) come into existence, and this second thing, and this (third); and after accomplishing so much on the first day, to do so much more again on the second, and third, and fourth, and fifth, and sixth? After this, indeed, he is weary, like a very bad workman, who stands in need of rest to refresh himself! It is not in keeping with the fitness of things that the first God should feel fatigue, or work with His hands, or give forth commands.
• He has neither mouth nor voice. God possesses nothing else of which we have any knowledge. Neither did He make man His image; for God is not such an one, nor like any other species of (visible) being. God partakes of form or colour nor does He even partake of 'motion'. He is not to be reached by word. He cannot be expressed by name. He has undergone no suffering that can be conveyed by words. Deity is beyond all suffering. How, then, shall I know God? and how shall I learn the way that leads to Him? And how will you show Him to me? Because now, indeed, you throw darkness before my eyes, and I see nothing distinctly. Those whom one would lead forth out of darkness into the brightness of light, being unable to withstand its splendours, have their power of vision affected and injured, and so imagine that they are smitten with blindness.
• That I bring no heavier charge than what the truth compels me, any one may see from the following remarks. Those who invite to participation in other mysteries, make proclamation as follows: 'Every one who has clean hands, and a prudent tongue;' others again thus: 'He who is pure from all pollution, and whose soul is conscious of no evil, and who has lived well and justly.' Such is the proclamation made by those who promise purification from sins. But let us hear what kind of persons these Christians invite. Every one, they say, who is a sinner, who is devoid of understanding, who is a child, and, to speak generally, whoever is unfortunate, him will the kingdom of God receive. Do you not call him a sinner, then, who is unjust, and a thief, and a housebreaker, and a poisoner, and a committer of sacrilege, and a robber of the dead? What others would a man invite if he were issuing a proclamation for an assembly of robbers?
• And I think that it makes no difference whether you call the highest being Zeus, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Ammoun like the Egyptians, or Pappaeus like the Scythians. Nor would they be deemed at all holier than others in this respect, that they observe the rite of circumcision, for this was done by the Egyptians and Colchians before them; nor because they abstain from swine's flesh, for the Egyptians practised abstinence not only from it, but from the flesh of goats, and sheep, and oxen, and fishes as well; while Pythagoras and his disciples do not eat beans, nor anything that contains life. It is not probable, however, that they enjoy God's favour, or are loved by Him differently from others, or that angels were sent from heaven to them alone, as if they had had allotted to them 'some region of the blessed,' for we see both themselves and the country of which they were deemed worthy.
• Well, let us believe that these cures, or the resurrection, or the feeding of a multitude with a few loaves, from which many fragments remained over, or those other stories of a marvellous nature were actually wrought by you. These are nothing more than the tricks of jugglers, who profess to do more wonderful things, and to the feats performed by those who have been taught by Egyptians, who in the middle of the market-place, in return for a few obols, will impart the knowledge of their most venerated arts, and will expel demons from men, and dispel diseases, and invoke the souls of heroes, and exhibit expensive banquets, and tables, and dishes, and dainties having no real existence, and who will put in motion, as if alive, what are not really living animals, but which have only the appearance of life. Since, then, these persons can perform such feats, shall we of necessity conclude that they are 'sons of God,' or must we admit that they are the proceedings of wicked men under the influence of an evil spirit?
• Come now, let us grant to you that the prediction was actually uttered. Yet how many others are there who practise such juggling tricks, in order to deceive their simple hearers, and who make gain by their deception? – as was the case, they say, with Zamolxis in Scythia, the slave of Pythagoras; and with Pythagoras himself in Italy; and with Rhampsinitus in Egypt (the latter of whom, they say, played at dice with Demeter in Hades, and returned to the upper world with a golden napkin which he had received from her as a gift); and also with Orpheus among the Odrysians, and Protesilaus in Thessaly, and Hercules at Cape Taenarus, and Theseus. But the question is, whether any one who was really dead ever rose with a veritable body. Or do you imagine the statements of others not only to be myths, but to have the appearance of such, while you have discovered a becoming and credible termination to your drama in the voice from the cross, when he breathed his last, and in the earthquake and the darkness?
• Seeing you are so eager for some novelty, how much better it would have been if you had chosen as the object of your zealous homage some one of those who died a glorious death, and whose divinity might have received the support of some myth to perpetuate his memory! Why, if you were not satisfied with Hercules or Aesculapius, and other heroes of antiquity, you had Orpheus, who was confessedly a divinely inspired man, who died a violent death. But perhaps some others have taken him up before you. You may then take Anaxarchus, who, when cast into a mortar, and beaten most barbarously, showed a noble contempt for his suffering, and said, 'Beat, beat the shell of Anaxarchus, for himself you do not beat,' – a speech surely of a spirit truly divine. But others were before you in following his interpretation of the laws of nature. Might you not, then, take Epictetus, who, when his master was twisting his leg, said, smiling and unmoved, 'You will break my leg;' and when it was broken, he added, 'Did I not tell you that you would break it?'
• The Dioscuri, and Hercules, and Aesculapius, and Dionysus, who are believed by the Greeks to have become gods after being men, but Christians cannot bear to call such beings gods, because they were at first men, and yet they manifested many noble qualifies, which were displayed for the benefit of mankind, while they assert that Jesus was seen after His death by His own followers, as if they said that 'He was seen indeed, but was only a shadow!' A great multitude both of Greeks and Barbarians acknowledge that they have frequently seen, and still see, no mere phantom, but Aesculapius himself, healing and doing good, and foretelling the future. They will not endure his being compared with Apollo or Zeus. Faith, having taken possession of our minds of Christians, makes them yield the assent which they give to the doctrine of Jesus. Well, after he has laid aside these qualities, he will be a God: (and if so), why not rather Aesculapius, and Dionysus, and Hercules? Christians ridicule those who worship Jupiter, because his tomb is pointed out in the island of Crete; and yet they worship him who rose from the tomb, although ignorant of the grounds on which the Cretans observe such a custom.
• They have also a precept to this effect, that we ought not to avenge ourselves on one who injures us, or, as he expresses it, 'Whosoever shall strike thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other also.' This is an ancient saying, which had been admirably expressed long before, and which they have only reported in a coarser way. For Plato introduces Socrates conversing with Crito as follows: 'Must we never do injustice to any?' 'Certainly not.' 'And since we must never do injustice, must we not return injustice for an injustice that has been done to us, as most people think?' 'It seems to me that we should not.' 'But tell me, Crito, may we do evil to any one or not?' 'Certainly not, O Socrates.' 'Well, is it just, as is commonly said, for one who has suffered wrong to do wrong in return, or is it unjust?' 'It is unjust. Yes; for to do harm to a man is the same as to do him injustice.' 'You speak truly. We must then not do injustice in return for injustice, nor must we do evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.' Thus Plato speaks; and he adds, 'Consider, then, whether you are at one with me, and whether, starting from this principle, we may not come to the conclusion .that it is never right to do injustice, even in return for an injustice which has been received; or whether, on the other hand, you differ from me, and do not admit the principle from which we started. That has always been my opinion, and is so still. Such are the sentiments of Plato, and indeed they were held by divine men before his time. But let this suffice as one example of the way in which this and other truths have been borrowed and corrupted. Any one who wishes can easily by searching find more of them.
• They cannot tolerate temples, altars, or images. In this they are like the Scythians, the nomadic tribes of Libya, the Seres who worship no god, and some other of the most barbarous and impious nations in the world. That the Persians hold the same notions is shown by Herodotus in these words: 'I know that among the Persians it is considered unlawful to erect images, altars, or temples; but they charge those with folly who do so, because, as I conjecture, they do not, like the Greeks, suppose the gods to be of the nature of men.' Heraclitus also says in one place: 'Persons who address prayers to these images act like those who speak to the walls, without knowing who the gods or the heroes are.' And what wiser lesson have they to teach us than Heraclitus? He certainly plainly enough implies that it is a foolish thing for a man to offer prayers to images, whilst he knows not who the gods and heroes are. This is the opinion of Heraclitus; but as for them, they go further, and despise without exception all images. If they merely mean that the stone, wood, brass, or gold which has been wrought by this or that workman cannot be a god, they are ridiculous with their wisdom. For who, unless he be utterly childish in his simplicity, can take these for gods, and not for offerings consecrated to the service of the gods, or images representing them? But if we are not to regard these as representing the Divine Being, seeing that God has a different form, as the Persians concur with them in saying, then let them take care that they do not contradict themselves; for they say that God made man His own image, and that He gave him a form like to Himself. However, they will admit that these images, whether they are like or not, are made and dedicated to the honour of certain beings. But they will hold that the beings to whom they are dedicated are not gods, but demons, and that a worshipper of God ought not to worship demons.
• All things came into existence not more for the sake of man than of the irrational animals. Thunders, and lightnings, and rains are not the works of God. Even if one were to grant that these were the works of God, they are brought into existence not more for the support of us who are human beings, than for that of plants, and trees, and herbs, and thorns. Although you may say that these things, namely plants, and trees, and herbs, and thorns, grow for the use of men, why will you maintain that they grow for the use of men rather than for that of the most savage of irrational animals? We indeed by labour and suffering earn a scanty and toilsome subsistence, while all things are produced for them without their sowing and ploughing. But if you will quote the saying of Euripides, that 'The Sun and Night are to mortals slaves,' why should they be so in a greater degree to us than to ants and flies? For the night is created for them in order that they may rest, and the day that they may see and resume their work. If one were to call us the lords of the animal creation because we hunt the other animals and live upon their flesh, we would say, Why were not we rather created on their account, since they hunt and devour us? Nay, we require nets and weapons, and the assistance of many persons, along with dogs, when engaged in the chase; while they are immediately and spontaneously provided by nature with weapons which easily bring us under their power. With respect to your assertion, that God gave you the power to capture wild beasts, and to make your own use of them, we would say that, in all probability, before cities were built, and arts invented, and societies such as now exist were formed, and weapons and nets employed, men were generally caught and devoured by wild beasts, while wild beasts were very seldom captured by men. The world was uncreated and incorruptible, and that it was only the things on earth which underwent deluges and conflagrations, and that all these things did not happen at the same time. In this way God rather subjected men to wild beasts. If men appear to be superior to irrational animals on this account, that they have built cities, and make use of a political constitution, and forms of government, and sovereignties, this is to say nothing to the purpose, for ants and bees do the same. Bees, indeed, have a sovereign, who has followers and attendants; and there occur among them wars and victories, and slaughterings of the vanquished, and cities and suburbs, and a succession of labours, and judgments passed upon the idle and the wicked; for the drones are driven away and punished. The ants set apart in a place by themselves those grains which sprout forth, that they may not swell into bud, but may continue throughout the year as their food, When ants die, the survivors set apart a special place (for their interment), and that their ancestral sepulchres such a place is. And when they [the ants] meet one another they enter into conversation, for which reason they never mistake their way; consequently they possess a full endowment of reason, and some common ideas on certain general subjects, and a voice by which they express themselves regarding accidental things. Come now, if one were to look down from heaven upon earth, in what respect would our actions appear to differ from those of ants and bees?

Dan Ceppa

• Ok, you win. You proved that your god it the best there ever was at hide'n'seek. Now, trot him out here so that we can give him his reward.

Roland Challis, SE-Asia Correspondent, BBC

• It was a triumph for western propaganda. My British sources purported not to know what was going on, but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out; now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal. [Shadow Of A Revolution, 2001]

Charles Chaplin

• By simple common sense I don't believe in God, in none.

Graham Chapman

• How difficult can it be to fly an airplane? I mean, John Travolta learned how.

Maggie Chapman

• We were brought up to fear, to fear, to fear. To fear the nuns, to fear God, to fear the Devil. We were never taught to love or given any love. I suffered physical abuse, mental abuse, psychological abuse and spiritual abuse. [survivor of church orphanage, Metro, 29 August 2000]

Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier, murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo

• I'd rather die standing than live on my knees. [Le Monde, 20 September 2012]
• If we say to religion, 'You are untouchable,' we're fucked. [Le Monde, 20 September 2012]
• Mohammed isn't sacred to me. I don't blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don't live under Quranic law.
• A non-believer, however hard he may try, cannot blaspheme. God is only sacred to those who believe in God. To insult God, you have to believe that God exists. The strategy of the multiculturalists disguised as anti-racists is to muddle blasphemy and Islamophobia, Islamophobia and racism. [Lettre Aux Escrocs De L'Islamophobie Qui Font Le Jeu Des Racistes (Letter To The Islamophobia Frauds Who Play Into The Hands Of Racists), January 2015]
• People who accuse Charlie Hebdo cartoonists of Islamophobia each time they draw a character with a beard are not just dishonest or hypocritical. They are supporting so-called radical Islam. If you draw an old man committing a paedophile act, you are not casting aspersions on all old men. You are not saying that all old men are paedophiles; or that all paedophiles are old men. Apart from a few imbeciles, no one would accuse a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist of doing any such thing. The drawing shows an old paedophile. That's all. [Lettre Aux Escrocs De L'Islamophobie Qui Font Le Jeu Des Racistes (Letter To The Islamophobia Frauds Who Play Into The Hands Of Racists), January 2015]
• However, a sacred text only becomes dangerous when a fanatical reader decides to apply his bed-time reading literally. You have to be really naïve to take at face value the founding texts of all the great religions. You have to be psychopathic to try to do what they say in your own home. In short, the problem is neither the Koran nor the Bible (both of them being boring novels, incoherent and badly written). The problem is the believer who reads the Koran or the Bible like an instruction leaflet for a set of Ikea shelves: "If I don't cut the throat of the infidel, God will banish me from Club Med when I am dead." Take any cookbook and declare it to be the Truth. The result? A bloodbath. Your neighbour makes gluten-free pancakes because he has an allergy? The sacred Book doesn't mention it. Burn your neighbour, he is a blasphemer! He puts too much butter on the bottom of his cake tin? Kill him! [Lettre Aux Escrocs De L'Islamophobie Qui Font Le Jeu Des Racistes (Letter To The Islamophobia Frauds Who Play Into The Hands Of Racists), January 2015]
• It would never enter the minds of communists to call anti-communists "communismophobes" or to demand that they are prosecuted for anti-communist racism. However much you twist reality, you will never get the world to say that there is a "communist" race. Equally, there is no "Islamic" race. In France today, communism is a minority viewpoint which is mocked, sometimes violently, by the faithful defenders of the all-conquering pro-market liberal mode. Now, unlike God, it is hard to deny that Marx or Lenin or (the former French Communist Party leader) Georges Marchais ever existed. But it is not a blasphemy, nor racist, nor communismophobic to dispute the validity of their writings or their sayings. Equally, in secular France, all religions are just a collection of texts, traditions and customs which anyone is entitled to criticise. To put a clown's nose on the face of Marx is no more outrageous or scandalous than to put the same conk on the face of Mohamed. [Lettre Aux Escrocs De L'Islamophobie Qui Font Le Jeu Des Racistes (Letter To The Islamophobia Frauds Who Play Into The Hands Of Racists), January 2015]
• If you argue that you can laugh at everything, except certain aspects of Islam - because Muslims are much more sensitive than the rest of the population - aren't you practising a kind of discrimination? And if so, isn't it time to do away with the disgusting paternalism of the white, bourgeois, left-wing intellectuals who want to fit in with "the poor and the miserable and under-educated" They're educated, you see, and obviously understand that Charlie Hebdo is meant to be funny - because, for one thing, they're very intelligent and, for another, they were brought up that way. But out of respect for people who have not yet learned about tongues in cheeks, they condemn from a sense of solidarity these "Islamophobic" cartoons which they pretend not to understand. "I bring myself down to your level to show how much I love you," they say. "And if I have to convert to Islam to be even closer to you, I will do it!" Such ridiculous demagogues are driven by an endless need for approval and an outrageous superiority complex. [Lettre Aux Escrocs De L'Islamophobie Qui Font Le Jeu Des Racistes (Letter To The Islamophobia Frauds Who Play Into The Hands Of Racists), January 2015]

Rev. Robert Chase, United Church of Christ

• We find it disturbing that the networks in question seem to have no problem exploiting gay persons through mindless comedies or titillating dramas, but when it comes to a church's loving welcome of committed gay couples, that's where they draw the line. [commenting on CBS & NBC's ban of their 'controversial' commercial ("Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we. … No matter who you are, or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here."), as it mentioned the exclusion of gays from some areas of life, 30 November 2004]

G. K. Chesterton

• The only defensible war is a war of defence. [Autobiography]
• Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions. [Illustrated London News, 19 April 1930]
• To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. [A Short History Of England]
• A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. [Everlasting Man, 1925]

Noam Chomsky

• If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
• I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system. [Language And Responsibility]
• The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
• The system of computer-controlled machine tools could have been developed so as to empower mechanics and get rid of useless layers of management. But it was done the other way around: it was done to increase the layers of management and to de-skill workers. Again, that's not a technological or an economic decision, but it's a power decision – basically, part of class war. [Power In The Domestic Arena]
• In 1997 at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) when the European Union brought charges against the United States for blatant, flagrant violation of WTO rules in the embargo [a unilateral one against Cuba that began in 1961 and is unique in that it bars food and medicine], the US rejected its jurisdiction, which is not surprising, because it rejects the jurisdiction of international bodies generally. [Cuba And The US Government – David vs. Goliath]
• In short, the world does not agree with us, so it follows, by simple logic, that the world is wrong; that is all there is to the matter. No alternative possibility can be discussed, even conceived. Still more strikingly, even the fact that the world does not agree with us cannot be acknowledged. Since it fails to see the light, the world outside our borders does not exist (Israel aside). We see here the grip of doctrine in a form that would have deeply impressed the medieval Church, or the mullahs in Qum today. [Necessary Illusions]
• In 1958, President Eisenhower supervised one of the major US clandestine operations in an effort to break up Indonesia, meanwhile dismantling its parliamentary institutions and setting the stage for the massive terror of the next 40 years. At the same time, Washington subverted the first (and last) free election in Laos, supported an attack on Cambodia, undermined the Burmese government, and intensified the terror of its client regime in South Vietnam, escalated to direct US aggression by JFK a few years later. [Rogues' Gallery]
• In the past century the idea that such entities [corporations / capital / state] have special rights, over and above persons, has been very strongly advocated. The most prominent examples are Bolshevism, fascism, and private corporatism, which is a form of privatised tyranny. Two of these systems have collapsed. The third is alive and flourishing under the banner TINA – There Is No Alternative to the emerging system of state corporate mercantilism disguised with various mantras like globalisation and free trade. [Socioeconomic Sovereignty]
• I would like to believe that people have an instinct for freedom, that they really want to control their own affairs. They don't want to be pushed around, ordered, oppressed, etc., and they want a chance to do things that make sense, like constructive work in a way they control, or maybe control together with others. I don't know any way to prove this. It's really a hope about what human beings are like, a hope that if social structures change sufficiently, those aspects of human nature will be realised.
• In the US, the term "person" is officially defined "['Person' is broadly defined] to include any individual, branch, partnership, associated group, association, estate, trust, corporation or other organization (whether or not organised under the laws of any State), or any government entity," [Survey Of Current Business, vol 76 # 12, December 1996 (US Department of Commerce, Washington, D.C.)] … These newly created immortal persons, protected from scrutiny by the grant of personal rights, administer domestic and international markets through their internal operations, "strategic alliances" with alleged competitors, and other linkages. … While insisting on powerful states to serve as their tools, they naturally seek to restrict the public arena for others, the main tenet of "neoliberalism". [Recovering Rights]
• In short, Nicaragua and other countries should be free – to do what we want them to do – and should chose their course independently, as long as their choice conforms to our interests. If they use the freedom we accord them unwisely, then naturally we are entitled to respond in self-defence. Note that these ideas are a close counterpart to the domestic conception of democracy a a form of population control. … It follows that the use of force can only be an exercise in self-defence and that those who try to resist must be aggressors, even in their own lands. What is more, no country has the right of self-defence against U.S. attack, and the United States has the natural right to impose its will, by force if necessary and feasible. [Necessary Illusions]
• But, that's the whole point of corporatisation – to try to remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run – which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything – are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public. And there are various modalities for doing this. One is to have the communication system, the so-called information system, in the hands of a network of, fewer or more doesn't matter that much, private tyrannies. [Corporate Watch]
• … the U.N. voted on a series of disarmament resolutions. The General Assembly voted 154 to 1, with no abstentions, opposing the buildup of weapons in outer space, a resolution clearly aimed at Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars). It voted 135 to 1 against developing new weapons of mass destruction. In both cases, the United States was alone in opposition. The United States was joined by France in opposing a resolution, passed 143 to 2, calling for a comprehensive test treaty ban. Another vote calling for a halt to all nuclear test explosions passed by a vote of 137 to 3, with the United States joined by France and Britain in opposition. … All of these votes were unreported [in the U.S. mainstream press] … [Necessary Illusions]

Renuka Chowdhury

• Today, we have the odd distinction of having lost 10 million girl children in the past 20 years. Who has killed these girl children? Their own parents. The minute the child is born and she opens her mouth to cry, they put sand into her mouth and her nostrils so she chokes and dies. They bury infants into pots alive and bury the pots. They put tobacco into her mouth. They hang them upside down like a bunch of flowers to dry. We have more passion for tigers of this country. We have people fighting for stray dogs on the road. But you have a whole society that ruthlessly hunts down girl children. [Reuters, 14 December 2006]

Michael Crichton

• The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.
• One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts. [Remarks To The Commonwealth Club, 15 September 2003]

Nils Christie

• Enemies are not always a threat; they can be extremely useful. Enemies unite, allow governments to change their priorities, focus public attention on a single issue so others are forgotten. Crime is something a weak state cannot live without. Governments can rule through crime.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

• Know then that thou art a god. [The Republic]
• I wonder that a soothsayer doesn't laugh whenever he sees another soothsayer.
• Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason that he is a man.
• When we call corn Ceres or wine Bacchus, we use a common figure of speech, but do you imagine that anyone is so mad as to believe the thing he feeds upon is a god?

Arthur C. Clarke

• A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
• It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
• 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.
• Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
• Their greatest tragedy in mankind's history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable – even necessary – that may have been in enforcing good behaviour on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.
• I have been appalled by the way in which the United States (and much of the world, East and West) appears to be sinking into cultural barbarism, harangued by fundamentalist ayatollahs of the airwaves, its bookstores, and newsstands poisoned with mind-rotting rubbish about astrology, UFOs, reincarnation, ESP, spoon-bending, and especially 'creationism'.

Jeremy Clarkson

• The church, to me, is just loathsome. I really do object to the fact that it's so powerful. Even though it actually represents fewer people than the local Tufty Club. And they quote from this book which is a fucking fairy tale. It's all just rubbish. You can't walk on water 'cos you'd sink. When you're dead, you can't come back to life. It's that simple. [GQ, May 1999]

Grover Cleveland

• As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters. [03 December 1888]

Voltairine de Cleyre

• Am I blasphemous? The word is theirs, not mine.
• The question of souls is old – we demand our bodies, now. We are tired of promises, God is deaf, and his church is our worst enemy. [1890]

W. K. Clifford

• It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. [The Ethics Of Belief, An Anthology Of Atheism And Rationalism, 1980]
• If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it – the life of that man is one long sin against mankind. If this judgment seems harsh when applied to those simple souls who have never known better, who have been brought up from the cradle with a horror of doubt, and taught that their eternal welfare depends on what they believe, then it leads to the very serious question, Who hath made Israel to sin?

Bill Clinton

• There are now 40m people living with Aids. The number is projected to rise to 100m by 2005. If that happens, it probably will be enough to crumble fledgling democracies. It probably will be enough to spread violence among young people who fear that they only have a year or so to live and therefore can't understand why they shouldn't be involved in whatever conflict is handy. … September 11 showed us a lot of things. It showed us that we can't claim the benefits of the modern world, the benefits of the global economy and information technology and scientific advance and openness and democracy and avoid the vulnerabilities of this age of interdependence. … If we really want a great future for our children, we will have to make the world without walls a home for all our children. [memorial lecture for the National Aids Trust, London, 13 December 2001] Nice speech except, of course, your own policies helped create the situation.

Richard Clopton

• For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill.

Benjamin Cohen

• A world in which others controlled the course of their own development … would be a world in which the American system would be seriously endangered.

Nick Cohen

• It is only the civilised who would be ashamed to have him in their family. Abraham's readiness to obey the order of a jealous, not to say psychopathic, God to "take now thy son, thine only son Issac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering" is divine justification for murderous servility. A servant who will slaughter his son on the whim of the Lord will do anything. [The Observer, 07 October 2001]

Richard Cohen

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

Cole's Axiom

• The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.

Pat Condell

• I don't respect your beliefs and I don't care if you're offended. Cheers. [patcondell.net]

Joseph Conrad

• The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Francis Crick

• If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.

Barry Crimmins

• America speaks with one voice. Unfortunately, it emanates from its ass.

Quentin Crisp

• When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"

Critias

• It was man who first made men believe in gods.

Patricia Crone

• It is a peculiar habit of God's that when he wishes to reveal himself to mankind, he will communicate only with a single person. The rest of mankind must learn the truth from that person and thus purchase their knowledge of the divine at the cost of subordination to another human being, who is eventually replaced by a human institution, so that the divine remains under other people's control [TLS, 12 January 1994]

Alister Crowley

• If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.

Jim D'Entremont

• Immersion in a corporate propaganda bath may ease America's justifiably distressed response to 11 September, but it also enhances Main Street USA's predisposition to view the world on insular and Manichean terms. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]
• Many citizens are now so ill-informed about the actual contents of the US Constitution that they neither know what rights they have to lose nor why the loss would be of any consequence. Conditioning tells them, however, that America is always right; that international law does not apply to the United States; that individuals from other cultures are Americans manqués; and that anyone who challenges prevailing wisdom flirts with treason. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]

Theodore Dalrymple

• A man in prison who told me that he wanted to be a suicide bomber was more hate-filled than any man I have ever met. The offspring of a broken marriage between a Muslim man and a female convert, he had followed the trajectory of many young men in his area: sex and drugs and rock and roll, untainted by anything resembling higher culture. Violent and aggressive by nature, intolerant of the slightest frustration to his will and frequently suicidal, he had experienced taunting during his childhood because of his mixed parentage. After a vicious rape for which he went to prison, he converted to a Salafist form of Islam and became convinced that any system of justice that could take the word of a mere woman over his own was irredeemably corrupt. I noticed one day that his mood had greatly improved; he was communicative and almost jovial, which he had never been before. I asked him what had changed in his life for the better. He had made his decision, he said. Everything was resolved. He was not going to kill himself in an isolated way, as he had previously intended. Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he got out of prison he would not kill himself; he would make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he could. Enemies, I asked; what enemies? How could he know that the people he killed at random would be enemies? They were enemies, he said, because they lived happily in our rotten and unjust society. Therefore, by definition, they were enemies – enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it – and hence were legitimate targets. I asked him whether he thought that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters – and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him. The idea appalled him, not because it was yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he could not conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy. [City Journal, Autumn 2005]

C. W. Dalton

• The religionists apologise that although the Bible was inspired by God, it was, unfortunately, written by ancient, ignorant, half-civilized people. [The Right Brain And Religion]
• With science unable to give us the answers, religion steps in and fills the gap of our ignorance with nonsense, fantasies and pretentious lies. Prophets and priests rush in where scientists fear to tread. [The Right Brain And Religion]

Isioma Daniel

• As the idea [of the Miss World contest being held in Nigeria] became a reality, it also aroused dissent from many groups of people. The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeria and ask them to revel in vanity. What would Mohammed think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them. The irony is that Algeria, an Islamic country, is one of the countries participating in the contest. [ThisDay, 18 November 2003] The reaction to this was predictable : another fatwa, called by the Deputy Governor of the Nigerian state of Zamfara : "Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed. It is binding on all Muslims, wherever they are, to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty." This was confirmed a few days later as the state's policy by the information minister Umar Dangaladima : "It's a fact that Islam prescribes the death penalty on anybody, no matter his faith, who insults the Prophet."

Clarence Darrow

• Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
• I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. [The Sign, May 1938]
• I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.
• Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man. I'm not worried about my soul.

Charles Darwin

• Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. [The Ascent of Man]

Henrietta Darwin

• I was present at his deathbed. Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. … The whole story has no foundation whatever. [on her father's alleged conversion, 1922]

Ali Dashti

• [The Koran contains] sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without the aid of commentaries; foreign words, unfamiliar Arabic words and words used with other than the normal meaning; adjectives and verbs inflected without observance of the concords of gender and number; illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passages are often remote from the subjects. [Twenty-Three Years: A Study Of The Prophetic Career Of Mohammed, 1985]
• [The Koran] contains nothing new in the sense of ideas not already expressed by others. All the moral precepts of the Koran are self-evident and generally acknowledged. The stories in it are taken in identical or slightly modified forms from the lore of the Jews and Christians, whose rabbis and monks Mohammed had met and consulted on his journeys to Syria, and from memories conserved by the descendants of the people of 'Ad and Thamud. [Twenty-Three Years: A Study Of The Prophetic Career Of Mohammed, 1985]

David Davis

• There is a growing feeling that the Muslim community is excessively sensitive to criticism, unwilling to engage in substantive debate. Much worse, is the feeling of some Muslim leaders that as a community they should be protected from criticism, argument, parody, satire and all the other challenges in a society that has free speech as its highest value. It is straightforward. I respect your religion, you respect mine and we all respect our laws. No special treatment. [The Telegraph, 15 October 2006]

Richard Dawkins

• I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
• Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not. [River Out Of Eden]
• The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. [The Selfish Gene]
• 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.
• 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. [River Out Of Eden]
• 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? [Viruses Of The Mind]
• 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 manoeuvring to maximise David Attenborough's television ratings? [River Out Of Eden]
• At the same time, modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. [A Devil's Chaplain]
• Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification. [The Selfish Gene]
• Faith is powerful enough to immunise people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunises 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. [ The Selfish Gene]
• Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. All these myths have in common that they depend upon the deliberate intentions of some kind of supernatural being. [The Blind Watchmaker]
• Blind faith can justify anything. In 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. [The Selfish Gene]
• Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists. But if I say something insulting about Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouchability is something religions have been allowed to get away with for too long.
• But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to believe something – it doesn't matter what – in the total absence of supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. It is this that makes the often-parroted claim that "evolution itself is a matter of faith" so silly. People believe in evolution not because they arbitrarily want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence. [The Selfish Gene]
• 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?
• The creationists' fondness for "gaps" in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don't work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God's gift to Kansas. [Creationism: God's Gift To The Ignorant, The Times, 21 May 2005]
• If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal demonstration of telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, whatever it is), he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy. or of the new fundamental force that moves objects around a table top, deserves a Nobel prize and would probably get one. If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake. [The Sunday Times, 25 August 25 1996]
• … Dan Rickman says "science provides an explanation of the mechanism of the tsunami but it cannot say why this occurred any more than religion can". There, in one sentence, we have the religious mind displayed before us in all its absurdity. In what sense of the word "why", does plate tectonics not provide the answer? Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety. Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering. [The Guardian, 30 December 2004]
• They [creation myths] are all different. Many of them are hauntingly beautiful. I think it is an excellent idea to teach them because it will bring home to the pupils that there is nothing to choose between them. And there is certainly no reason to prefer the Genesis creation myths (because Genesis itself has two different creation myths). Of all the thousands and thousands of origin accounts we can teach our students, one and only one stands out as different from all the rest. This is the complex of origin accounts given by science. And what singles out the scientific account by contrast with all the rest? It is supported by evidence. Lots and lots of evidence. Evidence that can be publicly demonstrated and which will persuade any reasonable person, no matter what their cultural background. [The Guardian, 19 June 2002]
• The 'Michael Reiss position' is defensible. Just as a chemistry teacher might discuss the phlogiston theory, or a physics teacher might discuss the Ptolemaic theory of the planets as history of science, so it is defensible to teach that there are people called creationists, and they believe what they believe. But if teaching creationism 'alongside' evolution means what it seems to mean, it is no more defensible than teaching the stork theory alongside the sex theory of where babies come from. If 29% of science teachers really think creationism should be taught as a valid alternative to evolution, we have a national disgrace on our hands, calling for urgent remedial action in the education of science teachers. We are failing in our duty to children, if we staff our schools with teachers who are this ignorant – or this stupid. [in response to a MORI poll in which 29% of 923 teachers said they agreed that "creationism should be taught in science lessons" (rather than explained as non-scientific religious dogma), The Guardian, 23 December 2008]
• Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened? … If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs. [(co-author with Jerry Coyne) The Guardian, 01 September 2005]
• Gerin Oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of symptoms, often of an anti-social or self-damaging nature. It can permanently modify the child brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which are hard to treat. … Gerin Oil intoxication can drive previously sane individuals to run away from a normally fulfilled human life and retreat to closed communities of confirmed addicts. These communities are usually limited to one sex only, and they vigorously, often obsessively, forbid sexual activity. Indeed, a tendency towards agonized sexual prohibition emerges as a drably recurring theme amid all the colourful variations of Gerin Oil symptomatology. Gerin Oil does not seem to reduce the libido per se, but it frequently leads to a preoccupation with reducing the sexual pleasure of others. A current example is the prurience with which many habitual 'Oilers' condemn homosexuality. … Oil-heads can be heard talking to thin air or muttering to themselves, apparently in the belief that private wishes so expressed will come true, even at the cost of other people's welfare and mild violation of the laws of physics. This autolocutory disorder is often accompanied by weird tics and hand gestures, manic stereotypes such as rhythmic head-nodding toward a wall, or Obsessive Compulsive Orientation Syndrome (OCOS: facing towards the east five times a day). … Gerin Oil in strong doses is hallucinogenic. Hardcore mainliners may hear voices in the head, or experience visual illusions which seem to the sufferers so real that they often succeed in persuading others of their reality. An individual who convincingly reports high-grade hallucinations may be venerated, and even followed as some kind of leader, by others who regard themselves as less fortunate. … Chronic abuse of Geriniol can lead to 'bad trips', in which the user suffers terrifying delusions, including fears of being tortured, not in the real world but in a postmortem fantasy world. Bad trips of this kind are bound up with a morbid punishment-lore which is as characteristic of this drug as the obsessive fear of sexuality already noted. The punishment-culture fostered by Gerin Oil ranges from 'smack' through 'lash' to getting 'stoned' (especially adulteresses and rape victims), and 'demanifestation' (amputation of one hand), up to the sinister fantasy of allo-punishment or 'cross-topping', the execution of one individual for the sins of others. [Free Inquiry #24, 09-11 January 2004]
• Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? If only! Nobody is that stupid, but how about this – it's a long shot, but it just might work. Given that they are certainly going to die, couldn't we sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life again afterwards? Don't be daft! No, listen, it might work. Offer them a fast track to a Great Oasis in the Sky, cooled by everlasting fountains. Harps and wings wouldn't appeal to the sort of young men we need, so tell them there's a special martyr's reward of 72 virgin brides, guaranteed eager and exclusive. Would they fall for it? Yes, 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. It's a tall story, but worth a try. You'd have to get them young, though. Feed them a complete and self-consistent background mythology to make the big lie sound plausible when it comes. Give them a holy book and make them learn it by heart. Do you know, I really think it might work. As luck would have it, we have just the thing to hand: a ready-made system of mind-control which has been honed over centuries, handed down through generations. Millions of people have been brought up in it. It is called religion and, for reasons which one day we may understand, most people fall for it (nowhere more so than America itself, though the irony passes unnoticed). Now all we need is to round up a few of these faith-heads and give them flying lessons. Facetious? Trivialising an unspeakable evil? That is the exact opposite of my intention, which is deadly serious and prompted by deep grief and fierce anger. I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite – or too devout – to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life. I don't mean devaluing the life of others (though it can do that too), but devaluing one's own life. Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end. If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that naive and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions? There is no doubt that the afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a smart missile, and its guidance system is in many respects superior to the most sophisticated electronic brain that money can buy. Yet to a cynical government, organisation, or priesthood, it is very very cheap. Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. "Mindless" may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used. [The Guardian, 15 September 2001]

Jeremy Dear, General Secretary, NUJ

• To take away a server is like taking away a broadcaster's transmitter. It is simply incredible that American security agents can just walk into a London office and remove equipment. In this nightmare world they can apparently close the operation down without any reason being given, without any chance to question or protest. [responding to the seizure of Indymedia's servers, 13 October 2004]

Democritus

• Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

Daniel C. Dennett

• It is undeniable that astrology provides its adherents with a highly articulated system of patterns that they think they see in the events of the world. The difference, however, is that no one has ever been able to get rich by betting on the patterns, but only by selling the patterns to others. [Brainchildren]
• 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. [Darwin's Dangerous Idea]

John Dewey

• Talk of democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of the means of production, exchange, the press and other means of publicity, propaganda and communication.

Khaled Diab

• Mohamed never claimed to be anything but human, and so Muslims who revere him so obsessively should take a chill pill and ask themselves whether they are not turning their own prophet into an idol of sorts. Idols do not have to be visual; they can also be mental. In fact, reforming Islam would involve granting Mohamed a more human status and following an approach that does not take his every move as gospel. Just as Muslims do not want non-Muslims to impose their alien values on Islamic societies, they should not try to force their own mores on to other societies. It is a longstanding tradition in Europe to mock and satirise religion and religious figures. In the last century, the holy cow of religion has been sacrificed at the altar of European secularism. Jesus Christ jokes are an entire genre of humour, Monty Python's Life of Brian satirises Christianity and monotheism, and was voted the greatest comedy of all time in Britain. The Last Temptation Of Christ explores the human fallibility of Jesus, as he is tempted by the devil on the cross. Christian fundamentalists have been angered by such expressions for decades but, despite their best efforts, have not managed to suppress them. However repugnant or repulsive Muslims find such irreverent and sacrilegious practices, they should be aware that they are a manifestation of the general retreat of organised religion in the West and not exclusively anti-Islamic in nature. All faiths are mocked mercilessly. Muslims have no right to try to curb these practices or punish those who commit them. [February 2006]

Dicentra

• And now, a grand jury will actually indict a ham sandwich. Look, I'm a Mormon, and I'm forbidden from drinking coffee and tea. Do I freak out because of the proliferation of coffee makers at work? Do I wig out because there is ice tea in the vending machines? (Though I'll admit I was grossed out by what looked like a large urine sample on someone's desk — turned out to be iced green tea.) Cripes, if someone spills coffee on me I might be peeved because of the stain, but I'm not going to act like I've been made ritually unclean or that God will send me to hell if I die by a tea-drenched bullet. Their behaviour is downright superstitious, not religious. They need to get a grip. [comment on proteinwisdom regarding the "ham sandwich = 'hate crime' incident", 19 April 2007]

Philip K. Dick

• Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
• The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Charles Dickens

• Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.

Emily Dickinson

• When we think of his lone effort to live and its bleak reward, the mind turns to the myth "for His mercy endureth forever," with confiding revulsion.

Denis Diderot

• Mankind shall not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.
• To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.
• The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers. [Observations On Drawing Up Of Laws, 1774]
• It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.
• 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.
• Which is the greater merit, to enlighten the human race, which remains forever, or to save one's fatherland, which is perishable?
• 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. [A Philosophical Conversation, 1777]
• To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster! [Philosophic Thoughts, 1746]
• 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. [footnote to d'Holbach's The System Of Nature]
• There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common. [On the Interpretation of Nature, 1753]

Marlene Dietrich

• If there is a supreme being, he's crazy. [Rave, November 1986]

Ellen Battelle Dietrick

• The human race is guided by its own ideas, and only by its ideas. If thought were left perfectly free from ban of legislative or ecclesiastical censor, the best thoughts would as naturally prevail over the worst as the best seeds of the forest naturally triumph over the worst seeds. [Women In The Early Christian Ministry: A Reply To Bishop Doane, And Others, 1897]
• Persistently leavening public opinion, in a grossly superstitious age, with the theological doctrine of popular preachers, that woman is a sex of superior wickedness and inferior mentality, could have but one general result throughout Christendom. Not only did it gradually create within women themselves a passion of self-depreciation, humility and a self-hatred which led thousands of them to slowly and persistently torture themselves until relieved by insanity or death, it planed within the minds of men a jealous hatred and superstitious horror of the natural powers of women, which ultimately culminated in a veritable crusade of ecclesiastics against womankind. [Women In The Early Christian Ministry: A Reply To Bishop Doane, And Others, 1897]

Annie Dillard

• An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?" [Pilgrim At Tinker Creek]

Diogenes

• 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.

David Dionisi

• The major media outlets are owned by a handful of corporations interested in promoting advertising and pro-government messages. Anything that challenges the existing power structure very often fails to receive air time. I highlight Fox as an extreme example of the Republican propaganda machine. But when your country is fighting a war, you have an obligation to understand what's really going on. If you don't, you can become an agent of injustice. If people can find the time to watch baseball or soccer etc, they can make an effort to read, travel, talk and not be limited to the messages of fear. They also need to understand their history. In 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a plan called Operation Northwood, which is now declassified. It proposed conducting mass casualty attacks on American targets and blaming it on Cuba to rally public support for war against Fidel Castro. President Kennedy rejected the plan. So we shouldn't just assume any future attack on our soil is the work of al-Qaida. [aljazeera.net, 27 November 2005]

Benjamin Disraeli

• Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

Frank Dobson

• The government wants more religious schools … The idea that religious schools have a distinctive, presumably superior, ethos in an insult to the dedicated teachers at non-religious schools. … At present, religious schools may select 100% of pupils from parents who share their faith. They are given taxpayers' money and allowed to discriminate against other children on the grounds of religion. Yet it would be totally unacceptable to exclude children on the grounds or race or colour. … After all, more than 40% of the population do not subscribe to an organised religion. … To separate children by religion is bound to promote discrimination. Children develop loyalty to their school, in which they are "us" and children at other schools are "them". … Would Protestant louts have endangered children at the Catholic Holy Cross school in Belfast if their own children had been attending that school? … Now the Church of England wants 100 extra secondary schools, a figure it hopes to achieve mainly by taking over existing community schools. That must reduce parental choice. … Children not of that particular faith will only be able to go to the remaining non-religious school or be bussed elsewhere. … In 1944 , the taxpayer had to contribute just half ["just"?!] the capital cost of a religious school. Now the taxpayer is to pick up 90% of the bill. … Everything we do now must reduce divisions between young people, not widen them. [The Guardian, 08 February 2002]

Cory Doctorow

• When the NSA came up with codenames for its projects to sabotage security products, it chose "BULLRUN" and "MANASSAS", names for a notorious battle from the American civil war in which the public were declared enemies of the state. GCHQ's parallel programme was called "EDGEHILL", another civil war battle where citizens became enemies of their government. Our spies' indiscriminate surveillance programmes clearly show an alarming trend for the state to view everyday people as adversaries. [The Guardian, 10 September 2013]

E. L. Doctorow

• On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. … But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, … He doesn't understand why he should mourn. … you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be. … they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. … He wanted to go to war and he did. … This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing – to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. … He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills – it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel. But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honour them by raising them into the professional class. And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it. … The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using it extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war. … How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective war-making, the constitutionally insensitive law-giving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves. [The Easthampton Star, 09 September 2004]

Chester Dolan

• 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 memorise. [Blind Faith]

Dolphin Radio

• Feminism's failure to appropriate geek culture, in my opinion, has a great deal to do with feminism's miscalculation of the average skeptical geek intellect and feminism's ability exploit the average geek confidence level. Feminists usually go after groups with low confidence or self-respect, like the alphabet soup of sexuality groups or obese people. What they weren't counting on from nerds and gamers was that these people don't need support or acceptance from organized groups because they are so fiercely independent that they were sure to reject any authoritarian group, regardless of the benefits of supporting it. Nerds don't want to be in the "popular group" because they generally see it as filled with mindless zombie idiots. [Youtube, Nicholas Goroff: Nerd Culture's Real Problem, 15 Dec 2015]

Amanda Donohoe

• I'm an atheist, so it was actually a joy. Spitting on Christ was a great deal of fun. I can't embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages. And that persecution still goes on today all over the world. [speaking of her role in Ken Russell's film Lair Of The White Worm (very loosely based on the Bram Stoker novel) in which she played a pagan priestess belonging to a snake-worshipping cult destroyed by Christians: she spat venom onto a crucifix, Interview]

Phil Donahue

• The God-loving people who fashioned the soaring vaults and delicate windows of Chartres had murder on their minds. Some of the workers may well have been veterans of the First Crusade, an expedition to save the Holy Land from the Muslims that was part religious frenzy, part military adventure and part social fad. On that excursion, begun four years after work on Chartres began, the Crusaders slaughtered thousands of noncombatants, levelled whole communities, and finally 'saved' the holy city of Jerusalem by massacring all its inhabitants – men, women, children, Muslims, Jews: everybody… We can pray one minute and kill the next… We like to think that our erratic behaviour is a thing of the past, that we've outgrown the excesses of the Crusades. But nothing could be further from the truth. There are people in Belfast today who will repeat the catechism, then go toss a bomb into a crowded pub … [The Human Animal, 1985]

Frederick Douglass

• I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
• For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! [The Meaning Of July Fourth For The Negro]

John William Draper

• We must bear in mind that the majority of men are imperfectly educated, and hence we must not needlessly offend the religious ideas of our age. It is enough for us ourselves to know that, though there is a Supreme Power, there is no Supreme Being. There is an invisible principle, but not a personal God, to whom it would be not so much blasphemy as absurdity to impute the form, the sentiments, the passions of man. All revelation is, necessarily, a mere fiction. That which men call chance is only the effect of an unknown cause. Even of chances there is a law. There is no such thing as Providence, for Nature proceeds under irresistible laws, and in this respect the universe is only a vast automatic engine. The vital force which pervades the world is what the illiterate call God. The modifications through which all things are running take place in an irresistible way, and hence it may be said that the progress of the world is, under Destiny, like a seed, it can evolve only in a predetermined mode. [History Of The Conflict Between Religion And Science, 1910]

John Drayton

• I continue to be bemused by women fighting for the right to be xtian priests. The whole religion and its textbooks are so sexist that it seems as mad as a jew fighting for the right to join a nazi party. [alt.atheism, 08 January 1999]

Theodore Dreiser

• Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

William Drummond

• He who will not reason, is a bigot; He who cannot, is a fool; And he who dares not, is a slave.

Ann Druyan

• 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, on her husband's (Carl Sagan) alleged death-bed conversion]
• "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 inseparably 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." [Newsweek]

Rev Malcolm Duncan, Evangelical Faithworks Movement

• We welcome the SORS as an attempt to ensure that goods and services are delivered inclusively and in non-discriminatory ways. It is right that any organisation receiving public funding should deliver services to genuine public benefit. The delivery of goods and services can relate to situations such as hiring out of rooms, something many churches have voiced their concerns over. A commitment to diversity through doing this does not mean losing your faith identity: it actually presents an opportunity to develop a dialogue and put the Gospel into action through demonstrating love and service. … Many opponents of the SORs have stated concerns that a Christian hotel owner would be forced to let out rooms to gay couples, but would they be as vociferous about letting out a room to an unmarried heterosexual couple? Why this inconsistency? It brings the Church into grave danger of sounding homophobic. Christians are called to follow Jesus' example, and he says remarkably little about sexuality in scripture. Rather, he treats all people he comes across with love and acceptance, and does not refuse his service to anyone, even if he does not agree with their lifestyle. Would it really be 'Christian' to refuse bereavement counselling to a gay man, or to exclude a gay person and their child from a parent-and-toddler group? … The proposed SORs are an opportunity for Christians to demonstrate the love and grace of Christ. [08 January 2007]

Ronald Dworkin

• Campaigns and laws [of censorship] … are particularly attractive in western democracies because they urge censorship in the interests not of the powerful but of the vulnerable; in the name not of injustice but of equality. They must nevertheless be resisted … because if we deny freedom of speech to opinions we hate, we weaken the legitimacy of our entire political system, particularly the legitimacy of the very laws we pass to protect victims of stereotype and prejudice. [1997]

'Dyingbreed'

• A phobia is an irrational fear. Kindly, if you would, answer me this: how on earth can the fear of having raving lunatics breaking into your office bellowing "Allahu akbar" then murdering you, and murdering all your colleagues, and then going outside and murdering the unarmed police, be deemed an irrational fear? If the fear is irrational, why hasn't The Guardian published the pictures in question? [Charlie Hebdo: Norway Didn't Give In To Islamophobia, Nor Should France, The Guardian, 08 January 2015]
• If the Muslim leaders can identify where Jews and Christians and Buddhists are being radicalised, and by whom, then I'm sure Pickles will attack them with all the same ferocity he's thus far reserved for radical Islam. Pickles hasn't singled anyone out, he's addressed every community which has a problem with youth radicalisation - it just happens that the Muslim community is the only one which has a problem. [Cameron Backs Pickles' Letter To Muslim Leaders, The Guardian, 19 January 2015]
• If Islam was a secular ideology, a magazine could print cartoons lampooning it in whichever way it pleased - far worse than what Charlie Hebdo has done - and nobody would bat an eyelid at the thought that the images might offend adherents of that ideology. Why should Islam (or any religion) receive special treatment because it's based on an obviously untrue mythology written down in an ancient book? Mohammed was just a man, Allah does not exist - we should be absolutely comfortable with saying that out loud. [Charlie Hebdo: Understanding Is The Least We Owe The Dead, The Guardian, 09 January 2015]
• I don't really see what you would be achieving by saying "I am not Charlie". It's one thing to stay silent, but to expressly state that "I am not Charlie" sends out rather a different message, as when taken in the context of people showing solidarity by saying "I am Charlie" it suggests that you are in opposition to these people, and to the actions of Charlie Hebdo, and by extension to the principle of free expression. Of course, there are those who found, and continue to find, depictions of Mohammed to be offensive. The correct, civilised way to deal with this offence is to shake your head, walk on, and get on with your day. [If Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie, Am I A Bad Person? Nuance Gets Lost In Groupthink, The Guardian, 12 January 2015]
• If I drew a picture of Mohammed and the Muslim community shook its head, tutted, then collectively got on with its day, then not only would I stop drawing pictures of Mohammed, I'd also feel like a bit of a prat for having done so in the first place. However, if I drew a picture of Mohammed and the populations of several large countries started wailing about it and babbling some medieval nonsense about blasphemy and holy war, of course I'd do it again (anonymously of course, because adherents of this religion I'm supposed to respect would try to murder me if they found out my real identity) because I'd find such a reaction completely hilarious. This is why people continue to produce images of Mohammed; it's certainly not because Mohammed is an interesting subject - he was an ordinary looking Arab, by all accounts. If Muslims stopped squealing about it, people would stop producing the images. [What Starring In The Infidel Taught Me About Faith And Culture, The Guardian, 23 January 2015]
• This is utter, utter rubbish; the vast majority of Westerners, either publicly or privately, want Muslims to take their religion and its repressive diktats, and do something unnatural with the lot. I have no compunction at all with drawing pictures of Mohammed. Muslims are not allowed to draw images of Mohammed, but I am not a Muslim, and will give no more credence to Islamic scripture than I do the works of L. Ron Hubbard, or those of JRR Tolkien, or any other work of fiction for that matter. I want to get on with my life in the real world; if Muslims want to burden themselves with the necessity to pray five times a day, refrain from eating certain foods, shun alcohol and ban themselves from saying certain words, then that's entirely up to them - but the moment any of these demands is levied against myself, it becomes my business, and I want none of it. I will draw images of Mohammed whenever and wherever I see fit, in whatever context I choose, and neither you nor any other authority - Islamic or otherwise - has the right, nor the power to compel me. [This Cruelty To Saudi blogger Raif Badawi Is A Cruelty To All Muslims, The Guardian, 15 January 2015]
• If the Muslim community is not seen to take greater responsibility for the radicalisation of its young men, who then go on to commit, or attempt to commit, terrorist atrocities against the civilian population of the United Kingdom, then I fear you will have far worse to contend with than a chiding letter from a minister of the crown, in years to come. Your attitude is ultra-defensive and dishonest, the attitude of your religious leaders is as bad or worse, and this will not be lost upon anyone. Muslims, who in nearly all cases have come to the UK to escape poverty or persecution in their native lands, should be bending over backwards to ensure that whatever beliefs they hold, those beliefs don't at any time come into conflict with the beliefs and ideals held by the country which took them, or your ancestors in, offered them shelter and a livelihood. Not only has the Muslim community failed to do this in recent times, it now bristles at the very suggestion that it ought to do so. You are not special, your religion confers upon you no special privileges or rights. If you, and your community leaders, continue to ignore the problems emanating from your midst, it will lead to nothing but anger, fear and violence - so please, take heed, and work with us to eradicate those who seek to cause us harm. [Dear Eric Pickles - Why Single Out Islam For This Patronising Treatment?, The Guardian, 20 January 2015]

Shirin Edabi, Nobel Peace Prize, 2003

• The only logical conclusion I can come to is that the texts of our religion, as with all texts, can and should be interpreted in accordance with the needs of society and the time we live in. [Index On Censorship, 4/2004]
• The Qur'an provides a basic law; experts interpret the rules and adapt them to new situations … Of one thing I am certain: none of our societies today resemble the Arabia of 1400 years ago for which they were designed. [Index On Censorship, 4/2004]

Sir Arthur Eddington

• We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong. [New York Times Magazine, 09 October 1932]

David Edgar

• It's not just that the idea of copyrighting an entry in the English dictionary, or someone's face, haircut or name, is ridiculous. There is an issue of principle. By declaring images, titles and now words to be ownable brands, these various organisations and individuals are contributing to an increased commodification and thus privatisation of materials previously agreed to be in the public domain. For scientists, this constrains the use of public and published knowledge, up to and including the human genome. For artists, it implies that the only thing you can do with subject matter is to sell it. As a consequence, people's view of what representation does becomes narrowly literal. Presumably, the Disney corporation felt that John Keane must have been either denigrating or exploiting its product when he used a doll on a beach to comment on the ironies of war. Similarly, painters, novelists and playwrights are attacked for representing Myra Hindley or Frederick West or James Bulger's murderers, on the grounds that to portray an action must be to promote it. Consulted by its British branch about the Olympic Mind Games case, the International Olympic Committee expressed two major concerns: that the word Olympic was used in the title of a work of fiction and that "there is no such thing as Olympic mind games". Clearly, the IOC hasn't grasped what the word "fiction" means. [The Guardian, 08 October 2007]

Richard & Maria Edgeworth

• … it is essential to arrange facts so that they shall be ready for use, as materials for the imagination, or the judgement, to select and combine. The power of retentive memory is exercised too much, the faculty of recollective memory is exercised too little, by the common modes of education. Whilst children are reading the history of kings, and battles, and victories, whilst they are learning tables of chronology and lessons of geography by rote, their inventive and their reasoning faculties are absolutely passive; nor are any of the facts which they learn in this manner associated with circumstances in real life.[Practical Education, 1798] Over two centuries later, not only has no one changed the system to improve it, but also it's more entrenched than ever, because 'thinking' and 'imagination' are anathema to those in control, who desire only meek unquestioning subjects.

Taner Edis

• Asking about a time before the beginning of our spherical spacetime is like asking what lies north of the North Pole. There is no such thing. [Is Anybody Out There?]
• In the popular imagination, the Big Bang is a great explosion; at one time there was nothing, then matter erupted into previously empty space. However, the Big Bang is the beginning of spacetime itself, not an event in time. [Is Anybody Out There?]
• Creation out of absolute nothing is a metaphysical quagmire for theists anyway, since nothing must at least have the potentiality for becoming something. Since theists are stuck with potentiality, it might as well be something like a quantum vacuum. [Is Anybody Out There?]
• Quantum events have a way of just happening, without any cause, as when a radioactive atom decays at a random time. Even the quantum vacuum is not an inert void, but is boiling with quantum fluctuations. In our macroscopic world, we are used to energy conservation, but in the quantum realm this holds only on average. Energy fluctuations out of nothing create short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs, which is why the vacuum is not emptiness but a sea of transient particles. An uncaused beginning, even out of nothing, for spacetime is no great leap of the imagination. [Is Anybody Out There?]

Thomas Alva Edison

• 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. [Columbian Magazine]
• Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

Elizabeth Edwards

• … I believe that we are given a set of guidelines, and that we are obligated to live our lives with a view to those guidelines. And I don't believe that we should live our lives that way for some promise of eternal life, but because that's what's right. We should do those things because that's what's right. [2007]

Jonathan Edwards, Olympic Athlete

• Once you start asking yourself questions like, "How do I really know there is a God?" you are already on the path to unbelief. During my documentary on St Paul, some experts raised the possibility that his spectacular conversion on the road to Damascus might have been caused by an epileptic fit. It made me realise that I had taken things for granted that were taught to me as a child without subjecting them to any kind of analysis. When you think about it rationally, it does seem incredibly improbable that there is a God. … One thing that I can say, however, is that even if I am unable to discover some fundamental purpose to life, this will not give me a reason to return to Christianity. Just because something is unpalatable does not mean that it is not true. [The Times, 27 June 2007]

Paul Edwards

• Atheisim may be defined as the view that "God exists" is a false statement. But there is also a broader sense in which an atheist is someone who rejects belief in God, not necessarily because such belief is judged to be false. It may be rejected because it is incoherent or meaningless, because it is too vague to be of any explanatory value, or because, as LaPlace put it in his famous exchange with Napoleon, there is no need for this "hypothesis". Atheism in this broader sense remains distinct from agnosticism, which advocates suspense of judgement. It is surely possible to justify atheism in this broader sense without having to "examine every object in boundless space and eternal time." [God And The Philosophers]

Barbara Ehrenreich

• When the powerful start acting irresponsibly then it is the responsibility of the rest of us to take power. New Internationalist, #351
• Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody's mom in that she knows what's best for us. But if you look at the historical record – Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages – you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway? [The Great Syringe Tide, The Worst Years of Our Lives]
• Katrina's a perfect example of how militarized the government has gotten even when it's supposedly trying to help people. The initial response of the government was a military one. When they finally got people down there, it was armed guards to protect the fancy stores and keep people in that convention centre – at gunpoint! I mean, this is unbelievable. [A Guided Tour of Class in America , Mother Jones, 05 June 2006]
• The worst [customers], for some reason, are the Visible Christians – like the ten-person table, all jolly and sanctified after Sunday night service, who run me mercilessly and then leave me $1 on a $92 bill. Or the guy with the crucifixion T-shirt (SOMEONE TO LOOK UP TO) who complains that his baked potato is too hard and his iced tea too icy (I cheerfully fix both) and leaves no tip at all. As a general rule, people wearing crosses or WWJD ("What Would Jesus Do?") buttons look at us disapprovingly no matter what we do, as if they were confusing waitresses with Mary Magdalene's original profession. [Nickel And Dimed, 2001]
• All this made me realise, thinking back to those personality tests and drug tests, that we have got a two-tier system of morality in America. If you're an ordinary person you've got to be an absolute straight arrow. You've got to pass that drug test. You've got to promise that you will never, ever do anything wrong, and that you never have. I'm sure that the same kind of tests apply if you are – or were, I should say – a low-level employee at a place like Enron. But if you're high up, close to the CEO level, you can do whatever you damn well please. If you steal $50 you're going to lose your job and you're going to jail. If you steal $50 million you're going to live in luxury for the rest of your life. If you put graffiti on a wall you go to juvenile centre. If you despoil a whole town, if you wreck the environment for thousands of people, somebody's going to describe you as an entrepreneurial genius. The Attorney General wants us to start informing on each other, through the new TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program. You're supposed to watch out for unusual behaviour and get to that 'enemy within' in this way. Mr Ashcroft, wherever you are, I have a tip for you. I have identified the enemy within. For so many years now the affluent and their paid hacks at the various right-wing think tanks have denounced, over and over again, the so-called underclass – the 'welfare-lovers', the people of colour, the low-wage workers – as dishonest, immoral, a burden on society. Well, it's the overclass that is the dishonest, criminal and corrupt burden on society. [New Internationalist, #351]
• The clerics who are struggling to make sense of the tsunami must not have noticed that this is hardly the first display of God's penchant for wanton, homicidal mischief. Leaving out man-made genocide, war, and even those "natural" disasters, like drought and famine, to which "man" invariably contributes through his inept social arrangements, God has a lot to account for in the way of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and plagues. Nor has He ever shown much discrimination in his choice of victims. A tsunami hit Lisbon in 1755, on All Saints Day, when the good Christians were all in church. The faithful perished, while the denizens of the red light district, which was built on strong stone, simply carried on sinning. Similarly, last fall's hurricanes flattened the God-fearing, Republican parts of Florida while sparing sin-soaked Key West and South Beach. The Christian-style "God of love" should be particularly vulnerable to post-tsunami doubts. What kind of "love" inspired Him to wrest babies from their parents' arms, the better to drown them in a hurry? If He so loves us that He gave his only son etc., why couldn't he have held those tectonic plates in place at least until the kids were off the beach? So much, too, for the current pop-Christian God, who can be found, at least on the Internet, micro-managing people's careers, resolving marital spats, and taking excess pounds off the faithful – this last being Pat Robertson's latest fixation. If we are responsible for our actions, as most religions insist, then God should be, too, and I would propose, post-tsunami, an immediate withdrawal of prayer and other forms of flattery directed at a supposedly moral deity – at least until an apology is issued, such as, for example: "I was so busy with Cindy-in-Omaha's weight-loss program that I wasn't paying attention to the Earth's crust." It's not just Christianity. Any religion centred on a God who is both all-powerful and all-good, including Islam and the more monotheistically inclined versions of Hinduism, should be subject to a thorough post-tsunami evaluation. As many have noted before me: If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn't give a damn. [The Progressive, March 2005]

Albert Einstein

• The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
• Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
• The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously. [letter to Hoffman & Dukas, 1946]
• I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him. [letter to Edgar Meyer, 02 January 1915]
• A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. [Religion and Science, New York Times Magazine, 09 November 1930]
• … 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. … [24 March 1954]
• 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 civilisation 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 no different than murder.
• I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God. [25 August 1927]
• I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvellous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. [The World As I See It]
• He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable an ignorable 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.
• 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. [1939]
• The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them. [letter to Eric Gutkind, 03 January 1954]
• Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being. However, it must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and fragmentary, so that, actually, the belief in the existence of basic all-embracing laws in Nature also rests on a sort of faith. All the same this faith has been largely justified so far by the success of scientific research. But, on the other hand, every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive. 24 January 1936]

General Dwight Eisenhower

• Don't join the book-burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
• The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.
• Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
• Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary. … I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face". The secretary [of War, Henry Stimson] was deeply perturbed by my attitude, almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusions.

T. S. Eliot

• To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.

Albert Ellis

• 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.

H. Havelock Ellis

• And it is in his own image, let us remember, that Man creates God.

Harlan Ellison

• Jesus is not going to come down from the mountain to save your lily-white hide or your black ass. Save yourselves.
• And science fiction fans will go for any goddamm thing. They'll believe anything, man, they will believe in the Abominable Snowman and the Bermuda Triangle, in Pyramid Power, in EST, in Scientology, in the Second Coming, they'll believe in any goddamm thing, they don't give a shit. They go to see Star Wars; they think it is for real!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
• Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. [Journals, 1838]
• Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. [Considerations By The Way, The Conduct Of Life, 1860]

Friedrich Engels

• People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.

Epicurus

• … it is upon sensation that reason must rely when it attempts to infer the unknown from the known. [Letter To Herodotus]
• Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another. [Principal Doctrines]
• Dreams have neither a divine nature nor a prophetic power, but they are the result of images that impact on us. [Collection : Vatican Sayings (possibly by a contemporary Epicurean)]
• I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know. [Fragments]
• Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us. [Principal Doctrines]
• Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence commeth evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? Though attributed to him in many sites of quotes, this doesn't appear anywhere on http://www.epicurus.net/ so it may not be genuine, or by a later Epicurean.
• It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honourably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honourably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honourably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life. [Principal Doctrines]
• The fact that the weather is sometimes foretold from the behaviour of certain animals is a mere coincidence in time. For the animals offer no necessary reason why a storm should be produced and no divine being sits observing when these animals go out and afterwards fulfilling the signs which they have given. For such folly as this would not possess the most ordinary being if ever so little enlightened, much less one who enjoys perfect felicity. [Letter To Pythocles]

Epictetus

• We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. [Discourses]

Anders Eriksson & Francisco Lacerda

• Charlatans may be found in all walks of life, especially in activities where there is a possibility of making money, and forensic speech science is no exception. The old disreputable voiceprint technique is still around and used by many private investigators in the OS in particular. In Germany, a physics professor specialized in crystallography appears in courts claiming to have invented an automatic speaker recognition method based on methods borrowed from crystallography but refusing to subject his methods to independent testing or revealing exactly how the method is supposed to work. These are just two examples. … It should be stated right away that at the present time no method for reliable lie detection is known and it is not even known if it should be possible to develop such methods in the future. There are nevertheless several products on the market claimed to be working lie detectors, They do not always call their products lie detectors but use some euphemism like 'stress analyzer' or 'emotion analyzer', but by looking at how the vendors present their products there can be no question that lie detectors are what they want us to believe their products are. [The International Journal Of Speech, Language And The Law, December 2007]

Susan Ertz

• Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy afternoon. [Anger In The Sky, 1943]
• Parsons always seem to be specially horrified about things like sunbathing and naked bodies. They don't mind poverty and misery and cruelty to animals nearly as much.

Gavin Esler

• Think about it. George Bush could involve Syria, Saudia Arabia and France in the Gulf War coalition, and persuade Russia and Israel not to make trouble. He could launch an information-age cruise missile strike on Baghdad guided by spy and communications satellites whirling in space. But he did not know that in every supermarket in America bar code scanners could add up the prices at the checkout. [America's Fifty Years War, 1997]
• August 1995, Anaheim, California. Billie Jean Matay, aged fifty-two, takes her three grandchildren to Disneyland and is robbed in the car park. The Disney people helped her to recover in a backstage area but Ms Matay sued. She was, quote, 'traumatised' when she saw Disney characters taking off their costumes. Her lawsuit claimed emotional distress because, among other things, the children were exposed 'to the reality that the Disney characters were make-believe'. The truth that dare not speak its name in 1990s America is that Mickey Mouse is – gasp! – not a real mouse. [Death Of The American Hero, The Culture Of Victims, 1997]
• A few years ago, those voters in Palm Beach County who claim they were disenfranchised by a confusing ballot paper would probably have been too embarrassed to admit they punched the wrong hole in the polling booths. But now, like millions of litigants all over the United States, stupidity, ignorance or misfortune is a passport to Victimhood. The Victim Voters were Victims of a system that they couldn't understand, and Victims, we will undoubtedly hear, of a conspiracy to steal the election. Florida's Victim Voters fall exactly into the dismal new American tradition exemplified by lawsuits of the 1990s, including the woman who sued McDonald's because she scalded herself with the cup of coffee she placed between her legs while driving. [The Independent, 13 November 2000] To quote from Esler's earlier Death Of The American Hero, The Culture Of Victims. 1997: "Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the notorious story of eighty-one-year-old Stella Liebeck who bought a coffee in McDonald's, stuck it between her legs while driving her car and spilled it, causing third-degree burns requiring eight days in hospital and extensive skin grafts. Damages were reduced from $2.7 million to a mere $600,000." A mere $600,000?! Oh, of course, it's not her fault for not being able to think for herself – it's everyone else's fault for not telling her what might go wrong. Don't dry your hair in a microwave, don't clean your dog in a washing-machine, don't set petrol alight if you get some on your hands, don't …
• A British politician who cloaks himself in the mantle of God is immediately regarded with suspicion. When told that it was time to offer moral leadership, Harold Macmillan quipped that if people wanted that sort of thing they should consult their clergy. In Britain, politicians who openly discuss their spirituality are about as welcome as Jehovah's Witnesses on the doorstep, and the British associate the mixture of politics and religion as a heady cocktail best reserved for the mass irrationality of Northern Ireland, Iran, Kashmir, and the Middle East. The very idea of a Party of God, Hizbollah, puts the fear of God into British hearts. But in the continuing re-invention of American politics, Al Gore's Democratic Party has metamorphosed into America' s own Hizbollah. Here at the Democratic National Convention in America's Sodom, Tinseltown, the party ticket formally now says Gore-Lieberman, but it is quite clear that the Democrats are fielding the Holy Trinity of Gore, Lieberman and God. In his first joint appearance with Al Gore in Nashville, Tennessee, Senator Joe Lieberman, who is an Orthodox Jew, mentioned God a dozen times. In one remarkable passage he pointed out that the saintly Al Gore has a hot line not, as you might imagine, to the Kremlin, but to the Man Upstairs. "He has never, never wavered in his responsibilities as a father, as a husband and yes, as a servant of God Almighty," Senator Lieberman told his audience. [The Independent, 19 August 2000]
• This culture of victims, like most things American, is spreading to Europe and beyond. In one variant, what the art critic Robert Hughes calls 'linguistic Lourdes', all pain is supposed to be healed by changing the words to soften the meaning. It begins innocently, with polite euphemisms. Jeff Woodward in Dayton said he was 'phased out' after a company take-over. Other workers said they were 'downsized' or 'rightsized'. People who were once 'handicapped' are now 'challenged', though their problems remain the same. This is the beginning of Alice In Wonderland-speak where nothing is 'right' or 'wrong' any more, only 'appropriate' or 'inappropriate'. … Yet the number one fact about America's culture of victims is that it cannot possibly coexist with common sense. [Death Of The American Hero, The Culture Of Victims, 1997]
• During the 1993 siege of David Koresh's compound in Texas, I travelled to Waco airport to meet the family of a British member of Koresh's Branch Dividian cult. I knew that the father was flying to Texas in the hope of rescuing his son from the compound. I was told the man was middle-aged, black, and from the English Midlands, but I had no other description. While I stood at the airport with other British journalists waiting for the flight to arrive, a white American television reporter, who had also been tipped off about the incoming relative, sidled up to me.
  "How will you recognise him?" she asked.
  "Well, he is British and black," I replied.
  "Oh," she said, "he is African-American."
  It is now regarded as politically correct to refer to black Americans and 'African-American'. But this was a British man who happened to be black.
  "No," I protested, amused at the mistake. "The man is not African-American. He is British."
  "But," the reporter persisted, "you said he was African American."
  "No. I said he was British and black."
  There was an embarrassed silence as, slowly, the last glimmer of common sense tried to reassert themselves. The journalist was adrift in the new rules, desperate not to offend anyone, yet managing precisely the opposite.
  "Well," she wondered, "could I say he was African-British?"
  Before I could answer, behind me a British voice called sarcastically, "Maybe you should try African-West Indian-British. Just to be on the safe side."
  [Death Of The American Hero, The Culture Of Victims, 1997]

Greg Erwin

• Religion stills a thinking mind.

Leonhard Euler

• When my brain excites in my soul the sensation of a tree, or of a house, I pronounce, without hesitation, that a tree, or a house, really exists out of me, of which I know the place, the size, and other properties. Accordingly, we find neither man nor beast who calls this truth in question. If a peasant should take it into his head to conceive such a doubt, and should say, for example, he dos not believe that his bailiff exists, though he stands in his presence, he would be taken for a madman, and with good reason; but when a philosopher advances such sentiments, he expects we should admire his knowledge and sagacity, which infinitely surpasses the apprehensions of the vulgar. [Refutation Of The Idealists, Letters Of Euler To A German Princess, Vol I, 1796]

Gareth Evans, Medical Genetics Consultant, St. Mary's Hospital, Manchester

• To say that the combination of a technique and newly isolated gene represents an inventive step is like saying that America could have been patented when Columbus discovered it using the technique of sailing a ship. [on behalf of the Clinical Genetics Service, letter to MEPs, 15 July 1997]

Morris Farhi

• If we cannot accept the existence of a 'divine power' – 'higher and unseen' – why should we believe that this divinity has control of our destiny and is entitled to obedience, reverence and worship? … we soon realise that the teaching that this divinity controls our destiny and that, therefore, he must be worshipped, has been imposed by the very institutions created around that divinity's persona. … The institution, claiming to base its authority either on its own 'profound understanding of the deity' or on the putative 'direct' (and therefore sacrosanct) teachings received by that deity's luminaries, elevates itself to the status of the deity's representative on earth. Thenceforth, it is the institution which exacts obedience, reverence and worship not only to the deity, but also, and particularly, to the institution itself and to its functionaries. [God Save Us From Religion!, Free Expression Is No Offence, 2005]

Dr. Frederic William Farrar

• If miracles be incredible, Christianity is false. If Christ wrought no miracles, then the Gospels are untrustworthy. [Witness Of History To Christ]

James K. Feibleman

• A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes. [Understanding Philosophy, 1973]

Niall Ferguson

• The United States is the empire that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial, and US denial of this poses a real danger to the world. An empire that doesn't recognise its own power is a dangerous one. … how can you not be an empire and maintain 750 military bases in three-quarters of the countries on earth? … The Americans simply don't believe they are there. But since they annexed the Philippines in 1898, they have acted as an imperial power. … conquest as a form of liberation, of building an empire of democracy, is not new. Britain did it too in its liberal heyday. What we are looking at is a second Anglophonic empire similar in many ways to the first, and that has to be recognised. [The Guardian, 02 June 2003]

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

• Now the corporations claim intellectual property rights in food as a reward for their investment in GM research. Vadana Shiva has launched a judicial challenge against RiceTec corporation's claim to patent Basmati rice, "which," she points out, "women farmers in my valley have been growing for centuries". Monsanto-owned companies have patented seed, genetically engineered so that it does not germinate on harvest, leaving farmers at the mercy of the company for the renewal of their crop. … Poor people in the west, deluded into over-spending on the fat-rich, starch-heavy, quick-energy fixes supplied by the junk-food industry, suffer from a modern form of malnutrition. Like the peasants at the other end of the industrialised food-chain, they are victims of the system. … Fast food and febrile routines atomise mealtimes: different family members choose to eat different things at different times. Microwave technology rends households. People radiate their packaged pap then withdraw to eat it alone, nerdy-eyed, in front of their personal screens. The companionship of the common table, which has helped to bond humans in collaborative living for at least 150,000 years, is in danger of reversal. [The Guardian, 24 May 2003]

Francisco Ferrer

• Let no more gods or exploiters be served. Let us learn rather to love one another. [final will written on the wall of his prison cell in Barcelona, 1909]
• When the masses become better informed about science, they will feel less need for help form supernatural Higher Powers. The need for religion will end when man becomes sensible enough to govern himself.

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

• There is no God, it is clear as the sun and as evident as the day that there is no God, and still more that there can be none.
• Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. [The Essence Of Christianity]

Richard Feynman

• The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.
• It's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
• For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
• It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvellous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined!
• 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 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.
• I have argued flying saucers with lots of people. I was interested in this: they kept arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not.
• 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. [Genius, The Life And Science]
• 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.

W. C. Fields

• They [prayers] 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.

Victoria Finney

• I would love to know why it is, that when confronted by a disaster such as this, God is not responsible. If a wonderful event occurs clearly he is to be thanked. Is it the case that the Christian God is like a child, and for that reason cannot be blamed for this? If he created all with a plan, then obviously he has caused this. [commenting on the Indonesian tsunami, BBC News Magazine, 03 January 2005]

Camille Flammarion

• Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.

Antony Flew

• Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakeably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever. [The Presumption Of Atheism]
• If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic. So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition. [The Presumption Of Atheism]
• 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 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?"

Panama Floyd

• Why does every human society have religion in it's culture? The same reason every baby has shit in it's diaper. It is a wonderful creature with a great potential, but it needs to grow up a little first. [alt.atheism, 07 August 2006]

George W. Foote

• It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible.
• The man who worships a tyrant in heaven naturally submits his neck to the yoke of tyrants on earth.
• Atheists are often charged with blasphemy, but it is a crime they cannot commit … When the Atheist examines, denounces, or satirises the gods, he is not dealing with persons but with ideas. He is incapable of insulting God, for he does not admit the existence of any such being … We attack not a person but a belief, not a being but an idea, not a fact but a fancy. [Who Are The Blasphemers?, Flowers Of Freethought]

Henry Ford

• I have learned through the years a good deal about wages. I believe in the first place that, all other considerations aside, our own sales depend in a measure upon the wages we pay. If we can distribute high wages, then that money is going to be spent and it will serve to make storekeepers and distributors and manufacturers and workers in other lines more prosperous and their prosperity will be reflected in our sales. [My Life And Work]

Clayton Forno

• Saying the second law of thermodynamics means evolution can't happen is like saying the theory of gravity means birds can't fly.

Jodie Foster

• 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. [on her role as Dr. Eleanor Arroway in the film of Carl Sagan's novel Contact, Vancouver's Georgia Strait, 10 July 1997]

Anatole France

• If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

France Soir

• It is necessary to crush once again the infamous thing, as Voltaire liked to say. This religious intolerance that accepts no mockery, no satire, no ridicule. We citizens of secular and democratic societies are summoned to condemn a dozen caricatures judged offensive to Islam. Summoned by who? By the Muslim Brotherhood, by Syria, the Islamic Jihad, the interior ministers of Arab countries, the Islamic Conferences – all paragons of tolerance, humanism and democracy. So, we must apologise to them because the freedom of expression they refuse, day after day, to each of their citizens, faithful or militant, is exercised in a society that is not subject to their iron rule. It's the world upside down. No, we will never apologise for being free to speak, to think and to believe. Because these self-proclaimed doctors of law have made this a point of principle, we have to be firm. They can claim whatever they like but we have the right to caricature Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, Yahve and all forms of theism. It's called freedom of expression in a secular country. [Editorial, 01 February 2006]

Victor Frankl

• Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one's belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one's right to believe, and obey, his own conscience. [The Will To Meaning]

Benjamin Franklin

• Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
• The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. [Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758]
• Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
• 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. [Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion, 20 November 1728]
• Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor safety. [11 November 1755]

Frederick the Great

• Religion is the idol of the mob: it adores everything it does not understand. [letter to Voltaire, 06 July 1737]

Jonathan Freedland

• No politician can utter a word that seems to question the armed services: so Kerry does not mention the Abu Ghraib scandal. Next is 9/11, which has been all but sanctified in American discourse. Because of that event, the US has re-imagined itself as a victim nation: witness the yellow-ribbon bumperstickers, usually bearing the slogan "Support America". (Ribbons were previously reserved for the suffering: red for Aids, pink for breast cancer.) As a result, any action taken in the name of 9/11 cannot be questioned. Oppose the Patriot Act, with its restrictions on civil liberties, and you are a friend of the terrorists – and, if you are a Democratic congressional candidate, Republicans will air TV ads against you placing your face alongside that of Osama bin Laden. Show concern for international opinion, and you are some kind of traitor. Kerry spoke French to a Haitian audience in Florida on Monday, the first time he had done so in public for many months: even to appear to have links with the outside world is a negative in today's politics, which has become all about America first. All this is partly caused by, and certainly reinforces, that gut feeling of certainty that animates today's American right. Bill Clinton used to joke that when Democrats are in the White House, they think they are renting it. Republicans believe they own the place. [The Guardian, 20 October 2004]
• The scale of British giving has been moving, especially acts of kindness by those with least to spare: cleaners or pensioners or the unemployed donating sums that either took a week to earn or were a week's keep. People have drawn a legitimate pride in this and in the public's outpacing of government, whose earliest pledge of £1m looked so paltry. Ministers increased that to £50m … hardly overwhelming. Others have pointed out the contrast between that contribution, even if it rises to, say, £100m, and the £6bn the UK government found so readily for the war on Iraq. … The major companies doubtless feel proud of their generosity. They shouldn't. They should be ashamed. Vodafone announced it would be giving £1m … the company made substantially more than a million pounds an hour. … BP gave a healthy looking £1.6m: … profits for 2004 weigh in at £9bn. … Tesco … with annual profits of £1.7bn, it only managed to give an anaemic £100,000. … According to the Charities Aid Foundation, the wealthiest 10% of UK income earners give just 0.7% of their household expenditure to charity, while the poorest 10% allocate 3% of theirs. … Maybe we ought to turn to the big companies and say: you can no longer have it both ways. Either you give as generously as we do – or we will take it off you in tax. Either way, it's time to start paying. [The Guardian, 05 January 2005]
• The Palestinian-Israeli conflict affects Palestinians and Israelis profoundly, but it does not begin to explain the dire state of today's Arab and Muslim world, nor why it has spent decades languishing in economic stagnation and political suffocation. The Saudi royal family does not behead criminals because of Israel; Syria did not slaughter thousands of its own people in 1982 because of Israel; Afghanistan is not in the dark ages because of Israel. Of course, the governments of those countries would like their peoples to think precisely that – that Israel is the satanic force responsible for all their woes. "Don't look at us, with all our corruption and incompetence; it's Israel's fault!" has been the cry of rotting dictatorships from Algeria to Iran. That's why their state-controlled presses are full of cartoons that could come straight from the Nazi press of the 1930s. Check out the Steve Bell slot in Egypt's al-Ahali: a regular procession of hooked-nosed, fanged Jews, their hands dripping in blood. In the absence of a free press, it's perhaps understandable that the people of those closed societies have fallen for this diversionary tactic by their rulers. But western liberals have no such excuse. We should know better than to fall prey to what amounts to a latter-day socialism of fools. When August Bebel first coined that phrase a century ago, he was urging German workers not to be duped into hating Jews when their real foe was capitalism. Today's brand of anti-Israelism risks becoming a new socialism of fools – blaming the Jewish state for the Islamic world's troubles, rather than the vast, structural malaise afflicting that region. Progressives should not let up the pressure on Israel for a just settlement: two secure states, sharing Jerusalem as their capital. They should do that because it will bring justice to those two peoples and some symbolic balm to bruised Arab and Muslim pride. But it's a dangerous delusion to imagine such a breakthrough will address what the Muslim-American intellectual, Fareed Zakaria, calls "the political, economic and cultural collapse that lies at the roots of Arab rage". That is a task that will take decades, cost billions and demand tectonic change for hundreds of millions of people. There are no magic short cuts, not even via the holy land. [The Guardian, 17 October 2001]

Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy

• The great irony is that, if they could but see it, Christian and Islamic Fundamentalists are the same people. Their vision of life and how to live it is driven by the same needs and neuroses. What they hate in each other is a projection of what they hate in themselves. If fate had birthed them in the other culture they would be Fundamentalists of the other persuasion. [Jesus And The Goddess, 2001]
• It is Literalists who fight wars of religion with Literalists from other traditions, each claiming that God is on their side. Literalists' enmity also extends to Gnostics within their own tradition who question their bigotry. Most spiritual traditions have a tragic history of the brutal oppression of Gnostics by intolerant Literalists. Interestingly, it is never the other way around. [Jesus And The Goddess, 2001]
• Above all, however, Literalist Christianity's success was due to one great quality it had from the beginning and continues to foster – intolerance. This is not a quirk of history, it is a logical by-product of taking the Jesus story as historical fact. Paganism and Gnosticism were inherently tolerant because they were based on myths. Different cults believed in different myths, but this didn't mean they were in opposition to each other. Plurality was acceptable because what mattered most was the inner meaning, not the particular expression. But intolerance in inherent in Literalism. If Jesus is the one and only Son of God who requires the faithful to acknowledge this as historical fact, then Christianity must be in opposition to all other religions who do not teach this. Moreover, if all unbelievers are to be damned for eternity it becomes the moral duty of Literalist Christians to spread their beliefs, by force if necessary, to save as many souls as possible, even if it means destroying their bodies to do so. The Roman Church's attacks upon Paganism and Gnosticism were a religious crusade, a God-given duty. Self-righteous intolerance had become holy. [The Jesus Mysteries, 1999]
• 21^st Century Gnosticism :

  Original sin.

  That's such a bad idea. Let's never again tell our children they've been born bad and reassure them instead that they are naturally good.

  The Bible is the word of God.

  Ridiculous idea.

  There is only one way to God.

  Obvious nonsense.

  The Day of Judgement and the resurrection of the flesh.

  Spooky ideas.

  The world is a bad place and we should hate it.

  In the face of the wonders all around us that's just ungrateful.

  Eternal damnation.

  Horrible, grotesque, really, really bad idea.

  God likes some people more than others.

  Please! What sort of God is that?

  Sex is evil.

  If you believe this you must be doing it wrong.

  God is male.

  What could that possibly mean? Does God have a penis?

  Men are more spiritual than women.

  This idea must have been thought up by a man who never had a mother.

  God has opinions – and only some people know what they are.

  That's got to be one of the worst ideas ever, because it is regularly used to justify a whole edifice of bad ideas.

  Jesus And The Goddess, 2001

Sigmund Freud

• Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis. [The Future Of An Illusion, 1927
• Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man. [New York Times Magazine, 06 May 1956]
• In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
• Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. [Civilization And Its Discontents]
• 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. [The Future Of An Illusion, 1927]

Johann P. Fritz, Director, International Press Institute

• The growing acceptance of this phrase ["defamation of religions"] at the international level has worrying implications for freedom of the media. In a conference in mid-July hosted by the OSCE, I warned that the UN's willingness to use the word 'defamation' in conjunction with religion remains a lingering concern. It could provide suitable legal cover and justification for several countries wishing to introduce fresh blasphemy laws. If this were to happen the media would find it increasingly difficult to comment upon religious principles, religious practices and even religious leaders. While I accept that journalists should be tolerant of religion and, when necessary, express themselves sensitively, I am very concerned that the 'space' for the media to report critically is gradually being eroded. I am also worried that this disturbing trend is being aided and abetted by governments and inter-governmental organisations who share the view that the news media are playing a role in encouraging and promoting terrorism. Xenophobia and racism should be rightfully condemned at every possible opportunity. However, in the argument about their impact on the promotion of terrorism, it seems that press freedom and freedom of expression are being increasingly ignored to the detriment of all who believe that a critical media has a role to play in democratic societies. [IPI Public Statement, 29 September 2006]

Erich Fromm

• Once a doctrine, however irrational, has gained power in a society, millions of people will believe it rather than feel ostracised and isolated. [An Analysis Of Some Types Of Religious Experience]
• If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated. [Man For Himself, 1947]
• Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race, or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human.
• 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.

Northrop Frye

• The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones. [Theory Of Archetypal Meaning, Anatomy Of Criticism, 1957]

J. William Fulbright

• We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts.

Robert W. Funk

• If the evidence supports the historical accuracy of the gospels, where is the need for faith? And if the historical reliability of the gospels is so obvious, why have so many scholars failed to appreciate the incontestable nature of the evidence? [Honest To Jesus, 1996]

Matilda Joslyn Gage

• The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world's civilization.
• The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it. [Woman, Church And State, 1893]

Galileo Galilei

• It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved. [The Authority Of Scripture In Philosophical Controversies
• In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
• I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations. [The Authority Of Scripture In Philosophical Controversies]
• I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forego their use.
• 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. [The Authority Of Scripture In Philosophical Controversies]
• They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbour, no matter how unjustly. … Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit… [1615]
• To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover. [The Authority Of Scripture In Philosophical Controversies]

Mohandas Gandhi

• The principle of an eye for an eye will some day make the whole world blind.
• Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
• You may hit me, beat me, even kill me, and then you will have my dead body, not my cooperation.
• The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives. [Young India, 1927]
• Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism… true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the centre. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.
• We are constantly being astonished at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt-of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence.
• It is not a mistake to commit a mistake, for no one commits a mistake knowing it to be one. But it is a mistake not to correct the mistake after knowing it to be one. If you are afraid of committing a mistake, you are afraid of doing anything at all. You will correct your mistakes whenever you find them.

Manuel García

• To criticize religion is unkind, like ridiculing a child's thumb sucking and security blanket. Then why discuss it, since for many, discussion is equivalent to critique? Because concepts of God are at the root of attitudes about community, security and power, and these in turn affect our shared external reality – country. Church and State, God and Country, they are never far apart. The ideal would be to keep our Gods contained within ourselves so they do not destroy what we enjoy together. Reality is otherwise. … Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. [Swans.com, 17 January 2005]
• Rationality will often undermine religions belief, and this is a good thing when the rationality leads away from superstition, bigotry, cruelty and ignorance. Examples of rationality lifting humanity above religiously-induced backwardness would have to include the absence of witch-burning, the advance in human thought sparked by the recognition of biological evolution, birth-control technology, condom use for AIDS prevention, and advances in women's health-care and more equitable participation in economic activity. Most of these advances still find opposition by religious leaders of Christianity and Islam. … Religious belief in and of itself has no social value. It may have a particular personal value, but note that it is the morality of the individual and not his/her religiousness that has social impact. This is "the separation of church and state" at a personal level; you can believe what you want, it is how you act that touches us all. There is no logical connection between religion and morality, though many influenced by religious marketing imagine this to be so. … Religion does not automatically make people moral. Neither does rationality, but it is more likely have that effect in social evolution. The American government under the G. W. Bush Administration is an example of a thoroughly immoral entity of excessive religiosity. Objectively, one sees blatant dishonesty, criminality, the theft of public resources abetted by cronyism and influence peddling, and a bald appeal to white-power bigotry and greed in all aspect of government operations. In short, capitalism as the piracy by selected elites operates at the expense of a nation, and is justified to the public with appeals to the irrational: be afraid, sink into bigotry, sink into greed and fear of material loss, sink into religion, but above all don't think and especially don't socialize your thinking – or opposition. … So yes, religion is a mental disease when it curtails human potential. [Counterpunch, 22 September 2005]

Helen H. Gardener

• Every injustice that has ever been fastened upon women in a Christian country has been "authorised by the Bible" and riveted and perpetuated by the pulpit. [Men, Women And Gods]
• This religion and the Bible require of woman everything, and give her nothing. They ask her support and her love, and repay her with contempt and oppression. [Men, Women And Gods]

Dan Gardner

• When the Pope says that a few words and some hand-waving causes a cracker to transform into the flesh of a 2,000-year-old man, Dawkins and his fellow travellers say, well, prove it. It should be simple. Swab the Host and do a DNA analysis. If you don't, we will give your claim no more respect than we give to those who say they see the future in crystal balls or bend spoons with their minds or become werewolves at each full moon. And for this, it is Dawkins, not the Pope, who is labelled the unreasonable fanatic on par with faith-saturated madmen who sacrifice children to an invisible spirit. This is completely contrary to how we live the rest of our lives. We demand proof of even trivial claims ("John was the main creative force behind Sergeant Pepper") and we dismiss those who make such claims without proof. We are still more demanding when claims are made on matters that are at least temporarily important ("Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" being a notorious example). So isn't it odd that when claims are made about matters as important as the nature of existence and our place in it we suddenly drop all expectation of proof and we respect those who make and believe claims without the slightest evidence? Why is it perfectly reasonable to roll my eyes when someone makes the bald assertion that Ringo was the greatest Beatle but it is "fundamentalist" and "fanatical" to say that, absent evidence, it is absurd to believe Muhammad was not lying or hallucinating when he claimed to have long chats with God? [The Ottowa Citizen, 05 may 2007]

Bill Gates

• We need to put the power to prevent HIV in the hands of women. This is true whether the woman is a faithful married mother of small children or a sex worker trying to scrape out a living in a slum. No matter where she lives or what she does, a woman should never need her partner's permission to save her own life. [16th International Aids Conference, Toronto, 13 August 2006]

Melinda Gates

• In the fight against Aids, condoms save lives. If you oppose the distribution of condoms, something is more important to you than saving lives. [16th International Aids Conference, Toronto, 13 August 2006] Saving 'sinners' and souls for God?

Henry George

• No theory is too false, no fable too absurd, no superstition too degrading for acceptance when it has become embedded in common belief. Men will submit themselves to torture and to death, mothers will immolate their children at the bidding of beliefs they thus accept.

André Gide

• Christianity, above all, consoles; but there are naturally happy souls who do not need consolation. Consequently, Christianity begins by making such souls unhappy, for otherwise it would have no power over them. [journal entry, 10 October 1893]

Terry Gilliam

• With Life of Brian we were vilified by Christians. Yet Christianity is alive and well. Come on, if your religion is so vulnerable that a little bit of disrespect is going to bring it down, it's not worth believing in, frankly. [The Independent, 18 January 2005]

John Stuart Glennie

• In ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, we find the worship of a divine mother and child. In ancient Osirianism as in modern Christianism, there is a doctrine of atonement. In ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, we find the vision of a last judgment, and resurrection of the body. And finally, in ancient Osirianism, as in modern Christianism, the sanctions of morality are a lake of fire and torturing demons on the one hand, and on the other, eternal life in the presence of God. [Christ And Osiris]

Emma Goldman

• Resistance to tyranny is man's highest ideal.
• The most violent element in society is ignorance.
• The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
• Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society. [The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth, April 1913]
• The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
• Real wealth consists of things of utility and beauty, in things that help create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. [Red Emma Speaks]
• Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name. [The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth, April 1913]
• The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond. [The Philosophy of Atheism, Mother Earth, 1916]
• I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made. [speaking from a pulpit in Detroit, 1898]
• The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.
• The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done. [The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth, 1913]
• Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man.
• 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. [The Philosophy of Atheism, Mother Earth, 1916]
• 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 it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations. Such is the logic of patriotism. [Patriotism – A Menace To Liberty]
• Whether I do or do not entirely agree with these iconoclasts [Nietzsche & Stirner], I believe, with them, that Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day. Indeed, never could society have degenerated to its present appalling stage, if not for the assistance of Christianity. The rulers of the earth have realised long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun. [The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth, April 1913]
• Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it. The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven. [The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth, April 1913]
• Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. 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. The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that, from early infancy, the mind of the child is poisoned with bloodcurdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamouring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition. It is for that purpose that America has within a short time spent four hundred million dollars. Just think of it – four hundred million dollars taken from the produce of the people. [Patriotism – A Menace To Liberty]

Gora

• Hallucinations and illusions are not facts useful for scientific investigation.

Stephen J. Gould

• The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning. [The Mismeasure Of Man]
• A real world regulated by genuine causes exists "out there" in nature, independent of our perceptions (even though we can only access this external reality through our senses and mental operations). [I Have Landed: The End Of A Beginning In Natural History]
• The fundamentalists, by knowing the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science – or of any honest intellectual inquiry. [Bully for Brontosaurus]
• 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.
• 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. [Life, December 1988]
• 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 characterise the ideas of their opponents. [The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 1987]
• 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 honourable 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? [The Skeptical Inquirer]
• Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered. [Science and Creationism, 1984]

Remy de Gourmont

• God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.

Ulysses S. Grant

• Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separate. [1875]

Muriel Gray

• The argument for and against compulsory ID cards has so far focused mainly on the delicate relationship between state and citizen, concentrating on the very real potential for the government to betray our trust and covertly use the information for its increasingly barking mad purposes. What has been ignored, however, is that the inevitable commercial and practical implications of a compulsory card will have consequences just as far-reaching as the MI5 man being able to idly scan your hospital appointments to see when your warts were burned off. … The "innocent have nothing to hide" cliche implies that it is only the guilty who wish to deceive, to be deeply secretive, when in fact the innocent also have plenty of valid reasons to wish to do so. Since it will be the commercial demands for the proof of identity that will bring about the practical and daily curtailment of freedom, the government will be able to hold up its hands in mock horror and say: "But we never insisted you show your ID card to join a health club or buy a TV set." Yeah, right. Ironically, criminals will be ably assisted by the ID card, which they will doubtless forge with great skill. Meanwhile those of us who like our secrets kept will be exposed by market forces when they bully us to conform. The innocent have much to hide. It's called a private life. [The Guardian, 02 July 2005]

A. C. Grayling

• It should by now be a commonplace, though alas it is not, that the right response to attempts by violent enemies to coerce our society, is to reassert the very liberties and values that make them attack us in the first place. To restrict ourselves out of fear of what they might do is to give them the victory they seek. If they were able to impose their will on our society, they would deprive us of many of the liberties distinctive of a Western democracy. Why do it to ourselves? And one of the first would be free speech. It scarcely needs iterating that the only way to deal with speech that one disagrees with or finds offensive, as with all forms of hate speech, is more free speech in response: that is, refutation, argument, rebuttal, countering the offensive speech and showing why it is wrong. … Freedom of speech is one of the two cornerstones of individual liberty, the other being due process at law. Without free speech it is impossible to give and receive information, debate important matters of opinion, take a responsible and informed part in political processes, stand up for one's rights, defend one's interests or the interests of those for whom one feels concern, and hold authority to account. Democracy is impossible without it. It is the basis of a free press and an independent legal framework. Any diminution of free speech is a diminution of this entire interdependent apparatus of freedom. … The central fallacy in the proposed religious hatred law is its claim to capture a genuine parallel to racial hatred. It does not. Religion is a matter of choice, ethnicity is not. In practice the vast majority of people have the religion they do as an accident of birth and therefore as a result of indoctrination in childhood. People can choose to leave a religion, adopt another, or have none at all, whereas they cannot adopt or leave an ethnicity. That is why laws against racism make sense, whereas a law against anti-religious sentiment is in fact an absurdity. To see this, consider how absurd it would be to provide protections to people on the grounds of their self-selected membership of a group that, for example, claims to believe in fairies or to worship Martians. In principle there is no difference between such imaginary groups and the major religions, other than the fact that the latter are well-organised long-standing interest groups which, in the present circumstances of an upsurge in their assertiveness, have a grossly disproportionate access to the current government's ear. … One might ask why subscribers to one or another religious outlook are different from politicians, despite also in effect choosing to remain in that religion; why are they so thin-skinned that they cannot bear what others say about them? Why are they thought to be so insecure in their outlook that they must be protected from the disagreement, opposition or contempt of others? … there are already effective remedies against verbal and physical attack, provided by the common law offences of assault and battery. This makes the proposed measure incomprehensible; why does there have to be a special crime of 'religious hatred' to protect people from what they are already protected from? [Index On Censorship, 4/2005]

TheGreatRonRafferty

• In the very narrowest, tunnel vision sense, vetting might be a very, very tiny help in fighting easy access to children by paedophiles. But it is tiny for several reasons. Paedophiles have to start somewhere. The vetting does not, and never will find paedophiles before their first actions, obviously. A point missed by all pro-vetting campaigners. Then there's the rule of unintended consequences. These campaigners can give you the law as it is written (and it isn't written very well). Like all laws, the general public will take the headline broad brush view - and so will most organisations. Forget the "get out" clauses, most ordinary citizens, and most organisations will simply rely on the rule of thumb: If you have contact with children as a volunteer, or car driver, you have to be registered. Full stop. That means lots of clubs, volunteering, and helpful car sharing will disappear. And of course, if you have the opportunity to help a child and risk a massive fine for yourself and the organisation, you're not going to do the helping. Children won't get lifts, so they'll be left to walk home - perhaps on a dark night, when they could well die in a road accident, be struck by lightning, or - dare I say it - be attacked by one of the paedophiles that apparently hide behind every bush. Of course, there'll be no figures proving the "success" or otherwise of the scheme, though it will be announced as a great success in preventing access by 20,000 extra adults. The loss of positive interaction by several million in formal or informal settings will not be raised. Poor kids that they have to have a life ruined by these do-gooders. [Vetting Keeps Our Children Safe, The Guardian, 12 September 2009]
• What are we doing to children? In times gone by, not all that long ago, there used to be lots of interaction between adults and children. Adults would keep an eye on everyone's children and help them out where necessary, but it was more than that. I well remember sitting fascinated with painters as they showed me how they could swing a paint bucket round without spilling a drop; had the "highly responsible" job of lighting the paraffin warning lights for builders as they rebuilt a roadside wall; fetched shopping for old ladies who just intercepted me as I walked by, and I profited to the tune of sixpence or thereabouts; I was taken for rides all round the county by the local florist as he made deliveries in one of the few cars in the village; played football with loads of other children aged 4 to 16 whilst we waited hopefully for our friend - a steelworker - to return off the 10-6 shift because he joined in and settled all disputes. Then when I was a bit older, I did what most children did, and some still do … I latched on to an adult and learned much from him about cricket, football, housebuilding (or rather demolition as I helped him demolish part of his house. In other words, there was a NATURAL relationship between adults and children. But there's nothing at all natural about suggesting that every adult a child comes into contact with has some kind of sexual desire for them. The intention to stop all contact with adults unless it is officially sanctioned and approved harms ALL children in an effort to prevent a very, very few suffering at the hands of strangers, instead of their parents. In the UK, almost uniquely, we are raising generations of children in a way no other children in the country's history have been raised, and possibly like no other children in any other country are raised. Poor, poor, kids. What have we done? What is our government doing to them? And was this really all from the Soham Report which (it seems to me) completely missed the most significant point of all? [Should Vetting Be Barred?, The Guardian, 11 September 2009]

Green Party policy

• RR501 The age of consent should be the same for everyone irrespective of their sexual orientation. It should be 16 years of age.
• RR503 Sexual orientation shall not affect the decision whether or not to employ, promote or discharge any individual. When assessing a person's work, their sexual orientation is of no consequence in their ability to undertake the work required.
• RR550 The Green Party believes that the law should not seek to regulate consensual sexual activities between adults where those do not affect others. Where there are such effects, a balance must be reached. Adults should be free to do as they wish with their own bodies, and to practice whatever form of sexual activity they wish by themselves or with each other by mutual consent. This includes the freedom not only to engage in such sexual acts, but also to be photographed or filmed doing so, to make such images available to other adults with their consent, and to be able to view such images. That someone might receive payment for any of these activities should not affect this freedom.
• RR600 The legal offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel should be abolished.

Ruth Hurmence Green

• It is possible to pull out justification for imposing your will on others, simply by calling your will God's will. [What I Found When I 'Searched the Scriptures', The Book of Ruth, 1982]
• If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admiration, what types of human behaviour can be presented to them as reprehensible? [The Born-Again Skeptic's Guide To The Bible]
• Christians tell me that they have a higher destiny than the lower animals, because Homo Sapiens can reason. But the Bible tells me that this gift of reason, which they call god-given, may be the match that lights the fires of hell for all who dare to use it, since whatever is not of faith is sin. [What I Found When I 'Searched the Scriptures', The Book of Ruth, 1982]
• To preserve a guess born of imagination and fantasy in the Holy Book of Christianity, presenting it as the revealed Word of God, all to be taken on faith, is an insult to the intelligence and reasoning ability of members of societies which might be expected to have undergone some scientific advancement over a period of several thousand years, and comprises just one of the many absurd impositions of the Bible. [The Born Again Skeptic's Guide To The Bible]
• The plan was for Jesus to come to Earth two thousand years ago with a pocketful of miracles and souls for the people who were then alive. After his return to heaven from Earth (it is about twelve septillion miles from Earth to the edge of our galaxy with four hundred billion suns to dodge) he is going to build those mansions, come back before his generation dies out, finally put an end to the world which has been such a rotten disappointment, and deposit most of these souls in hell. No wonder heaven is only 12,000 furlongs wide, long, and high. [What I Found When I 'Searched the Scriptures', The Book of Ruth, 1982]
• Suppose you had never heard of Christianity, and that next Sunday morning a stranger standing in a pulpit told you about a book whose authors could not be authenticated and whose contents, written hundreds of years ago, included blood-curdling legends of slaughter and intrigue and fables about unnatural happenings such as virgin births, devils that inhabit bodies and talk, people rising from the dead and ascending live into the clouds, and suns that stand still. Suppose he then asked you to believe that an uneducated man described in that book was a god who could get you into an eternal fantasy-place called heaven, when you die. Would you as an intelligent rational person even bother to read such nonsense, let alone pattern your entire life upon it? [A Born Again Skeptics Guide to the Bible]

Kate Greenaway

• It is strange beyond anything I can think to be able to believe in any of the known religions.

Graham Greene

• Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought. [1981]

Edward J. Greenfield, Supreme Court Justice, New York

• Faith is the antithesis of proof. [1995]

A. Whitney Griswold

• Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. [Essays On Education]
• In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education. [Essays On Education]

Nigel de Gruchy, General Secretary, National Association Of Schoolmasters Union Of Women Teachers

• The only justification Blair gave when challenged was that they got good academic results – but what's the point of having better educated bigots? [speaking of the state-funded Emmanuel College in Gateshead which promotes creationism, 18 March 2002]

Nino Guerreiro, Portugese Workers' Association

• Look, never mind the questions of nationality and justice, let's say you don't care about social tension either, think about this at the most basic. selfish level. Treating people like this is not a good idea. We are forcing people to live in squalor, in bad housing with wages so low that cannot live. They are bound to be ill. Bad housing and bad diets – these are the sort of conditions that before the war sustained TB. These are the people who are cleaning your salad. [Not On The Label, Felicity Lawrence, 2004]

D. Dale Gulledge

• I am treated as evil by people who claim that they are being oppressed because they are not allowed to force me to practice what they do.

Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama

• We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don't stand up to experimentation, Buddha's own words must be rejected. [Time, 11 April 1988]

Larry Haftl

• Disbelief in religions does not constitute a religion any more than disbelief in UFOs constitutes a space program.

Edward Everett Hale

• I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.

J. B. S. Haldane

• Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. [Possible Worlds, 1927]

E. Haldeman-Julius

• The fear of gods and devils is never anything but a pitiable degradation of the human mind. [The Meaning Of Atheism]
• Commonly, those who have professed the strongest motives of love of a God have demonstrated the deepest hatred toward human joy and liberty. [The Meaning Of Atheism]
• 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. [The Meaning Of Atheism]
• 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". [The Meaning Of Atheism]
• 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. [The Meaning Of Atheism]
• 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. [The Outline Of Bunk]
• 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 realise 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. [The Meaning Of Atheism]

Garrett Hardin

• Why don't we teach astrology in the schools? Astrology holds that the course of each human life is determined to a considerable degree by the position of the stars in the sky at the exact moment of the individual's birth. Belief in it, in one variant or another, has probably been held by most of the people on earth. Even today, some universities in India offer degrees in the subject. Yet American believers do not pressure boards of education to add their subject to the curriculum. If believers in astrology became as well organised as the creationists, it is hard to see how their demands could be withstood. [Science And Creationism, 1984]

Dr Taj Hargey

• I will give £5 to anyone in Britain who wants to live under Sharia law. It will help pay for their ticket to Sudan, Yemen, Pakistan, or wherever it is customary to live under Sharia law. Please, please go and leave us alone. This is Britain, not 10th century Arabia! … I know I am a Muslim in my heart and my actions, not in my beard or the niqab face mask. The niqab only comes from a hadith and even that only refers to the Prophet's wives. This is a big fight for the hearts and minds of Islam. There is nothing in the Koran that is incompatible with (living in) British society. … But we do need a reformation in Islam. We have to go back to the pristine principles in our faith. We need a British Islam and by that I do not mean a compromise. Christianity was once an alien faith. We have to integrate in a matter of decades rather than centuries. I have called for Bush and Blair to be indicted at the international criminal court for their wars. What kind of stooge does that make me? We have a multicultural community of men and women, including converts. We are not fanatics and appeal to a very broad constituency. We do not appeal to those who have been brainwashed by the mullahs. [Daily Mail, 30 April 2009]

Johann Hari

• All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him. I don't respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of "prejudice" or "ignorance", but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal. … But when the religious are challenged, there is no evidence for them to consult. By definition, if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in the absence of evidence. Nobody has "faith" that fire hurts, or Australia exists; they know it, based on proof. But it is psychologically painful to be confronted with the fact that your core beliefs are based on thin air, or on the empty shells of revelation or contorted parodies of reason. It's easier to demand the source of the pesky doubt be silenced. But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs - but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence. [Why Should I Respect These Oppressive Religions?, The Indepentent, 28 January 2009]
• The central insight of the Enlightenment is that there are two fundamentally different ways to understand the world. One is divine revelation, where a being contacts you from another realm and discloses some truth. (Another word for this is 'hallucination'). The second method is reason – observing the world empirically, and drawing conclusions from the things we observe. The ultimate expression of reason is the scientific method. These approaches are fundamentally contrasting, and you cannot simply weld them together with contorted theological trickery. By claiming that divine revelation leads to reason – indeed, is its central underpinning – Ratzinger is subtly attacking the core principles of the Enlightenment. There is nothing we can observe in the world that leads us rationally to conclude a magical creature created it. But Ratzinger wants to be able to claim the fruits of the Enlightenment, like science, without following its basic principles. … Of course, none of Ratzinger's lies justify threats of violence against him. For decades now, he has been saying atheists have "no morality" and are "depraved", and that homosexuality is "an objective disorder" and "evil" – far worse insults than last week's cagey, quickly-retracted half-slur on Muslims – and it never occurred to us to respond by attacking Catholic children or nuns working with the starving. We mocked the sex advice of an elderly virgin, gave money to aid agencies trying to correct his poisonous lies, and got on with our lives. The cool balm of reason is the way to put down God's most rabid Rottweiler – not the furious fire of a parallel fundamentalism. [The Independent, 21 September 2006]

Rt. Rev. Richard Harries

• Historians of science note how quickly the late Victorian Christian public accepted evolution. It is therefore quite extraordinary that 140 years later, after so much evidence has accumulated, that a school in Gateshead is opposing evolutionary theory on alleged biblical grounds. Do some people really think that the worldwide scientific community is engaged in a massive conspiracy to hoodwink the rest of us? … This attempt to see the Book of Genesis as a rival to scientific truth [also] stops people taking the Bible seriously. Biblical literalism brings not only the Bible but Christianity itself into disrepute. [speaking of the state funded Emmanuel College in Gateshead which promotes creationism, March 2002]

Lee Harris

• We were all brought up in a world in which it was safe to speak our minds – safe both for us, and for the other members of our community. There was a tacit compact by which we all agreed to play by the same set of rules. I could say pretty much whatever I wanted to say, provided I allowed you the same liberty. Furthermore, I agreed that I would not become too upset if you offended me, provided you agreed that you would not become too upset if I offended you. Of course, most of us would watch what we said, in the interest of not causing others too much offense, but we would not fly off the handle if now and then someone went too far over the line. We might grumble and complain; we might even decide not to speak with the person who offended us, but we would not stab the offender to death, or behead him, or riot in the streets in protest against him, or burn down buildings to indicate to the world the fury of our resentment. [The Weekly Standard, 02/11/2008]

Paul Harris

• The US comprises a small fraction of the world but it sees all the rest of the world – and, for emphasis, ALL the rest of the world – as its servant, its supplier of cheap goods and labour, its warehouse, its flea market, the place to play with its guns. Both Canada and Mexico can reasonably think of the United States as our best friend. But it is also our worst enemy. Indeed, I will argue here that the United States is the enemy of ALL nations. It may be a little tougher for Canada and Mexico because the Beast lives next door, but also a little easier because at least they haven't sent in the troops. Yet. Now, we've all heard the rebuttal that 'not all Americans are like that', and that is certainly true. The US has at least as many decent humans as any other nation, more than many. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]
• Many outside the US have waited patiently for them to outgrow their juvenile delinquency, but they show no sign of maturing. We have waited patiently for the good citizens of the US to corral the bad, but they persist in failing to do so. And now that they are acting out again and threatening the peace and security of the entire planet, it is high time that the rest of us took matters into our own hands. The rest of the world should join hands and shun the United States. America, the country, really does believe it is better than anyone else. That America is entitled to as much of the resources and riches of the planet as it wants and it doesn't matter whomever else might have to suffer or go short. That all other nations are enemies if they don't march to the American drum in virtually any arena you might mention. That it has the right, indeed the obligation, to enforce its will wherever it sees fit, and by whatever means it wants. That it has the right to invade sovereign nations as a way of deflecting attention from domestic political scandals or if there is some new weapon that needs a good field testing. That killing of foreign civilians doesn't really count because they're always in season and there's no quota. That a bullet-ridden and trigger-happy American society is in every way superior to any other place on earth. Astonishingly, Americans as a group have a hard time grasping that other folks might be a little annoyed about all that. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]
• Where the US is unable to win agreement from other countries, it threatens. It starts with gentle remonstrance but the stakes very quickly rise to trade and even military threats: it takes guts to stand up to the US and only a few countries have the clout or temerity to do so (China and Cuba, respectively, come easily to mind). But the reason these difficulties arise in the first place is there is no room in the eyes of the United States for compromise. President Bush again: "Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists." This narrow black-versus-white approach (an appropriate metaphor for the US) allows for no compromise, it permits no neutrality. It is the classic schoolyard bully approach to problem solving. As a further example, consider the American attitude to such concepts as the International Court of Justice. The US refuses to be a part of it because they will not put themselves in the position where someone else has the power to judge them or the activities of their citizens. They believe that international law governs everyone but them: they were quite prepared to judge the Third Reich at Nuremburg and Manuel Noriega (after he finished being useful to them) and Saddam Hussein, and so on, but they refuse to accept that anyone, anywhere, has the right to judge them or one of their citizens. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]
• The US was founded on the principle of democracy, the republican form of democracy, but it has been many years since it practised democracy or even believed that it should. We all know its elections are unfair contests of rich against rich, often with unscrupulous polling practices to ensure the right person wins. And we all know that once elected, the winners are ensconced for the sole purpose of lining their own pockets and those of their backers. Yet the United States strides around the world with the alleged aim of installing 'democracy', by force if necessary, even if the people affected would rather not have it. There is a proselytizing fervour and a missionary zeal with which the US pledges to 'free' the rest of the world. It cannot be stated more clearly that the US interest in other nations is solely as providers of cheap raw materials and labour, and as market places. They are quite content to accept the rule of dictators in those nations who are willingly serving US interests (Saudi Arabia, for instance). The US notion of 'democracy', at least within the current administration, is surely Orwellian, avoiding anything that would allow for a genuine rule of the people. In nominal democracies today there is a huge gap between the ruling elites and the general populace. In this neo-con world, leaders regularly betray campaign promises and the public interest in order to serve the needs of the corporations who ensured their election victories. Nowhere has this reached such a high art form as in the United States. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]
• Today, the US is the most powerful nation on earth in every sense of the word, except moral. The moral authority of the United States comes from the barrel of a gun. It is feared worldwide, even by its friends, and dismayed that others don't unconditionally love it. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]
• The world no longer needs the United States. It is time the world ignored the United States and went about its business without this bully. For much of its history the US has practised a form of isolationism (note its very late entry into World Wars I & II). It is time the rest of the world practised reverse isolationism and locked the US out of the world community so it can do harm only to itself. The US is in serious danger of collapsing on itself; moving it outside the realm of relations with other nations is the only way to ensure that other nations come to no harm when the US finally implodes. And like a miscreant child sent to its room to think about what it has done, there is the possibility that the US will realize it has misbehaved and pledge itself anew to being a better person. But until it does, it should be shunned. [vivelecanada, 20 September 2005]

Richard Harris

• Jesus is just a word I use to swear with.

Sam Harris

• In the year 2002 the GDP in all Arab countries combined did not equal that of Spain. Even more troubling, Spain translates as many books into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic since the ninth century. [The End Of Faith] It doesn't trouble them, of course, for they have a 'perfect' book, so just like William Jennings Bryan all the rest are irrelevant. By the way, if you think Harris' numbers are wrong or he's being disingenuous, then consider this quote from the Arab Human Development Report 2003: "The aggregate total of translated books from the Al-Ma'moon era to the present day amounts to 10,000 books [an average of 10 per year!] – equivalent to what Spain translates in a single year … the average number of books translated per 1 million people in the Arab world during the 5-year period was 4.4 (less than one book for every million Arabs), while in Hungary it was 519, and in Spain 920."
• We've elected a president who can't speak, who is animated by his own religious dogmas, who is beholden to genuine religious lunatics in our own culture, and who has been almost perfectly designed to alienate our allies and enrage our enemies. [Rochester City News, 18 October 2006]
• At this point in their history, give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedom by the root. We should not for a moment lose sight of the possibility that they would curtail our freedoms as well, if they only had the power to do so. [The End Of Faith]
• The irony here is almost a miracle in its own right: the most sexually repressive people found in the world today – people who are stirred to a killing rage by reruns of Baywatch – are lured to martyrdom by a conception of paradise that resembles nothing so much as an al fresco bordello. [The End Of Faith]
• The Saudi Prince Abdullah, for instance – a man who has by no means distinguished himself as a liberal – recently proposed that women should be permitted to drive automobiles in his country. As it turns out, his greatly oppressed people would not stand for this degree of spiritual oppression, and the prince was forced to back down. [The End Of Faith]
• If God sees and knows all things, and remains so provincial a creature as to be scandalised by certain sexual behaviours or states of the brain, then what people do in the privacy of their own homes, though it may not have the slightest implication for their behaviour in public, will still be a matter of public concern for people of faith. [The End Of Faith]
• Notice that no one is ever faulted in our culture for not "respecting" another person's beliefs about mathematics or history. When people have reasons for what they believe, we consider those reasons, and when they are good, we find ourselves believing likewise. When they have no reasons, or bad ones, we dismiss their beliefs as a symptom of ignorance, delusion, or stupidity. Except on matters of religion.
• Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever. [The End Of Faith, 2004]
• Christians think there's something about the Christian tradition and the contents of the Bible that puts the God of Abraham on a completely different footing epistemologically [than Poseidon]. It's a sign that it's very difficult to see your circumstance with fresh eyes when you've been taught from the moment you acquired language that the word "god" means something robust, intelligible, and beyond criticism and these other words are names of mythical figures. [Rochester City News, 18 October 2006]
• We live in a world of unimaginable surprises – from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light's dancing for eons upon the earth – and yet paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn't know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.
• If you truly believe that your neighbour is going to hell for his unbelief, and you believe that his ideas about the world are putting the souls of your children in peril, it is quite sensible to drive him from your community, or kill him. Religion, by promising an eternity of supernatural rewards and punishments, raises the stakes enormously. Which is worse, a child molester or a heretic? If you really believe that the heretic can endanger your child for all time, there's simply no contest.
• We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words – "Jesus", "Allah", "Ram" – can mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting. Considering the stakes here, it is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necessary to murder other human beings for using the wrong magic words, or the right ones for the wrong reasons. How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world. [The End Of Faith, 2004]
• Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences – and hence our religious beliefs – antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbouring believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia – because our neighbours are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal," or they will unmake our world.
• Well, it has suffered some important moments of derision, especially in Europe (think Voltaire or Hume), which may account for why modern Europeans are not content to wander quite so far down the path of biblically inspired irrationality as we are. More importantly, Christianity has suffered a relentless and uncelebrated winnowing as a result of the progress of science and secular culture in the West. Priests would still be diagnosing demonic possession if it were not for the advances made in the last 200 years by medical science. The situations in which prayer now seems an adequate (or even sane) first response to human suffering have been gradually (but radically) diminished.
• The Israeli settlers are themselves religious extremists who are putting us all in danger. Their notion of God as some omniscient real-estate broker is one of the principal sources of conflict between the West and Islam. But anyone who thinks western or Israeli imperialism solves the riddle of Muslim violence must explain why we don't see Tibetan suicide bombers killing Chinese children. The Tibetans have suffered every bit as much as the Palestinians. Over a million of them died as a direct result of the Chinese occupation of their country. Where are the Tibetan suicide bombers? Where is their cult of martyrdom? Where are the throngs of Tibetans seething with hatred, calling for the deaths of the Chinese? They are not likely to exist. What is the difference that makes the difference? Religion.
• The kind of intolerance of faith that I am advocating in my book [The End Of Faith] is not the intolerance that gave us the gulag. It is conversational intolerance. When people make outlandish claims, without evidence, we stop listening to them – except on matters of faith. I am arguing that we can no longer afford to give faith a pass in this way. Bad beliefs should be criticized wherever they appear in our discourse – in physics, in medicine, and on matters of ethics and spirituality as well. The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. Now, if he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive.
• We'll know there are Muslim moderates in this world when they get on television and say things like: "There is much in the doctrine of Islam that should not be taken literally. It is, for instance, unacceptable to believe that people can get into Paradise by killing infidels and dying in the process. In fact, we're not even sure Paradise exists. Nor are we sure that the Koran was written by the Creator of the universe. The Koran is an ancient book of religious wisdom, some of it applies to our modern circumstance and some of it does not." Find a Muslim who can talk this way, and you will have found a Muslim moderate. You will also have found someone who is guilty of blasphemy and liable to be killed in almost any Muslim community on this earth.
• Jesus Christ – who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens – can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favourite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that he would be mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilisation is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?
• There is a pervasive piece of wishful thinking circulating among religious moderates, and it could get a lot of us killed. The idea is that all religions, at their core, teach the same thing. This is myth. The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviourally. Read the Koran. Osama bin Laden is playing it more or less by the book. Anyone who says that there is no basis for his worldview in the doctrine of Islam is either dangerously ignorant or just dangerous. We must hope that the Muslim world is full of moderates who abhor the worldview of Osama bin Laden. But where are they? We cannot just assume that they exist. And the horrible truth is that if they do exist, they will be easily marginalised by their coreligionists.
• Religious moderates may ignore or overlook the more barbaric passages in their religious books, but by venerating the books in general, they leave us powerless to really oppose the belief systems of fundamentalists. And because moderates tend to ignore the most lunatic parts of scripture, they lose touch with how dangerous these books are when taken literally. In fact, they have trouble believing that anyone does still take these books literally, and so they tend not to recognize the role that faith plays in inspiring human violence. Religious moderates are blinded by their own moderation. When college-educated jihadists stare into a video camera and declare that "we love death more than the infidels love life," and then blow themselves up along with dozens of innocent bystanders, religious moderates rack their brains wondering what motivated these killers to do what they did.
• What if a religion said: "Treat everyone well, don't lie, raise your children to excel in science and mathematics and if you don't do that, you're going to be tortured for eternity by a green-headed demon"? This would be a benign religion to spread when you compare it to the jihadist lunacy that goes on under the name of Islam or many of these end-time beliefs that animate Christianity at the moment. This would be a good religion, yet it wouldn't lend the slightest bit of credence to the claim that there's a demon who's going to enforce its precepts. People would recognize that immediately. It's based on this false notion that you can believe things simply because they're useful. You should only be able to believe things because you have reason to believe that they're true. Usefulness and truth are quite distinct. We can get our useful structures without deluding ourselves about the nature of the universe. [Rochester City News, 18 October 2006]
• The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence. There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia." [The Huffington Post, 05 May 2008]
• Religious moderates insist that we respect people's religious beliefs no matter how unreasonable and divisive they are. We respect this basic claim that it's legitimate to organize your life around the contents of a single book. This mode of discourse gives immense cover to fundamentalists. We really can't call a spade a spade when it's religious dogma getting people killed, because moderates want their faith claims off the table of criticism. And they also want raising their children to believe they are Christians, Muslims, or Jews to remain off the table. The other problem is, by virtue of being moderates, they don't understand the degree to which fundamentalists and extremists are moved by their theology. They don't take their theology seriously; therefore they're rather perversely the least able to understand that people really do fly planes into buildings because they think they're going to paradise. People really do live in the Christian West with this expectation that Jesus is going to come down and Rapture them and their families into the sky in a few years. [Rochester City News, 18 October 2006]
• We have been lulled into ignoring just how strange and insupportable many of our religious beliefs are. How comforting would it be to hear the President of the United States assure us that almighty Zeus is on our side in our war on terrorism? The mere change of a single word in his speech – from God to Zeus – would precipitate a national emergency. If I believe that Christ was born of a virgin, resurrected bodily after death, and is now literally transformed into a wafer at the Mass, I can still function as a respected member of society. I can believe these propositions because millions of others believe them, and we have all been taught to overlook how irrational this picture of reality is. If, on the other hand, I wake up tomorrow morning believing that God is communicating with me through my hairdryer, I'll be considered a nut, even in church. The beliefs themselves are more or less on a par – in so far as they are in flagrant violation of the most basic principles of reason. The perversity of religion is that it allows sane people to believe the unbelievable en masse.
• According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution. … More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy. Unreason is now ascendant in the United States – in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world. [alternet.org, 10 August 2005]
• The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary. We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them. [Newsweek, 20 September 2008]
• We live in a world in which women and girls are regularly murdered by their male relatives for perceived sexual indiscretions – ranging from merely speaking to a man without permission to falling victim of rape. … the problem is clearly a product of what men in these societies believe about shame and honour, about the role of women, and about female sexuality. … Given the requisite beliefs about "honour", a man will be desperate to kill his daughter upon learning that she was raped. The same angel of compassion can be expected to visit her brothers as well. … Luckily, this shame is not indelible and can be readily expunged with her blood. … Can we say that Middle Eastern men who are murderously obsessed with female sexual purity actually love their wives, daughters, and sisters less than American or European men do? Of course, we can. And what is truly incredible about the state of our discourse is that such a claim is not only controversial but actually unutterable in most contexts. Where's the proof that these men are less capable of love than the rest of us? Well, where would the proof be if a person behaved that way in our society? … There is no doubt that certain beliefs are incompatible with love, and this notion of "honour" is among them. … Most of us will find that cutting a little girl's head off after she has been raped just doesn't capture these sentiments very well. [The End Of Faith]

Rex Harrison

• Charlton Heston is good at portraying arrogance and ambition. But in the same way that a dwarf is good at being short.

Deborah Harry

• Ah, George [W. Bush]. Anyone who can say 'nookula' instead of 'nuclear' is living in another world. [Diva, June 2004]

Ian Hart

• We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could eventually reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. Speaking of If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel. [A. S. Eddington, The Nature Of The Physical World, 1927]

James L. Hartley

• The problem is that Americans don't recognise 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 recognise that, when we recognise 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.

John Hattan

• 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.

James A. Haught

• The stronger the supernatural beliefs, the worse the inhumanity.

Stephen Hawking

• The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behaviour at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: "The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary." The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE. [A Brief History of Time, 1988]
• The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator? [A Brief History of Time, 1988]

Judith Hayes

• 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?
• If a plane crashes and 99 people die while 1 survives, it is called a miracle. Should the families of the 99 think so? [In God We Trust: But Which One?, 1997]
• 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. [In God We Trust: But Which One?, 1997]
• 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? [In God We Trust: But Which One?, 1997]
• Why is every utterance of the Pope considered to be worthy of worldwide attention and respect? It's like the fawning reverence that was accorded every banal platitude ever uttered by the late Mother Teresa. But the Pope is not exactly on the cutting edge of world events or anything else, for that matter. It was only a little over a year ago, in October 1996, that John Paul II announced that the scientific theory of evolution could be said to be valid. That message was received with enthusiastic approval in many circles throughout the world. Warm congratulations were offered to John Paul, just as they had been in 1979. In that year he declared that the Roman Catholic Church had been mistaken when it sentenced a 70-year-old Galileo to house arrest (with threats of the tortures of The Inquisition) for insisting that the Earth orbits the Sun, not vice versa. Mistaken?! No, not mistaken. A mistake is when you slip the wrong key into your front door. The Church's treatment of Galileo, one of the world's few geniuses, was viciously cruel and betrays the unenlightened, progress-impeding attitude that has dominated the Church since its inception. And they were as wrong as it is possible to be. [The Happy Heretic, February 1998]

Rutherford Hayes

• This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations. [1876]

Brian Hayward

• There is no sin. It is an invention to shame people into believing fantasies. We are the only animals known to desire to act differently (often better) than we do. This is a glorious quality, and provides optimism that we will will eventually improve ourselves. We should be proud of it, not ashamed.

Chris Hedges

• We have lost touch with the essence of war. Following our defeat in Vietnam we became a better nation. We were humbled, even humiliated. We asked questions about ourselves we had not asked before. We were forced to see ourselves as others saw us and the sight was not always a pretty one. We were forced to confront our own capacity for a atrocity – for evil – and in this we understood not only war but more about ourselves. But that humility is gone. War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press – remember in wartime the press is always part of the problem – have turned war into a vast video arcade came. Its very essence – death – is hidden from public view. There was no more candour in the Persian Gulf War or the War in Afghanistan or the War in Iraq than there was in Vietnam. But in the age of live feeds and satellite television, the state and the military have perfected the appearance of candour. Because we no longer understand war, we no longer understand that it can all go horribly wrong. We no longer understand that war begins by calling for the annihilation of others but ends if we do not know when to make or maintain peace with self-annihilation. We flirt, given the potency of modern weapons, with our own destruction. The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true – it does create a feeling of comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong. War allows us to rise above our small stations in life; we find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion. War for those who enter into combat has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it the lust of the eye and warns believers against it. War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning. [17 May 2003]

Ernest Hemingway

• All thinking men are atheists. [A Farewell To Arms]

Bobby Henderson

• I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design. … I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. … If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith. … Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. … I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence. [Open Letter To Kansas School Board, 23 August 2005]

Katharine Hepburn

• I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people. [Ladies' Home Journal, October 1991]
• We are taught you must blame your father, your sister, your brother, the school, the teachers – you can blame anyone but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault, because if you wanted to change, you're the one who has got to change. It's as simple as that., isn't it?

Heraclitus

• Those who worship images as gods are as foolish as men who talk to walls.
• A blow to the head will confuse a man's thinking, a blow to the foot has no such effect, this cannot be the result of an immaterial soul.

Edward Herman

• As human rights conditions deteriorate, factors affecting the "climate of investment," like the tax laws and labour repression, improve from the viewpoint of the multinational corporation. This suggests an important line of causation - military dictatorships tend to improve the investment climate … The multinational corporate community and the U.S. government are very sensitive to this factor. Military dictators enter into a tacit joint venture arrangement with Free World leaders: They will keep the masses quiet, maintain an open door to multinational investment, and provide bases and otherwise serve as loyal clients. In exchange, they will be aided and protected against their own people, and allowed to loot public property.

Alexander Herzen

• All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence. the former – of the corruption of the will. [From The Other Shore, 1855]

Liz Highleyman

• The basic tenet of anarchism is that hierarchical authority – be it state, church, patriarchy or economic elite – is not only unnecessary, but is inherently detrimental to the maximisation of human potential. Anarchists generally believe that human beings are capable of managing their own affairs on the basis of creativity, cooperation, and mutual respect. It is believed that power is inherently corrupting, and that authorities are inevitably more concerned with self-perpetuation and increasing their own power than they are with doing what is best for their constituents.

Joe Hill, Industrial Workers of the World

• Long-haired preachers come out every night,
  Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
  But when asked how 'bout something to eat
  They will answer with voices so sweet:
  
  You will eat, bye and bye,
  In that glorious land above the sky;
  Work and pray, live on hay,
  You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
  
  [1911]

Symon Hill, Ekklesia

• Wakefield District Housing allow employees to wear religious symbols but not to display symbols in vehicles. This rule may or may not be defensible, but it applies to everyone – not a particular faith group. There therefore appears to be no substance to claims that WHD are discriminating against Christians in particular. Cases like this are most likely to be resolved by mediation and dialogue, not by scaremongering and hysterical headlines. We have seen no evidence that Christians as a group face systematic discrimination in Britain – but the constant repetition of unfounded claims may be in danger of bringing Christianity into disrepute. It is also ironic that this case should be about a cross and should be raised in Holy Week - since the cross symbolises Jesus' sacrificial death at the hands of political and religious authorities who wanted to suppress his nonviolent resistance to injustice. Properly understood, the cross is therefore a sign of self-giving love, not a justification for preoccupation with one's own status as a religious group. [201104]

Hippocrates

• Where prayer, amulets and incantations work it is only a manifestation of the patient's belief.
• Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency and lamentations.
• Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.

Don Hirschberg

• Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair colour. [letter to Ann Landers]

Christopher Hitchens

• The claim of Islam is that it is the last, and final, revelation from God to Humanity. It's quite a big claim to make, you don't need another book after the Qur'an. You don't need any more evidence, you don't ned any more argument, it's all done for you. Now, that's OK if you want to claim that, but now they want to say if you have any difficulty with this idea, if you have any doubts about it, you're not allowed to express them, because if you do, you are insulting us, you're making us feel hurt. Now, just imagine those two claims put together. One, fantastically, and the other, a fantatstic claim that you can't challenge. That is totalitarianism defined. [Lou Dobbs Show, 05 March 2009]
• I mentioned civilisation before – and people talk about the clash of civilisation – civilisation consists of the leaving behind of the religious mentality, of the mentality of faith, of the mentality of fanaticism, of the mentality of certainty, of the mentality of holy books and the word of God. Civilisation begins where that stops in all societies and all cultures in the Muslim world no less. For me its very interesting because the Christian fanatics in America began this confrontation by saying well, America deserved it. The sympathisers of Muslim extremism said the same. The sympathisers of Israeli Jewish extremism added their own words and said "yes, it also meant that you should support us." I feel certain as never before, this is a war between those who are for faith, those who are for holy books, for the word of God, for acts of faith – and those who believe in reason – and it's almost perfectly joined. I couldn't be more ready to spend the rest of my life fighting it – which I'm absolutely sure I'm going to have to do. [interview with Jennifer Byrne, 07 November 2001]
• … the cadres of the new jihad make it very apparent that their quarrel is with Judaism and secularism on principle, not with (or not just with) Zionism. They regard the Saudi regime not as the extreme authoritarian theocracy that it is, but as something too soft and lenient. The Taliban forces viciously persecute the Shi'a minority in Afghanistan. The Muslim fanatics in Indonesia try to extirpate the infidel minorities there; civil society in Algeria is barely breathing after the fundamentalist assault. Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition and Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the west", to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any observant follower of the prophet Mohammed could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings – yes, even in the Pentagon. The new talk is all of "human intelligence": the very faculty in which our ruling elite is most deficient. A few months ago, the Bush administration handed the Taliban a subsidy of $43m, in abject gratitude for the assistance of fundamentalism in "the war on drugs". Next up is the renewed "missile defence" fantasy, recently endorsed by even more craven Democrats who seek to occupy the void "behind the President". Idiocy can contribute no more. There is sure to be further opportunity to emphasise the failings of our supposed leaders, whose costly mantra is "national security" and who could not protect us. And yes, indeed, my guide in Peshawar was a shadow thrown by William Casey's CIA, which first connected the unstoppable Stinger missile to the infallible and inerrant Koran. But that's only one way among many of stating the obvious, which is that Islamic fascism is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life. [The Guardian, 21 September 2001]
• You can be sure that the relevant European newspapers have also printed their share of cartoons making fun of nuns and popes and messianic Israeli settlers, and taunting child-raping priests. There was a time when this would not have been possible. But those taboos have been broken. Which is what taboos are for. Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet – who was only another male mammal – is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. … I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a "holy" book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object. It is revolting to me to breathe the same air as wafts from the exhalations of the madrasahs, or the reeking fumes of the suicide-murderers, or the sermons of Billy Graham and Joseph Ratzinger. But these same principles of mine also prevent me from wreaking random violence on the nearest church, or kidnapping a Muslim at random and holding him hostage, or violating diplomatic immunity by attacking the embassy or the envoys of even the most despotic Islamic state, or making a moronic spectacle of myself threatening blood and fire to faraway individuals who may have hurt my feelings. The babyish rumour-fuelled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species. … But if Muslims do not want their alleged prophet identified with barbaric acts or adolescent fantasies, they should say publicly that random murder for virgins is not in their religion. And here one runs up against a curious reluctance. … Can the discussion be carried on without the threat of violence, or the automatic resort to it? … The same point holds for international relations: There can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination. And civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient. [Slate, 04 February 2006]

Eric Hoffer

• Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. [Reflections on the Human Condition]
• Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith. [The Passionate State of Mind]
• The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds. [The True Believer]
• To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance. [The Passionate State of Mind]
• The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. [The True Believer]
• Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from. [New York Times, 21 July 1969]
• A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. [The True Believer]
• 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. [The True Believer]
• 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. [The True Believer]
• People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief of the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility. [The True Believer]

Nocholas von Hoffman

• In peacetime the functions of mass media are advertising, entertainment and inculcating the norms and opinions that a nation, terrified of disunity, wants in its people. … In wartime such institutions have no capacity to be other than the means by which the central government instructs the populace. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]
• All but a couple of hundred of the nation's thousands of radio stations broadcast no news at all, literally not a word. In peacetime, television stations and newspapers, with perhaps 25 exceptions, skip coverage of events abroad. … the home truth is that the vast majority of Americans will not watch or read news, unless it's local news, sports, or gossip. … Those who doubt this observation might want to compare and contrast the international news service offered by CNN with the entirely different service presented to its American audience. American CNN is bubble-headed news. It is an unwatchable gallimaufry of crime, scandal, tear-jerker reunions and the like. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]
• For the past ten or 15 years, movies, theatrical and made for TV, have presented a diet of shows glorifying American military might and how that might was used by the United States to save weak, incompetent, inferior democracies such as Great Britain. Ham-handed propaganda movies like the odious Saving Private Ryan are taken to be historical truth by the great unwashed and by the editorial writers. The country is soaked in false, inaccurate, distorted and self-adulatory histories. Thanks to these media, America is coming to see itself as the dissed democracy of generosity, goodness and valour which is met by ingratitude, spite and envious hatred, the natural consequence of being better than everyone else. The secondary message is that America is alone in a hostile world in which friends are few and unreliable. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]
• Islam and Christianity both have a sex fixation: Practitioners can't get enough of it, even as they despise the thought of it. Their self-inflicted contradictions drive them crazy, and so they drive us non-believers nuts trying to take away our dirty pictures and our evil Web sites. They make their sex problems worse for themselves by immuring themselves in exclusive communities in which their ceaseless animadversions on the subject set them off into paroxysms of clandestine lust. … And the stuff they believe makes your ordinary witch doctor look like Louis Pasteur or Jonas Salk. Submicroscopic homunculi running around inside a single cell, dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, the virginity cult, hairy palms in Hell for masturbators. American Calvinists and their Jansenist Roman Catholic counterparts count it a sin to wrap an engorged male organ with a three-millimeter-thick latex film. [New York Observer, 23 March 2005]
• American flag idolatry is practised all over; the flag lapel button or brooch for women is nigh on mandatory in certain occupations; the yellow ribbon is universally hung from trees, mailboxes, porches and all manner of public places. … The pledge of allegiance has become a tool of social intimidation. One is pressured to recite it in the classroom, on the athletic field, at theatrical events and at the commencement of every kind of meeting. The singing of the national anthem is incessant. Athletic events begin with an "Oh, say can you see" and are interrupted midway for a rousing chorus of "God Bless America". The country is taking on a hue and tone reminiscent of the authoritarian state. As it does so, the distinction between patriotism and militarism is getting blurred. Even before 11 September the public was being schooled to believe in a version of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori which to a non-American might sound not unlike the creed of the suicide bomber. [Index On Censorship, 3/2003]

Baron d'Holbach (Paul Henri Thiry)

• All children are atheists – they have no idea of God. [Good Sense, 1772]
• Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system.
• If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them. [The System Of Nature, 1770]
• All religions are ancient monuments to superstitions, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies rejuvenated.
• If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests. [The System Of Nature]

Oliver Wendell Holmes

• Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While the experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country. [Abrams v. United States, 1919]
• Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't make it of wood, you must make it of words. [The Poet At The Breakfast Table, 1872]

Elmer Homrighausen

• Few intelligent Christians can still hold to the idea that the Bible is an infallible Book, that it contains no linguistic errors, no historical discrepancies, no antiquated scientific assumptions, not even bad ethical standards. Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages. The existence of thousands of variations of texts makes it impossible to hold the doctrine of a book verbally infallible. Some might claim for the original copies of the Bible an infallible character, but this view only begs the question and makes such Christian apologetics more ridiculous in the eyes of the sincere man. [Christianity In America]

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, Physics Chair, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad

• You were supposed to say that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah water was created. [New York Times, 2001] Everything happens because Yahweh/Allah/Her Holiness says so.
• Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world's science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. [Physics Today Online, August 2007]
• No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific development is one important element – although by no means the only one – that contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a growing sense of injustice and victimhood. [Physics Today Online, August 2007]
• Muslims bristle at any hint that Islam and science may be at odds, or that some underlying conflict between Islam and science may account for the slowness of progress. The Qur'an, being the unaltered word of God, cannot be at fault: Muslims believe that if there is a problem, it must come from their inability to properly interpret and implement the Qur'an's divine instructions. [Physics Today Online, August 2007] A book "cannot be at fault"? That mindset is precisely the problem! If it isn't in the Qur'an, then it isn't valid. Close your eyes, let your brain rot, and blame everyone else because you're a 'victim'.
• When the 2005 earthquake struck Pakistan, killing more than 90,000 people, no major scientist in the country publicly challenged the belief, freely propagated through the mass media, that the quake was God's punishment for sinful behavior . Mullahs ridiculed the notion that science could provide an explanation; they incited their followers into smashing television sets[ just as they did in 2001], which had provoked Allah's anger and hence the earthquake. As several class discussions showed, an overwhelming majority of my university's science students accepted various divine-wrath explanations. [Physics Today Online, August 2007] It happened, therefore god-did-it. And that's all they need to know for a 'good' life. Don't think (assuming they're even capable of doing do), don't ask questions: just accept and obey.
• Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame – the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered. Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. [Physics Today Online, August 2007]
• Academic and cultural freedoms on campuses are highly restricted in most Muslim countries. At Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, where I teach, the constraints are similar to those existing in most other Pakistani public-sector institutions. This university serves the typical middle-class Pakistani student and, according to the survey referred to earlier, ranks number two among OIC universities. Here, as in other Pakistani public universities, films, drama, and music are frowned on, and sometimes even physical attacks by student vigilantes who believe that such pursuits violate Islamic norms take place. The campus has three mosques with a fourth one planned, but no bookstore. No Pakistani university, including QAU, allowed Abdus Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his role in formulating the standard model of particle physics. The Ahmedi sect to which he belonged, and which had earlier been considered to be Muslim, was officially declared heretical in 1974 by the Pakistani government. As intolerance and militancy sweep across the Muslim world, personal and academic freedoms diminish with the rising pressure to conform. In Pakistani universities, the veil is now ubiquitous, and the last few unveiled women students are under intense pressure to cover up. The head of the government-funded mosque-cum-seminary in the heart of Islamabad, the nation's capital, issued the following chilling warning to my university's female students and faculty on his FM radio channel on 12 April 2007: The government should abolish co-education. Quaid-i-Azam University has become a brothel. Its female professors and students roam in objectionable dresses. … Sportswomen are spreading nudity. I warn the sportswomen of Islamabad to stop participating in sports. … Our female students have not issued the threat of throwing acid on the uncovered faces of women. However, such a threat could be used for creating the fear of Islam among sinful women. There is no harm in it. There are far more horrible punishments in the hereafter for such women. The imposition of the veil makes a difference. My colleagues and I share a common observation that over time most students – particularly veiled females – have largely lapsed into becoming silent note-takers, are increasingly timid, and are less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions. [Physics Today Online, August 2007]

Jon Honeyball

• A few years ago, I was taking a week's holiday driving around California. One of those "point at the map and stay there tonight" sort of trips. By either luck, or lack of it, I ended up in a run-down ex-mining town in south-east California. I pulled up at lunchtime outside the family diner on the main street. One of those emporia that has a bar, lots of chrome and barstools. I settled myself down and perused the menu. Mama, for I shall call her that, sidled down the bar armed with a large pot of hot coffee in one hand and an even bigger mug in the other. The sort of mug that lets you get all four fingers through the handle. Just as she was about to start pouring the thick black rocket fuel, I asked, in my most polite and crystal-clear English voice: "You wouldn't happen to have any tea?" She froze, put the mug down and wandered away with the coffee pot. A few moments later she reappeared with a box; a deep hunt into its deepest corner found an English Breakfast teabag. This would have to do, I decided. Mama took my order, and then, as she was about to turn away, said: "You're not from around here, are you?" I replied that indeed so, I was from near Cambridge, the original one. "Huh," she said, as she ambled off to get my plate of heart attack. When she reappeared she looked me up and down and told me, in a firm but curious voice, that she had a friend called Mary. Apparently, Mary used to live down the street, just past the gun shop, but she had met an Englishman and moved to English. I tried hard to keep a straight face. "Ah," I replied, before she trundled off to serve some other locals who had just appeared in the diner. I ate my heart attack slowly, pondering that she really did have a good excuse for such a narrow worldview. We were, after all, in Armpit California, and Tewksbury seemed a very long way away. The only time people speak French here is when they get drunk. My plate emptied, she reappeared again and I confess I couldn't help but ask: "Where does Mary live in England?" "Liverpool," came the reply, followed by the priceless comment of "Maybe you know her?" At this point, I nearly slid off the barstool. But I managed to keep a stern and interested expression. "No, I'm sorry, I don't know a Mary from Liverpool. I do know a Mary from Sheffield, though?" I added in an ever-so-helpful way. Her eyes narrowed, and you could see the cogs turning in her head. What happened next was a complete surprise. She replied, saying "Hmm," and had a long pause. "She didn't tell me she'd moved." As she trundled off to the kitchen, I did my best not to giggle out loud. [PC Pro, #172, February 2009] It would have been even funnier if you'd quietly sung the chorus to Chumbawamba's "Mary Mary" :)

Fred Hoyle

• Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this is illusory. [The Nature Of The Universe, 1950]

Elbert Hubbard

• Theology is Classified Superstition.
• Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
• What we call God's justice is only man's idea of what he would do if he were God.
• A miracle is an event described by those to whom it was told by people who did not see it. [The Philistine, 1909]
• A mystic is a person who is puzzled before the obvious, but who understands the nonexistent.
• Dogma is a lie reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more persons who believe that they believe what someone else believes. [The Note Book, 1927]
• Organised religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific – that is, truthful – must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organised religion going hand in hand.
• Theology, by diverting the attention of men from this life to another, and by endeavouring to coerce all men into one religion, constantly preaching that this world is full of misery, but the next world would be beautiful – or not, as the case may be – has forced on men the thought of fear where otherwise there might have been the happy abandon of nature.

Charles Evans Hughes

• When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

Robert Hughes

• No decent person pretends that abortion does not present a grave moral choice, but the whole point is that this choice must be made by the mother, not denied her by the state. Nobody – except those who believe, on no evidence at all, that an immortal soul really is implanted in the embryo at the moment of conception, thus endowing it with complete humanity – can say at what point an embryo turns into a human being. The innocence of foetuses is not in doubt. But it is irrelevant.: lettuces are innocent too. [Culture Of Complaint, 1993]
• Every time you wanked, it was a slaughter of future Catholics so small that a hundred of them could dance, or at least wiggle, on the head of a pin. The real trouble with masturbation was that it represented an inversion of the cosmic order – and contraception, even worse. The notion that some small part of the cosmic order hung on our teenage willies was a heavy load for us young soldiers in St. Ignatius' army of Christ. In some of us, including Private Hughes, it induced the kind of suffocating guilt that led to scepticism: if God was so busy counting sperm, and so apparently unconcerned with preventing the world's famines, epidemics and slaughters, was He worth worshipping? Was He there at all? No answer from the altar. [Culture Of Complaint, 1993]
• To divide a polity you must have scapegoats and hate-objects – human caricatures that dramatise the difference between Them and Us. If some part of a political strategy can turn, as it does now, on the act of inflaming prejudice against homosexuals and denying them certain rights as a class or group, then so be it; and so much the worse for the people whom in the past Buchanan had called promoters of "Satanism and suicide", "perverted", "destructive", a "pederast proletariat" – all those lisping armies of the night out there, sneaking up on your children, not just on consenting adults" God's little ally, the AIDS virus, was "divine retribution" against such people, just as, to the fundamentalist preacher of the 1920s, the spirochete and the gonococcus had been launched against the rake and the seducer by an offended God. Nothing had changed. [Culture Of Complaint, 1993]
• For when the 1960s' animus against elitism entered American education, it brought in its train an enormous and cynical tolerance of student ignorance, rationalised as a regard for "personal expression" and "self esteem". Rather than "stress" the kids by asking them to read too much or think too closely, which might cause their fragile personalities to implode on contact with college-level demands, schools reduced their reading assignments, thus automatically reducing their command of language. Untrained in logical analysis, ill-equipped to develop and construct formal arguments about issues, unused to mining texts for deposits of factual material, the students fell back to the only position they could truly call their own: what they felt about things. When feelings and attitudes are the main referents of argument, to attack any position is automatically to insult its holder, or even to assail his or her perceived "rights"; every argumentum becomes ad hominem, approaching the condition of harassment, if not quite rape. "I feel very threatened by your rejection of my views on [check one] pallocentricity / the Mother Goddess / the Treaty of Vienna / Young's Modulus of Elasticity." Cycle this subjectivisation of discourse through two or three generations of students turning into teachers, with the sixties' dioxins accumulating more each time, and you have the entropic background to our culture of complaint. [Culture Of Complaint, 1993]
• We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism. Does the cripple rise from his wheelchair, or feel better about being stuck in it, because someone back in the days of the Carter administration decided that, for official purposes, he was "physically challenged"? Does the homosexual suppose others love him more or hate him less because he is called a "gay" – that term revived from eighteenth-century English criminal slang, which implied prostitution and living on one's wits? The net gain is that thugs who used to go faggot-bashing now go gay-bashing. … We do not fail, we underachieve. We are not junkies, but substance abusers; not handicapped, but differently abled. And we are mealy-mouthed unto death: a corpse, the New England Journal Of Medicine urged in 1988, should be referred to as a "nonliving person". By extension, a fat corpse is a differently sized nonliving person. … Seventy years ago, in polite white usage, blacks were called "coloured people". Then they became "negroes." Then, "blacks". Now, "African-Americans" or "persons of colour" again. … Just as managerial lingo gave us "equity retreat" for the 1987 stock market crash and "corporate rightsizing" for firing large numbers of workers, so the Gulf War taught us that bombing a place flat was "servicing a target" or "visiting a site", that bombing it again to make quite sure that not even a snake or a thornbush survived was "revisiting a site". [Culture Of Complaint, 1993]

Rupert Hughes

• 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. [Why I Quit Going To Church, 1924]

Victor Hugo

• There is in every village a torch: the schoolmaster – and an extinguisher: the parson.

David Hume

• A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]
• 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. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]
• 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 endeavours to establish. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]
• If there is a designer he must take credit for the flaws in his creation. Flaws in the creation directly reflect flaws in the creator. If there is a flaw in the creator then he cannot be all powerful.
• They [religions] all make up new species of crime and bring unhappiness in their train. When I hear a man is religious, I conclude he is a rascal, though I know some instances of very good men being religious. [interview with James Boswell]
• When any one tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]
• 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. [An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]

Mick Hume

• No censorship - bans are for bigots and Big Brother. No taboos - taboos are the for superstitious and the stupid. Question everything, ban nothing. [1994]

Samuel P. Huntington

• Many more people in the world are concerned about sports than human rights.

Aldous Huxley

• Maybe this world is just another planet's hell.
• Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. [Proper Studies]
• Ye shall know the Truth, And the Truth shall make you angry!
• That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
• 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. [Time Must Have A Stop]
• Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
• The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
• You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. … Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. 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. [Amor Fati, Texts And Pretexts]

Julian Huxley

• Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct.
• Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.

Thomas Huxley

• Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
• Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
• Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
• 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.
• The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best – that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. [Evolution And Ethics]
• 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 favour 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. [Agnosticism and Christianity]

Hypatia

• To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.

Nicholas Hytner, Director, National Theatre

• My basic proposition is that nobody has the right not to be offended. [No Limits: The Business Of Theatre, Free Expression Is No Offence, 2005]
• I claim the right to be as offensive as I choose about what other people think, and to tell any story that I choose. No one has the right not to be offended. [Critics' Circle Theatre Awards, 01 February 2005]

Robert Green Ingersoll

• A crime against god is a demonstrated impossibility.
• We are not accountable for the sins of "Adam". [Myth And Miracle]
• The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray. [The Devil]
• Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense. [Second Interview On Rev. Talmadge]
• Salvation through slavery is worthless. Salvation from slavery is inestimable. [The Gods]
• The inspiration of the Bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it. [The Ingersoll-Black Debate, 25 April 1881]
• God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of the human race. [Why I Am An Agnostic]
• We are satisfied that there can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven. [The Gods, 1872]
• As long as every question is answered by the word "God," scientific inquiry is simply impossible. [The Gods, 1872]
• The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men. [The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child]
• My objection to Christianity is that it is infinitely cruel, infinitely selfish, and, I might add, infinitely absurd.
• The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth. [The Gods]
• Ministers say that they teach charity. This is natural. They live on alms. All beggars teach that others should give. [The Truth, 1897]
• This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves. [An Interview On Chief Justice Comegys]
• Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilise mankind? [Some Mistakes Of Moses]
• 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. [The Gods]
• If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would strictly follow the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
• 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. [Orthodoxy, 1884]
• As long as man believes the Bible to be infallible, that book is his master. The civilisation of this century is not the child of faith, but of unbelief – the result of free thought. [The Gods]
• Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. [The Ghosts]
• Give me the storm and stress 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.
• 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. [Orthodoxy, 1884]
• 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.
• 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. [(Humboldt, 1869]
• 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 believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called "faith."
• The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever. [Crumbling Creeds]
• 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]
• When I became convinced that the Universe is natural – that all the ghosts and gods are myth, 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 bards, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave.
• 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. [The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child, 1877]
• Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of "inspiration." It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge – that is to say, of science. When man becomes great and grand enough to admit that all have equal rights; when thought is untrammelled; when worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilised. [Reply To The Indianapolis Clergy, The Iconoclast, 1882]
• 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 honour, 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!" [The Gods, 1872]
• 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 mouldy 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. [The Gods, 1872]
• 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 neighbours, 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." [Orthodoxy, 1884]

Greg Irwin

• 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?

Eddie Izzard

• In the beginning? Well… in the beginning was the word and the word was fish… Every religion looks bonkers compared with another religion. What do you believe? Well, we believe that all soup is special and that every third Sunday after the fourth Sunday after the 12th, we get together and sing 'Hallo, halla' and we bang on the ground, put soup in a bowl and all these endless things. Then we throw sandwiches at the walls and pray for more sandwiches. [The Times, 23 August 2009]

William James

• Philosophy is like a blind man searching in a dark room for a black cat that isn't there. The difference between philosophy and theology is that theology finds the cat.

Thomas Jefferson

• I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
• A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. [letter to James Madison]
• History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. [letter to Alexander von Humboldt, 06 December 1813]
• If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. [letter to Charles Yancey, 1816]
• Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
• We may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. [letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, 10 February 1814]
• Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear. [letter to Peter Carr, 10 August 1787]
• In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. [letter to Horatio Spafford, 17 March 1814]
• 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 classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. [letter to John Adams]
• To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. [letter to John Adams, 15 August 1820]
• The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. [Notes On The State Of Virginia, 1782]
• 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. [letter to Baron von Humboldt, 1813]
• The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. [his last letter, 1826]
• In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them. [letter to Horatio Spofford, 17 March 1814]
• The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere. [letter to Abigail Adams, 1787]
• I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies. The Christian God is a being of terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust. [letter to Dr. Woods]
• [I do not believe in] the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of the Hierarchy, etc. [letter to William Short, 31 October 1819 ]
• On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. [letter to Archibald Carey, 1816]
• Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. [Notes On The State Of Virginia, 1782]
• The Christian God can be easily pictured as virtually the same as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, evil and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed, beast-like god, one only needs to look at the calibre of the people who say they serve him. The are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites. [letter to Peter Carr]
• They [priests] have tried upon me all their various batteries of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering. I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance on whom their interested duperies were to be played off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develop itself. [letter to Horatio Spofford, 1816]
• Because religious belief or non-belief is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society. [letter to Virginia Baptists, 1808]

Stephen Jeffrey

• If as most religions seem to suggest, the conditions here on earth and our short lives have been set up by some god or other as a cruel and risky training camp for our souls, then I reject my ultimate salvation if it means the suffering of one single child or one grieving parent. Let us all stay unholy if it means no more suffering. [commenting on the Indonesian tsunami, BBC News Magazine, 03 January 2005]

Penn Jillette

• When people over 7 years old have imaginary friends, there's going to be trouble. It doesn't matter who their imaginary friend is, if they go to prison or they follow the Abrahamic religions, they're going to be killing somebody. It's just a really dangerous thing to have people believe in things that they can't prove. … People that say, "I am doing this on faith," whether that faith is, no matter what that faith is, when it's not based on love of people and humanity, there's gonna be trouble. [Politically Incorrect, 06 June 2002]
• 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? [Reason magazine, on censorship of television violence]

'Jirik'

• Islamists fetishise a book. They seek to exclude the influence of all other books. This leads to societies under their influence being backward and full of ludicrous anachronisms. (women as property, flogging, stoning, amputations, FGM, and many more). It also reduces education in those places (some now in Europe) to what is acceptable to the 'scholars', even though their scholarship is entirely in dark-age imbecility. Ironically, the great days of Islam were when they did not take their book too seriously - consider Omar Khayam, in the heart of the Persian Empire, writing joyfully of wine, women and song. He lived in a progressive, dynamic society that is now one of the myths of the 'Caliphate' dreamers - but who would have killed him as an apostate. So the literalist interpretation of this book is what keeps whole societies in darkness. Even the richest society on Earth, Saudi Arabia, executes people for witchcraft. All the wealth in the world can not cure their silly, backward beliefs. Now, the people caught in this awful time-warp know that they are behind, and they know that they are mocked and derided. Planet Earth has recently landed a space probe on a moving comet, photographed the Andromeda galaxy in a single, detailed image, analysed the physics of the start of the universe, and cured a terminal leukemia patient using modified HIV cells. Planet Earth has achieved this while 'Scholars' have been making fatwas against snowmen. Time to read some new books, and understand that religious belief, in 2015, is imbecility, and not to be respected at all. [What Starring In The Infidel Taught Me About Faith And Culture, The Guardian, 24 Janaury 2015]

Cyril Joad

• There are those who feel an imperative need to believe, for whom the values of a belief are proportionate not to its truth, but to its definiteness. Incapable of either admitting the existence of contrary judgments or of suspending their own, they supply the place of knowledge by turning other men's conjectures into dogmas. [The Recovery Of Belief, 1952]

Jeffrey John, Dean, St Albans

• The ability of the church to ignore the deeper implications of its own scriptures is horribly plain throughout history. Remember it took 18 centuries for Christians to realise that slavery is against the Gospel. Remember that those who supported slavery claimed to do so on biblical grounds. [26 April 2004]
• By definition, a church which lives in the spirit of Jesus will be genuinely, not just theoretically or conditionally, open and welcoming to everyone. Building and defending that kind of church is the most truly biblical thing any Christian can do. We need to say so now, loud and clear. [26 April 2004]
• Remember too that Jesus was condemned to death for his own inclusive attitudes by fundamentalist zealots who believed that they were obeying scripture. In all these cases those who opposed change could quote the Bible in their defence. With hindsight the church sees that they were wrong; they were killing the spirit with the letter. [26 April 2004]
• What sort of God was this, getting so angry with the world and the people he created and then, to calm himself down, demanding the blood of his own son. And anyway, why should God forgive us through punishing somebody else? It was worse than illogical, it was insane. It made God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this, we would say they were a monster.
• In the same way the church will one day look back on the issues that divide us today and find it incredible that it once thought it right and 'scriptural' to treat women and other minorities as it does now. The struggle to make the church inclusive is not based on some secular, woolly 'liberal agenda' (the charge endlessly parroted against us) but on a scriptural imperative to do what Jesus did. It is the same struggle to oppose prejudice, bigotry and oppression and open the kingdom to everyone, especially the most marginalised. Inclusivity is not a soft option. It is harder to live in a truly diverse and welcoming community than it is to live in a community of the respectably like-minded, just as it is harder to be an intelligent student of scripture than it is to be a fundamentalist. … All of us must be challenged and changed in every department of our life, by the Gospel and by one another, whether we are male or female, black or white, gay or straight, rich or poor. [26 April 2004]

Ellen Johnson

• We are intellectually free because we doubt, we question, and we have the courage to disagree. We are free of the strictures of blind faith. We realize that it is reason, not uncritical adherence to unquestioned dogmas that is the basis of human freedom and progress. [02 November 2002]

Samuel Johnson

• Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
• All argument is against it [the afterlife]; but all belief is for it.

Sonia Johnson

• One of my favourite fantasies is that next Sunday not one woman, in any country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they cease to be.

Angelina Jolie

• You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens.
• I could really imagine Lara not having a lot of time for men. Can you imagine that, Lara Croft as a lesbian? That would be a shock for the boys playing with their joysticks in their bedrooms around the world. At the end of the day I really like women. I'd love it if the girls in the cinema watching Lara Croft find me just as hot as their boyfriends do. [Amica, June 2001]

Benjamin Jones, NSS Communications Officer

• It seems almost futile to repeat this mantra, again, but I will add my voice to the chorus: you do not have a right to not be offended. This applies just as uncompromisingly if you are a Muslim upset about cartoons of Mohammed, or a gay person distressed by a street preacher claiming that your love life is 'sinful'. We must be completely unambiguous and unrelenting in our defence of free speech: up to the point of defamation of living people, or incitement to violence, anything goes. … There is something particularly jarring about 'witnesses' being called to testify in a British court because they heard a religious figure being insulted. It is as though we have already accepted the premise that criticising Mohammed is a cause for suspicion, and this assumption (coupled with the well-meaning doctrine of tolerance and the stultifying attitude that anything insulting or upsetting is to be avoided at almost any cost) is proving to be nearly ineradicable from our civil society. … If Judge Qureshi finds Mr Overd's comments, in which he was quoting from the Bible, to be criminal, then presumably a very great volume of the 'moral' teachings in the Koran and the Old Testament (for example) will likewise contain criminal content? Are we to ban religious scripture which goes much further than Mr. Overd did, and which actually calls for the capital punishment of homosexuals? If Overd is found guilty, what possible reason is there for not also banning the scripture which he articulates? This is a preposterous situation. Regardless of their content, do we really want to live in a society where books are banned? The answer to this mess, of course, is obvious. Free speech must be 'free' in the sense of meaning uninhibited, restricted only by prohibition on the incitement to violence or defamation. 'Free' however, is not to imply that speech does not have a cost for society: the price is paid in allowing Mr Overd to set out his stall, and so we take the inconsequential risk that people may be upset by what he says. We must be confident in our values, even if they are at times inconvenient to those of us who find Mr Overd's use of our shared rights to be distinctly unpleasant. Needless to say, there are people in recent months who have endured rather a lot more than discomfort to defend freedom of expression.Je Suis Michael Overd: This Obnoxious Street Preacher Is A Canary In The Coalmine For Free Speech, NSS Blog, [20 March 2015]

James Joyce

• There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

Heshu Jones

• Bye dad, sorry I was so much trouble. Me and you will probably never understand each other but I'm sorry I wasn't what you wanted but there's some thing you can't change. Hey, for an older man you have a good strong punch and kick. I hope you enjoyed testing your strengths on me, it was fun being on the receiving end. WELL DONE. I will be OK, don't look for me because I don't know where I'm going yet, I just want to be alone. [letter to her father, Abdulla, who later murdered her for being 'too Western' even though he and his family had left Iraq and sought refuge in the UK, 2003]

S. T. Joshi

• The atheist, agnostic, or secularist … should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, immorality, impoliteness, or any of the other smokescreens used by the pious to deflect attention from the central issues at hand. [Atheism: A Reader, 2000]
• The atheist, agnostic, or secularist … should not be cowed by exaggerated sensitivity to people's religious beliefs and fail to speak vigorously and pointedly when the devout put forth arguments manifestly contrary to all the acquired knowledge of the past two or three millennia. Those who advocate a piece of folly like the theory of an "intelligent creator" should be held accountable for their folly; they have no right to be offended for being called fools until they establish that they are not in fact fools. Religiously inclined writers like Stephen L. Carter may plead that "respect" should be accorded to religious views in public discourse, but he neglects to demonstrate that those views are worthy of respect. All secularists – scientists, literary figures, even politicians (if there are any such with the requisite courage) – should speak out on the issue when the opportunity presents itself. [Atheism: A Reader, 2000]

Juvenal

• Who watches the watchmen? [Satires, VI : 347]

Mohsen Kadivar

• Velayat has no credible foundation in Islamic jurisprudence and its rejection does not in any way undermine any Islamic teachings, requirements or obligations. The choice between velayat and democracy is devoid of any religious connotation and should be made solely on the basis of reason: which system will be of greatest benefit to society? … The fact it [democracy] was first practised in the West does not preclude its adoption in other cultures: reason extends beyond geographical boundaries. [Index On Censorship, 4/2004]

Azam Kamguian

• When I came to the West in the early 1990s, I was faced with the fact that the majority of intellectuals, mainstream media, academics, and feminists, in the name of respecting 'other cultures,' were trying to justify Islam by dividing it into fundamentalist and moderate, progressive and reactionary, Medina's and Mecca's, Muhammad's and Kholafa's, folksy and nonfolksy. For people like me, the victims of Islam in power, it was suffocating to listen to and to have to refute endless tales to justify the terror and bloodshed committed by Islamic movements and Islamic governments in Iran and in the region. [Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, 2003]
• According to cultural relativism, human rights are a Western concept and not applicable to people living in non-Western parts of the world. Cultural relativism is a racist idea because its essence is difference. The idea of difference always serves racism. According to cultural relativism we must respect people's culture and religion, however despicable. This is absurd and amounts to a call in many cases for the respect of brutality. Human beings are worthy of respect, but not all beliefs must be respected. If a culture allows women to be mutilated and killed to save the family's 'honour', it cannot be excused. [Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, 2003]

Wendy Kaminer

• People who believe that god exists and heeds their prayers have probably waived the right to mock people who talk to trees or claim to channel the spirits of Native Americans.
• If I were to mock religious belief as childish, if I were to suggest that worshipping 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, likening him to a mechanical gorilla, 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 paedophiles. But, while paedophilia may at least be characterised as a disease, atheism is a choice, a wilful rejection of beliefs to which vast majorities of people cling. [The Last Taboo, 1996]

Oliver Kamm

• To see how mired in confusion – to put it no higher – is the political culture of even this most tolerant of European states [Holland], you need only consider that the court 'considers appropriate criminal prosecution for insulting Muslim worshippers because of comparisons between Islam and Nazism made by Wilders'. So criminal law is being invoked against insults to a system of belief. I have no reason to doubt the offence caused to Muslims by Wilders's campaigns. Mockery and denunciation of what others hold literally sacred will inevitably cause anguish and outrage. And faced with mental suffering on the part of some of its citizens, a free society must do nothing at all. No one is entitled to restitution for hurt feelings: not now; not ever. The most – and not the least – that religious believers might be entitled to is human sympathy. They won't get it from me; they might get it from you; but they must not get it as a matter of public policy, because a state has no business concerning itself with how its citizens feel. Insisting on the right to offend religious believers may seem an unfeeling and uncaring doctrine. (The non sequitur that many Muslims in western societies are poor is often brought into the discussion at this point.) But the case for liberty has never been that it protects sensibilities. It is rather that by allowing people's beliefs to be scrutinised, criticised and – yes – insulted, bad ideas are more likely to be superseded by better ones. Allowing ideas to die in place of their adherents is a mark of a civilised society. It is not hyperbole to say that in the defence of the unlikely figure of Geert Wilders lies also the defence of western civilisation. [Index On Censorship], 22 January 2009

Immanuel Kant

• The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
• The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend – and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective. [lecture at Konigsberg, 1775]

Shyaka Kanuma

• What I always ask myself watching the Muslim people who run berserk at every perceived insult to Islam, or to Islam's prophet Mohammed is this: since God is so great why won't they let him fight his own wars? I mean, every good Muslim knows that before Allah his god he is a very puny being, nothing more than an insect. Which then begs the question, how does this puny being, this insect presume he will fight Allah's battles for him? If an American burns the Koran and Allah is displeased, surely the supreme being wouldn't fail to smite down - with the fearsome retribution only God is capable of - the offending American "infidel"? If some obscure Danish cartoonist dares depict the Prophet Mohammed unflatteringly, why would a lot of Muslims feel the need to torch every building in sight? Does it mean they think Allah is incapable of personally dealing with that sacrilegious European cartoonist? If Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses commits the (grave) offense of blaspheming against Islam, why does an old Iranian mullah called Ayatollah Khomeini presume he can issue a death fatwa against the author? Who on earth does this mullah imagine he is, condemning another human being to death? Why is it that this squalid mullah, and thousands of others like him fail to see the logic that if God were sufficiently angry with Rushdie, he himself would mete out some particularly awful punishment on the alleged blasphemer? … Religion imposes itself through violence, so that anyone failing to blindly accept all its dogmas (most of which amount to no more than glorified gibberish), does so at risk of some very painful consequences, or death. [Religion, Always At Odds With Logic And Reason, AllAfrica.com, 27 February 2012]

Esther Kaplan

• Unlike modern-day social reformers, who want Nike to let inspectors into their factories or the World Bank to forgive some debt, anarchists explicitly oppose capitalism itself. They don't attack the International Monetary Fund or the WEF just because their policies exploit the poor, but because their power is illegitimate. They envision an egalitarian society without nation states, where wealth and power have been redistributed, and they take great pains to model their institutions in this vein, with autonomous, interconnected structures and consensus-based decision making. UC Santa Cruz professor Barbara Epstein, an expert on direct action, senses that anarchism has now become "the pole that everyone revolves around," much as Marxism was in the '60s. In other words, even young activists who don't identify as anarchists have to position themselves in relation to its values. [The Village Voice, 29 January 2002]

Abul Kasem

• So here is how Islam is oppressed by the unbelievers:
  • The infidels do not submit to Allah despite repeated warnings to them. This is the highest form rebellion by the Kafirs and undoubtedly, is an extreme form of oppression to Islam.
  • The infidel women go to swim in the beaches wearing bikini. Allah is greatly offended by such outrageous conduct of Islamically impure infidel women.
  • The Kafir nations vehemently condemn Islamic stoning in Islamic Paradises. Islamic penal code is written by Allah, how could the infidels condemn such a divine, merciful penal system? Allah is surely angry with the infidels.
  • The Kafirs' law court incarcerates Islamic rapists, but, who, according to Islam, has the inalienable right to have unlimited sex with infidel women, no question asked. As per Islam, these infidel women (Islamically, all western women, who do not dress/conduct themselves as per Islamic/Bedouin custom are harlots, sluts and prostitutes and all infidels are incestuous, believe it or not) are Islamic captives.
  • To protect its innocent citizens from the genocide of the Islamist terrorists, the Kafirs pass anti-terror laws, but the Islamists believe it is their basic Islamic right to terrorize the infidels. The anti-terror law is oppression to Islam, as this law violates the Qur'anic injunction of casting terror in the hearts of the unbelievers.
  • An infidel woman gives birth out-of-wedlock and she is treated fairly by the social security system of the harami (repugnant) Kafir. This oppresses Islam, as this woman must be stoned to death, as per pure, unadulterated Islam. The infidels are not respecting the sanctity of Islam.
  • An infidel woman goes out of her house without hijab. This is oppression to Islam, as this violates the Qur'nic injunction that women must stay at home at all time and serve their husbands. In case she has to be out, she must seek her husband's permission and must be 'covered', from head to toe.'
  • Violating the Qur'an and Hadis, Kafir men and women patronize pubs and drink wine and liqueur. Islamic punishment of forty lashes is not meted out for such naked un-Islamic indulgence. To further anger the Muslims, during Ramadan, the Kafirs heartily eat and jubilantly drink publicly, in open view of the Muslims. This, of course is an unpardonable Islamic offence, as the infidels show no sensitivity/respect for the best religion on earth.
  • An unmarried Kafir woman engages in de-facto relationship with a man. This offends the migrant Muslims, but despite much harangue from the Islamist moralists, the Kafirs refuse to change their law of personal freedom. This (the unbridled mixing of opposite sexes), is certainly a gross oppression to Islamic faith.
  • The infidel's local council prohibits the use of loud speakers to broadcast the melodious tune of Azan (the Islamic prayer call). This is the violation of Islamic right of noise pollution, and, therefore is a gross tyranny upon Islam.
  • Harami Kafirs enact law banning hijab in public schools. This angers the Islamists, as it amounts to flagrantly violating the Qur'an, and hence is oppressive to Islam.
  • The Kafirs refuse to pay jizyah (special privileges to the Arab Bedouins/Muslims). In modern times, this jizya is in the form of special privileges to the Muslims (for example, Bumiputra/Malay/Muslim policy in Malaysia, reservation of places for the Muslims in Kafirs' Universities, special concession on employment policies, affirmative policies exclusively designed for the incompetent Muslims…and so on). Non-payment of jizya tax is a gross violation of the holy Qur'an and is oppression to Islam.
  • When, for security reasons and to apprehend the suspected terrorists of peaceful Islam, America, the Great Satan, requires all visitors to the United States to be photographed, fingerprinted and biometrically registered, it offends real Islam.
  • When the infidels and in-name-only Muslims patronize a theatre to enjoy a stage drama, Islam is gravely hurt, as this vilely violates the basic tenets of the Qur'an—no idol worshipping. Ditto for patronizing cinema houses. Acting in a drama/and or watching this performance is abhorrently un-Islamic. In Bangladesh, bombs are thrown in such premises, as visiting stage drama and enjoying a movie is oppressive to Islam.
  • When you quote those murderous verses from the Holy Qur'an it oppresses Islam. Embarrassing Allah /Islamists is a great offence.
  • When you quote those anti-feminist and misogynist hadis from Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim and Sunaan Abu Dawud, Allah gets slighted.
  • When you expose that Islam allows unlimited sex with maid-servants (sex-slaves) and infidel women. These provisions are Qur'anic, so they are above any discussion.
  • When the police embarks on a clean-up operation in an Islamic enclave in a Kafirland. This action violates the incontrovertible rights of the Islamist terrorists to frighten the infidels—an absolute Islamic right enshrined by Allah in the Qur'an.
  • When the Kafir government disallows Sharia law to be enforced for the Muslims living in a Kafirland. Allah's law supercedes all man-made laws, how could the abhorrent infidels annoy Allah?
  • When, through earthquake and Tsunami, Allah tests His believers in Islamic Paradises and the Kafir's aid is delayed due to the poor/non-existence of logistical supports in those Islamic Paradises. Infidels must attend immediately to the Muslims' plight—this is also a form of jizya on the unbelievers.
  • When you disclose that the prophet of Islam, Muhammad (pbuh), had between nine to twenty official wives and at least one sex-slave. Allah is angry when you discuss Muhammad's intimate private life—a violation of Islamic privacy.
  • When the harami freethinkers disclose that the 52-year-old Prophet (pbuh) of mercy married a six-year-old girl and had sex with her when she turned nine. See above for the reason.
  • When the 'Islam bashers' reveal that Hazrat Omar (Allah's mercy be upon him) married a four-year-old baby-girl when he was around 54-55 years old. See above for reason.
  • When the devilish Islamphobes divulge that Hazrat Ali (Allah's mercy be upon him) used to have sex with captive women, routinely, even when he was married to Fatima, Muhammad's dearest daughter. Those who embarrass the Khulafa Rashedin (the rightly guided caliphs) embarrass Allah. Allah will not forgive them.
  • When the infidels learn from the writing of the Muslim apostates that Muslims must not be friendly with the Jews and the Christians and the unbelievers. When the Qur'an has decreed certain matters, it is a great offence to discuss about them.
  • The Kafirs in Kafirland, instead of adopting the Islamic values of the myopic Muslim community in their midst, urge the Islamists to respect multiculturalism. This is an affront to Islam. According to Islam, these Kafirs (read animals) must adopt pristine Islamic values, and not the other way round.
  • The Kafirs do not learn Arabic, the language of Allah/Islam, but instead, urge the Islamist immigrants to learn the language of their adopted country and try to integrate. Allah is offended when the Kafirs do not learn the language (Arabic) of His Scripture.
  • The western/infidel civilization refuses to adopt Bedouin/Arab culture. Instead, sticks to their own decadent, petrified, immoral, corrupt, lascivious way of life. Islam is oppressed when the Muslims, the best creation of Allah have to witness, with their open eyes, such blatant depravity and transgression. After all, Islam came to purify the world, but the infidels steadfastly refuse to comply. This is oppression to Islam.
  • Peaceful Islam is not allowed to preach hateful sermons by the clerics living in infidel territories. This is a gross of violation Islamic human rights, of freedom to preach hatred for the infidels, since this right has been fully enshrined in the Qur'an, the constitution of Allah.
  • Kafirs deport/cancel visa of firebrand clerics who exhort, in Friday congregations, jihad and murder of the infidels. Read above why Islam is oppressed for such an action of the Kafir.
  • Billboards near Allah's house (mosques) in Kafirlands brazenly display women's underwear, bras and lingerie in provocative manner, arousing the sexual passion in the devotees of Allah. This is oppressive to Islam, as Allah does not like to have a look at women's undergarments and their half-clad body. Allah only looks at hijabi/Burka-clad Muslimahs.
  • Islamists living in Haram land pass by a fitness centre and observe infidel women (and men) performing physical exercise wearing sportswear. Offended, the Islamists complain to the local council and advise the authority that during physical fitness chore the women must wear Burka and jilbab, their shiny and sexy thighs and polished legs must be covered inside baggy Islamic trousers, otherwise, the doors and windows of the gym must be covered with black 'hijab.' The local council turns down the Muslim request. This is oppressive to Islam.
  • The Islamists in Kfirlands go to the local swimming pool and observe men and women practicing swimming together. This is grossly un-Islamic and is oppressive to the Muslims. They ask the local council to open separate swimming pools exclusively for Muslim women and having no access to male visitors. The council turns down their request, which offends the Islamists.
  • In Olympic events, women are allowed to compete, in the presence of mixed spectators, in gymnastics, track and field, swimming, beach volleyball, high jump (despicable, because of the possibility of viewing the women's pudenda), long jump, pole vault…etc., Allah is offended with such display of female flesh in such provocative/erotic manner. The Islamists write lengthy articles and lobby their politicians to ban women from participating in such events. In Islamic Paradises they successfully force the government to ban the telecasting of such 'pornographic' events of the International Olympic.
  • The infidels enact laws to prevent polygamy; Muslims could no longer acquire four wives at any time. This surely is a gross violation of Islamic rights of Muslim men to acquire four wives at any time, guaranteed by the Qur'an.
  • Imams extolling the goodness in beating wives to discipline them are deported from infidel lands. This is a great torment to Islam, as it openly violates the Qur'anic verse which calls to beat women to control them.
  • During Christmas gala, party, the Kafir invites his Muslim neighbor and unwittingly serves haram food and wine. The display of haram food and alcoholic drinks to the Muslims is, of course, very offensive. The infidels must not eat and drink haram stuff in the presence of Muslims—it is very odious, Allah becomes angry.
  [26 June 2008]

Hamza Kashgari

• On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you've always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you. On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more. On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more. [Twitter, 04 February 2012] The reactions to this were entirely predictable: "Kill him! Kill him! Not to mention the hilarious sight of the snivelling Sheikh Nasser Al Omar. Aw, diddums!

Walter Kaufmann

• 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. [Critique Of Religion And Philosophy]

Donald Kaul

• We are looking at an era of religious intolerance that we have not seen since the Salem witch trials. And people like me – the majority, as it turns out – are the witches. … I do not feel threatened by gay marriage and I don't see how it threatens the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. You would think that the divorce rate would be a pretty good indicator of the sanctity of marriage, wouldn't you? Well, the lowest divorce rate in the country is that of Massachusetts, home of legalized, gay marriage. Such bastions of religiosity as Kentucky, Arkansas and Mississippi have a divorce rate twice as high. The region of the country with the lowest divorce rate? The Northeast – the blue states. In other words, the people who talk most about sanctity of marriage are the ones who do the least about it. Evangelical Christians are fond of espousing an apocalyptic view of history. On that great gettin' up mornin' the Lord will sweep all Born Again Christians to his bosom and condemn the rest of us – atheists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, all – to eternal damnation. … But you know, the more I think of it, the less I object to the "Left Behind" scenario. Do I really want to spend eternity with people who walk around with a Bible in one hand and a lynch-rope in the other? [Tri-state media, Warricknews Editorial, 08 December 2004]

John Keane

• Market competition produces market censorship. Private ownership of the media produces private caprice. Those who control the market sphere of producing and distributing information determine, prior to publication, what products (such as books, magazines, newspapers, television programmes, computer software) will be mass produced and, thus, which opinions gain entry into the 'marketplace of opinions'.[The Media And Democracy]

Garrison Keillor

• My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in hopes of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

Helen Keller

• Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. [letter to a suffragette in England, 1911]
• You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 people and only one-eleventh of the land belongs to the other 40,000,000 people? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from injustice? [letter to a suffragette in England, 1911]

Al Kennedy

• Why this sudden rush of representative enthusiasm? Because of everyone's constant companion: The Terror. Those on the right who aren't simply voting for Bush because of a psychological loop which runs "Bush he Christian he God-fearing more wrong he seem do more faith we must have Bush he Christian …" have been filled with righteous horror that Democrat rule would lead mothers to earn their own money, gay people to imagine they have souls, coloured folks to get uppity and the poor to drag themselves out of the storm drains and even as far as, say, the sidewalks. Of course, the right has also managed, with very little Democrat help, to scare the bejeesus out of everybody else with their satanic reinterpretations of scripture and their gleeful interest in imminent Armageddon with wholesale privatisations along the way. Faced with living under an almost tangible Pall of Doom, or submitting to a ballot-spoiling joke which transformed Kerry wins in Ohio and New Mexico into more madness with King George, voters took the only option open to them outside of civil war – they voted anyway and hoped. And having been scammed out of a presidency last time, the Democrats bent over and took it again. But that's enough dwelling on the past. Given that where the pointyhead werewolves lead, Mr Blair will always follow, we proud British voters can look forward to an electoral process transformed into an adrenaline-drenched rollercoaster ride of fun. More ricin alerts, more random arrests of Muslims and people standing next to Muslims, more tanks at Heathrow, Liverpool sealed in plastic for undisclosed reasons, total surveillance of book purchases, email traffic, phone lines, video rentals and underwear preferences. There shouldn't be a shop or building we can enter that isn't full of mounted policemen or uniformed teenagers with guns. We should also be able to witness more UK troop fatalities, more maimings, more fountains of Iraqi blood and more global instability and moronic cruelty. And the fears this naturally engenders will be balanced by the kind of harmless family entertainment we all enjoyed in It's A Knockout and The Generation Game when the new voting regulations are unveiled. How terrific it will be when Bradford voters have to recite Leviticus backwards before they can cross their box. (Of course, if they can recite it backwards they can also be burned as witches.) Those suspected of harbouring anti-Blairite tendencies may be asked to walk across hot coals on the way to polling booths in Preston. And if this seems a little disturbing, remember – how could we dare export democracy across the globe, if we didn't defend it at home with every lie, threat and dirty trick available? [The Guardian, 10 November 2004]

John F. Kennedy

• Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. [1962]

Ludovic Kennedy

• In the spring and with the coming of Easter, an old man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of gods. I am now 83 pushing 84 and the closer I come to shuffling off this mortal coil, the more mystified I am by Christian belief in the deity they call by the not very original name of God (as if there had never been others). Not all Christians of course, for the exodus from their churches these past few decades has only been paralleled by the numbers of the children of Israel as they traipsed across the wilderness in search of the promised land. … Do the brothers and sisters really believe they are being listened to, and have they ever paused to consider how silly to outsiders they sound and look? (Though no sillier than Jews nodding at the Wailing Wall or Muslims prostrating themselves in the direction of Mecca – an attitude described by Rowan Atkinson as the hunt for Khomeini's contact lenses.). It is a mistake to consider gods as unconnected, existing in a vacuum. The ones we are saddled with are heirs to a long line of former idols like Bunjil and Pulga, Baal and Mithras, Ra and Osiris, Thor and Odin, and before them literally thousands of others, gods of the sea and sky, of rivers and mountains, stones and bushes, all of which originated when primitive man sought comfort and reassurance in the things that scared him: thunder and lightning, droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, fearsome beasts and poisonous fruits and berries. All gods from time immemorial are fantasies, created by humans for the welfare of humans and to attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable. But do we, in the third year of the 21st century of the Common Era and on the springboard of colonising the universe, need such palliatives? There have been periods in history when men and women found spiritual fulfilment, as I and increasing numbers do today, in nature, art; long periods too when they lived without religious beliefs. The Ancients, wrote the philosopher John Locke in 1689, had no beliefs in a personal god, and about the same time French missionaries seeking converts were finding godless societies living contentedly all over the world. [The Guardian, 17 April 2003]

Johannes Kepler

• When miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.
• The universe is stamped with the adornment of harmonic proportions, but harmonies must accommodate experience. [upon calculating that the planets orbited in ellipses rather than the perfect circles he had believed]

'Kimpatsu'

• Why should the Bible need interpreting? Is god such a rubbish author he can't make his opinions clear? [Face To Faith, The Guardian, 05 September 2009]
• Not a bad article, but would you please stop calling Muhammed a prophet? He was no more a prophet than my pet cat. [The Right To Offend, The Guardian, 30 September 2008]
• "…church attendance dwindles to dangerous levels…" How can abandoning superstition be dangerous? [Faith Should Harness Art's Appeal, The Guardian, 13 July 2010]
• Try accessing Richard Dawkins's website in Turkey and see what happens. Then tell me again that Turkey respects freedom of speech. [Who's Calling Turkey A Police State?, The Guardian, 29 March 2011]
• WTF is Islamophobia? Please define, because it just seems like playing the martyr card when people ask valid questions about your loony beliefs. [The Guardian, Message to Richard Dawkins: 'Islam is not a race' is a cop out., 20 September 2013]
• What protections do the religious need in the workplace? Surely not the right to skive off while they go and pray, leaving everyone else to take up the slack?! [Will We Establish A Green Religion?, The Guardian, 08 September 2009]
• Surely the essential point of the Koran, like with the Bible, is whether or not it really is the word of god? And on that point, all holy books are just so much crap. [Sebastian Faulks And The Quran, The Guardian, 26 August 2009]
• Lobbyists don't represent the public, they represent special interest groups to the detriment of the public. They shouldn't be allowed within 100 miles of the Beltway. [In Defence Of Lobbyists, The Guardian, 28 January 2009]
• So, you're admitting that religion has nothing to do with the truth, but is a useful fiction for controlling the masses? At least you're starting to be honest, at last! [If God Does Not Exist, We Must Urgently Invent One, The Guardian, 27 March 2009]
• "The Qur'an itself says he is entitled to his opinion." The Qur'an also says he should be killed for that opinion. Sounds like the rantings of a schizophrenic to me. [Reading The Qur'an In The Dark, The Guardian, 28 August 2009]
• Why do you think "The West" (sic) is particularly hostile to Islam? What about to fascism, slavery, and other unacceptable practices? Oh, and what's the penalty for apostacy? [Western Hostility To Islam Is Stoked By Double Standards And Distortion, The Guardian, 21 July 2009]
• Increasingly, the police see the people as a problem to be managed rather than a citizenry to be served. Until this psychological black spot is addressed, policing in Britain will never be improved. [A National Police Force? Move Along Please, The Guardian, 16 January 2011]
• "The call for a ban has not been taken lightly." Still too light than it should be. Let the EDL march. The correct way to deal with a bad argument is a better argument; it is never censorship. [Stop EDL's Bradford March Of Hate, The Guardian, 11 August 2010]
• @Islamophobiasucks: "Belief in superstitions is Haraam and yet they are still widely believed in the Muslim world." This sentence makes no sense. Superstition is forbidden by a superstition? What a tautology! [Attack Of The Killer Texts, The Guardian, 28 March 2009]
• Respect cannot be mandated; it must be earned. If religious people don't want their beliefs made fun of, they shouldn't have funny beliefs. Blasphemy is a non-crime, and the notion is an offence against the human right of free speech. [An Offensive Law, The Guardian, 10 January 2008]
• The secular state is the best option for everyone, because it guarantees equality in the shared space of society without privileging one superstition over another. Now go and explain that to all those Muslims who want to live under sharia. [Representing Ourselves Better, The Guardian, 02 May 2008]
• "…they are fundamentalists, committed to patriarchy on biblical grounds…" So they are misogynists who justify their oppression of women usign a Bronze Age book of myths. IOW, they are nasty people. Why can't you just say so? [Fundamentalists Against Women, The Guardian, 16 July 2010]
• There is zero evidence for the existence of any gods, but mounds of evidence that evolution is a purely natural phenomenon. Superstition has no place in the classroom. And what the hell is random about natural selection, anyway? Can you answer that one, Axandar? [Our Scientists Must Nail The Creationists, The Guardian, 14 September 2008]
• "I don't care if people want to retain a sense of being religious, as long as what they believe stands up to intellectual scrutiny." But nothing religious ever stands up to intellectual scrutiny. That's because religious claims are untrue. And the truth should count, don't you think? [Loud But Not Clear, The Guardian, 13 April 2009]
• Pascal's wager is nonsense. Why not use it to become a Muslim? Or a Hindu? Or a Scientologist? The wager assumes that there are only two choices: Xianity or atheism, which as we can see from the other options listed above, is not the case. But then, if you don't care for the truth, why should it matter? [My Faith Is An Informed Choice, The Guardian, 07 August 2010]
• This must be banned by law. We must turn back the tide, and return Britain from being a police state to being a democracy. And the police officers who suggested and who back this idea should be fired, as they are clearly authoritarians with no grasp of what their job really entails. Welcome to Big Brother. [CCTV In The Sky: Police Plan To Use Military-style Spy Drones, The Guardian], 23 January 2010
• Do you really want to use the Bible as a guide to political life? Stoning people who work on Sundays, or who wear clothes made of two different fibres, or who are gay? Far better to adopt a modern, humanist philosophy and keep superstition out of politics, particularly when it comes to making policy decision. [The political Bible, Part 1: A Foundation For British Attitudes, The Guardian, 09 August 2011]
• If homeopathy works, I'll drink my own piss. Where is the evidence? The double-blinded trials? The meta-analysis? The funnel plot? The reality is that homeopathy is just a placebo, and if anyone thinks otherwise, let them claim $1 million. Otherwise, 'tis a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. [Please end These Unfounded Attacks On Homeopathy, The Guardian, 16 August 2010] 'Unfounded'? Oh, please! There's every foundation to the attacks, and with good reason: they have proper evidence, not some unfounded (sorry!) belief in a mythical essence.
• Look, Henry, the real reason the police delete and destroy photos taken by law-abiding citizens, and the same reason they delight in harassing amateur photographers, is because they can. It's all about showing us who's boss. And until this thuggish psychology is tackled, the harassment and intimidation will continue. [The War On Street Photography, The Guardian, 17 July 2009]
• Two wrongs don't make a right. It was wrong to block the miners a quarter of a century ago, and it's wrong to block the EDL now. The EDL is odious, but the correct response to a bad argument is a better argument, never censorship. Interesting how people only ever want to deny free speech to those people with whom they disagree. [The EDL Demonstration Can't Be Stopped? Rubbish, The Guardian, 22 August 2010]
• Ethos is NOT the issue behind faith schools; indoctrination is. Do you really want Vardy schools run by Xian fundies teaching that the Earth is only 6,000 years old?! Stop selection by stealth, separate religion from the state, and enable admissions through fairness. Oh, and keep your superstitions to yourself. Nothing else is fair or just. [Faith Schools Can Best Generate The Common Purpose That Pupils Need, The Guardian, 08 September 2008]
• ID IS religious belief. There is no avoiding that reality. To deny the fact is disingenuous. Further, what are the testable predictions of ID? Name them, please. We're waiting… This article reveals no more than a complete lack of understanding of what science is, and of what evolution is. And you were a science teacher?! Where? Toytown? [Intelligent Design Should Not Excluded From The Study Of Origins, The Guardian, 01 December 2009]
• No, Thomas, that would be evidence (not "proof", which is for maths and whisky) that universes can exist – which we already know empirically from the existence of our own. It would not demonstrate in any way the existence of a higher power that consciously willed our universe – or any other universe, for that matter – into existence. [Making The Connection, The Guardian, 19 September 2008]
• Atheism is not a movement, it is merely the absence of belief in gods. As such, everyone is an atheist – Xians are atheists about Baal, Thor, Zeus, Quetzlcotl, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, for example – but some of us go one god further, for the very good reason that there is no evidence for the supernatural. [Face To Faith, The Guardian, 23 August 2008]
• The best thing of all would be for the fuzzy-minded liberal theologians to reappraise their positions and reject superstition completely. At least the fundamentalists are true to their religious texts; no imaginative reinterpretation for them. They read the books as they were meant to be read. Leviticus states point-blank that homosexuals should be stoned to death; either accept that, or reject the Bible as divinely inspired. Bet you won't do either, though. [Liberals Must Stand Together, The Guardian, 29 May 2010]
• Williams is wrong. Of course gods can be bound down for study. Tell me what you mean by god – shiny beardy man in the sky, winged messenger, flying serpent, etc. – and I'll examine your claims scientifically. Simple, really. What Williams really means is that his own thinking is too muddled to make any sense at all. Befuddlement as a precursor to senility, really. [Making Sense Of Rowan Williams, The Guardian, 28 May 2008]
• Why don't you just get your god to fix everything with a wave of her magic wand? Perhaps because she doesn't exist? Nice conflation of secularism (which includes many religious people, by the way) with "greedy lifestyles". Care to be explicit? How about some facts – which are notoriously lacking. BTW, you did know that secularism is NOT the same as atheism, didn't you…? [It's Creation, Stupid! A Coalition Of The Faiths Could Save The Planet, The Guardian, 06 August 2008]
• What on earth does remembrance of the Holocaust and compassion for its victims have to do with superstitions like the Big Sky Fairy? To conflate the two is dishonest, as it falsely implies that only the superstitious can have empathy. I note ,also, that whilst you mentioned the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, you haven't mentioned the gay, disabled, or Roma victims. Why is that, I wonder? [Face To Faith, The Guardian, 26 January 2008]
• @Dickstoneheart: You are incorrect. The first known example of scientific thinking was Thales of Miletus, who looked at fossils in the rock face and wondered if the world were once made from water, without any involvement from any gods. Science eschews gods, but if the Xian god existed, she could make that fact known merely by revealing herself to everybody on Earth. Funny that she hasn't done that. [Atheism's Aesthetic Of Enchantment, The Guardian, 02 April 2011]
• Andrew, Andrew, Andrew. Once again, you are confusing the sound advice of the good doctor (theology has no place in rationality) with his substandard knowledge of medicine compare to the profession today. You are saying that because La Mettrie didn't know everything, he didn't know anything. Why do you always throw out the baby with the bathwater? Mind you, that really is a neat and Christian murder. [The Man Who Said We Are Machines, The Guardian, 12 August 2010]
• The problem with the general public is scientific illiteracy. If a chemist sells homeopathy and the government says that homeopathy is available on the NHS, then Joe Public concludes that it must be efficacious, because no one would allow it otherwise. To that end, its sale by chemists must be banned, and we need to improve science education. Which will require a magic wand… [There Is No Scientific Case For Homeopathy: The Debate Is Over, The Guardian, 22 March 2015]
• There aren't "two kinds of religion"; the imputing of divine agency to natural phenomena and calling it Zeus is called "promiscuous teleology"… and is exactly the same as calling it "Jesus". The belief in divine agency is the sine qua non of religion, and although no one believes in the existence of Zeus or Ra any more, there is no difference in believing in the monstrous Abrahamic myths either. And you can pray to have your god smite me dead if you disagree. I'll be back to post again tomorrow… [In Search Of The Historical Zeus, The Guardian, 24 June 2009]
• And yet: It was Zanu-Labour that introduced racist ID cards for non-EU nationals. It was Zanu-Labour that ended the right to demonstrate in front of Parliament. It was Zanu-Labour that wants to track all of us over everything we do. It was Zanu-Labour that introduced intrusive, sexualised body scanners at airports. It was Zanu-Labour that introduced fingerprinting at Stanstead airport. It was Zanu-Labour that lied about the David Kelly affair. It was Zanu-Labour that launched an illegal war. Toxic policies? Zanu-Labour surely knows… [We Must Trust In Basic British Decency To Beat The Racist BNP, The Guardian, 21 March 2010]
• The solution to the disproportionate American treatment of non-Americans travelling to the US is simple: tit for tat. If US tourists had to be fingerprinted, searched, apply 72 hours beforehand for permission to travel, etc., their outcry would change the relationship dynamic by the end of the week to something more equitable and approaching parity. You can guarantee, however, that spineless European politicans will never introduce it. [Terrorism: Keep Calm And Carry On, The Guardian, 27 April 2010]
• Psychological testing by the American criminologist L. Craig Parker Jr., and to a lesser extent by Canadian activist Naomi Klein, has revealed that the psychology among police is such that they cannot distinguish between genuine protest and violence; in their minds, ALL protest is violent and unlawful, because it is treason against the state (which they represent). Hence, police (who are normally woefully ignorant of what the law actually says) wrongly assume that the law shares their prejudices. [Criminal Policing, The Guardian, 04 February 2009]
• WTF are the "new athesist"? The only question is whether any gods have ever existed (you know, Baal, Queztlcotl, Mithras, Yahweh, or the FSM). As there is absolutely no evidence for any supernatural men in the sky (although Amaterasu is a woman), the logical conclusion is that none of them exist. Everything else you say is just smoke and mirrors. Or are you comfortable with such obvious lies…? [Could God Die Again?, The Guardian, 04 October 2009]
• "Some Muslims are fond of condemning western morality ? alcoholism, nudity, premarital sex and homosexuality often being cited as examples." Assuming you mean alcohol consumption rather than outright alcoholism, there's nothing wrong with any of the supposed "immoralities" in that list. Compare that to the homophobia, paedophilia, and honour killings mandated by Islam, and you'll see which ethical system is superior. [The Hypocrisy Of Child Abuse In Many Muslim Countries, The Guardian, 25 April 2010]
• The headline should read "Science has not explained the Big bang YET". This article is really just a rehashing of the "god of the gaps" argument, and fails to address two key points: who created god, and which god do you mean? Zeus? Astarte? Quetzlcotl? Or that Jewish bloke who is really just an amalgam of earlier saviour gods? The article is an embarrassing joke; whatever possessed the editor to run it? Or did the Devil make him do it? [Science Can't Explain The Big Bang - There Is Still Scope For A Creator, The Guardian, 08 January 2009]
• "Scientific knowledge is of course distinct from religious belief, but only to scientists, and the sufficiently scientifically educated. The rest of us must take it on faith." No, the rest of you should bloody well stop watching reality TV and study more science. The great thing about science is that it is accessible to everyone. Of course, to understand science a little effort is required, which seems to be anathema these days… [Particularly Divine?, The Guardian, 10 April 2008]
• This government deserves to be kicked out of office because of SOCPA, their assaults on free speech, the right of peaceful assembly, racist 42-day detention without charge, ID cards, ANPR tracking your journey, surveillance cameras everywhere, and snooping on our phone calls and e-mails. Saying that other parties would be just as bad misses the point, because what others would do is hypothetical; what this authoritarian government is real, and here and now. [Labour Can Win. Here's How, The Guardian, 19 September 2008]
• "Richard Dawkins is an extreme atheist" Yet again, the old canard that's such utter bollocks. Muslim extremists fly planes into buildings. Xian extremists shoot abortion doctors. Dawkins writes books. There is no equivalent. Further, how can one be "extremely Muslim" and yet not be an extremist? To be "extremely Muslim" is to reject the rule of law in favour of violence against non-Muslims. If you don't feel that way, you are not living the jihad, and hence are not "extremely Muslim." Simple, really. [Lady Warsi And The Concept Of Extremism, The Guardian, 21 January 2011]
• The final sentence of this article is revealing of the police mindset ["Police have lodged an appeal at the supreme court."]: they don't believe they have done anything wrong. Not only should this database be deleted immediately, any officer involved in its creation or maintenance belongs in prison as they are guilty of unlawful spying. Cleaning out the Augean stables of the Met, however, requires a political will that is sorely lacking among the equally corrupt Palace of Westminster. [Green Party Peer Put On Database Of 'Extremists' After Police Surveillance, The Guardian, 16 June 2014]
• Do not confuse belief and faith. Faith is the position that X is true without evidence; and religious belief falls into that category. It is different rfom a belief that say, the Sun will rise tomorrow, because we know that the Sun rising is a consequence of the rotation of the Earth, and given that it's happened every day for the last 4.5 billion years and that there is no evidence that the world will end before then, believing that the Sun will rise tomorrow is a reasonable belief. Unlike religion. [Belief Is About Truth, Not Feelings, The Guardian, 06 August 2010]
• Religion IS superstition. It's merely one manifestation thereof. Both religion and superstition eschew evidence in favour of visceral feelings of what is "true". Both have rituals that attempt to influence the real world by paranormal means; religionists pray, and new agers throw salt over their shoulder, but the purpose is the same: to magically interfere with the workings of the universe. Neither has any merit. The only difference is the length of time that one has been around longer than the other. [Science vs Superstition, Not Science vs Religion, The Guardian, 14 February 2009]
• Like all fuzzy thinkers, Giles Fraser mistakenly conflates hatred of Islam (which I do) with hatred of brown skinned people (which I do not). After all, to hate Muslims is to hate the majority of white people in Chechnya. It's the superstition, and the violence that encourages, which I despise--just as I despise Catholicism for its rape and torture of children, and all superstition in general for stifling thought and reason. Give me a one true example of "Islamophobia" , Giles. Just one. I'm waiting… [Islamophobia Is The Moral Blind Spot Of Modern Britain, The Guardian, 23 January 2011]
• All schools should be forced to teach every single religion in the world, and I don't just mean lip service. Adherents of each faith should be brought in to explain why they belief their superstitions are correct and every else's, including those of the host school, wrong. This will start critical thinking in children. Also, no child must ever be forced to say any prayers in any school funded with a single penny of taxpayers' money. How long do the faithheads think their indoctrination will last then? [Taxpayers' Cash Should Not Be Used To Fund Faith Schools, Say Voters, The Guardian, 15 June 2014]
• You are telling me that I'm a second-class citizen because I don't subscribe to your particular set of superstitions. This is arrogant and dangerous nonsense. Keep breeding such disaffection, and you WILL reap the consequences. Secularism – the complete separation of religion and state – is the only viable starting point for the equality of all before the law, and within society. Religion, like sex, is a private matter – you can practice it in the privacy of your own home, but not in public. And please keep it away from the children. [We Need The Church Of England, The Guardian, 22 February 2008]
• This article spectacularly misses the point of the writing of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al.: Namely that they are right. Claims made by witches, warlocks, imams, muftis, and priests are so much unsubstantiated hogwash. The truth is superior to all other claims, so these rationalist writers are doing the world a favour by calling attention to it. Oh, and Western civilisation IS superior to Islam. Unless you geniuinely do believe that amputating the hands of thieves is acceptable justice? Or that the word of a man is truly worth twice that of a woman? Well, do you? [The Liberal Supremacists, The Guardian, 25 April 2009]
• The fact remains that even if Muslims are in a minority in Britain, they still do not have any rights to religious privilege, so mocking Islam is perfectly acceptable. (You seem to be confusing mocking Islam with mocking Muslims, a blurring that the faithheads enjoy because it enables them to claim martyrdom.) It matters not one whit whether Xians are offended by the statue. I don't find the statue particularly funny or clever, either… but no one has the right to demand its destruction. Free speech trumps all other considerations. All else is smoke and mirrors. [Cock And Bull, The Guardian, 04 September 2008]
• As to why faithheads grow stronger in their delusions through suffering is actually rather easy to explain: solipsism. They believe everything revolves around them, and so the suffering that they experience is designed to spur them to greater efforts at witnessing. Such is the self-centred nature of their thought processes. BTW, when you were a paediatrician, did you ever withhold medicine and just pray for a child's recovery? If not, you clearly don't have as much faith in your god as you profess, and if yes, then you committed child abuse. Puts you in kind of a bind, doesn't it…? [God On Trial, The Guardian, 08 September 2008]
• A better question to ask, Giles is why you present the bifurcation fallacy of atheism or the Abrahamic god. There are plenty of other gods that have been and still are worshipped around the world, including various African Jujus up the Mountain. or do you regard such beliefs as childish and silly? After all, it's no more preposterous than your born-of-a-virgin, dying-and-returning fable, or the ritual of eating your holy spaceman's flesh and drinking his blood every week. To dismiss the Great Juju up the Mountain and not your own silliness would be racist, wouldn't it, Giles…? [Intelligent, Divine, The Guardian, 14 June 2008]
• What a load of self-serving cobblers. There is no place for sharia anywhere in the modern world; it is a bronze age anachronism, homophobic, misogynistic, and hate-mongering, and must be eliminated globally. The comparison to beth din is apt, but not for the reason Inayat gives; rather than attempting to justify sharia because beth din exist, the answer is to outlaw beth din as well. Justice is a secular issue; how can one receive justice in a court that claims you are inferior just because your beliefs are different? And, Inayat, if you think that sharia is acceptable: what is the penalty for apostasy? [There's A Place For Sharia, The Guardian, 05 July 2008]
• The fact that religion does not make a person ethically superior is evident from Catholic paedophile priests to meth-taking, catamite-hiring hypocrites like Ted Haggard, to corrupt swindlers like Benny Hinn and Jim Swaggert, to homophobic blowhards like Rick Warren to Muslim suicide bombers to imams who spout hate. I could continue, but the salient point is clear: religion not only does not make you a better person, if you only do what is right out of religious motivation, you are either self centred (trying to buy your way into Heaven) or have no independent moral compass. Either way, religion comes off very badly in the ethical stakes. [Is Faith The Sign Of A Better Person?, The Guardian, 07 February 2010]
• I have an absolute right to protest outside parliament, but SOCPA criminalises this right. I must never need to ask permission to protest or demonstrate, any more than I need to ask permission to travel, or associate with others, or to read what I like. That 157 demonstrations have taken place since SOCPA is a red herring; how many applications were refused? And no one should have to ask permission to demonstrate in the first place. ID cards are an affront to civil liberties, and must be resisted at all turns. Apart from criminalising me for merely existing, the huge waste of money would be better spent of refinancing the health service. [Is The PM Taking Liberties?, The Guardian, 23 April 2006] "Taking Liberties"? You mean there are any left? He forgot one when he made us all guilty-never-innocent cogs of the state?
• Just like the investigation into thuggery in the Armed Response Unit following the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes was hastily dropped after the ARU uniformly downed tools and refused to work unless they were all guaranteed immunity, an immunity they expect to last in perpetuity. The police don't like to be called to account for their actions, and this refusal to do their job during the riots was intended as a warning; stop looking closely at what we do, or we will stop doing it all together. Until this mindset is addressed, not only will the politicisation of the police continue apace, but also the likelihood of the police doing the right thing for the right reasons will grow increasingly remote. [We Will Wear The Great Shame Of These Riots For A Very Long Time, The Guardian, 14 August 2011]
• As with all politicians, New labour is stuffed full of authoritarians who view the electorate with contempt. And the electorate is asleep, because they are sheeple who docily believe that these assaults on freedom are for their own good. They don't care how many innocent people are wrongly imprisoned, so long as they aren't one of them. As long as this "I'm all right, Jack" attitude – this absence of empathy – continues, Britain will continue to spiral downwards into being a police state. We need a libertarian prime minister who will also stand up to America on issues like private information of people boarding flights. The simplest solution is tit-for-tat. Until that day, we are all slaves and serfs. [Why I Told Parliament: You've Failed Us On Liberty, The Guardian, 09 March 2008]
• Religion is codified superstition so, yes, it very much does exist. Also, the problem with intuitions, whether they be "like cures like" or "'natural' (sic) is better", is that they are so often just plain wrong. That's why we have double-blinded, randomized, controlled trials to check homeopathy… and discover that, stripped of anecdote, it's really just a placebo. The trouble with religion, however, its moderates offer a fig leaf for the extremists, who crash planes into buildings and shoot abortion doctors. And that makes religion dangerous. [Is witchcraft Homeopathy?, The Guardian, 16 July 2010]
• The real issue here, then, is the psychology of the politicians. They are more intent on scoring points off each other than they are in doing the right thing for the right reasons; i.e., none of them oppose Zanu-Labour's assault on liberty because they perceive it to be wrong. Even if an incoming Tory government repealed all of Zanu-Labour's evil using a single bill as proposed by the Lib Dems, they would be doing it to stick two fingers up at the opposite benches, rather than being motivated out of a concern for justice and liberty. None of them have a moral compass, and while that remains the case, the people who go into politics will remain the scum of the Earth that they are now. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. [Stop Playing Politics With Our Rights And Freedoms. They're Too Valuable., The Guardian, 24 January 2010]
• As to theists "welcoming" or "accepting" evolution (the latter verb being terribly patronising; science doesn't need their acceptance or approval), this muddled thinking is inherent nonsense. The whole point that Dawkins is making here is that Darwin's explanation of the mechanism of evolution – namely, natural selection – removed the teleological argument from the reason why religion exists in the first place – as an attempt to explain natural phenomena. Believing in both god(s) and evolution is Orwellian doublethink; otherwise, the most you can accept is that whatever god(s) created biodiversity, they were terribly hamfisted about it. Which doesn't make them worth praising, does it? You would be better off praying to the law of gravity. [Not So Highly Evolved, The Guardian, 19 August 2008]
• What does it matter what a Bronze Age book chock full of myths and fish stories says, anyway? The question is, and always will be, whether veiling (including headscarves) is a symptom of the suppression of women (answer: yes), and what can be done about it? (Answer: consciousness-raising.) Male insistence on women dressing like Ninja says more about the male mindset than it does about the women in question; take the Buddhist parable of the Buddha helping the woman to ford a river, and then explaining to his angry friend, "I left her by the riverbank, whereas you're still carrying her." Until these patriarchs learn that women are not here merely for their convenience, and that "lustful thoughts" are their responsibility alone, we will never make any progress. Which is why I despair of the human race. [Face To Faith, The Guardian, 15 March 2008]
• What a load of absolute tosh. I have the right to do as I like with the one proviso that I don't hurt anyone – a proviso that is dishonestly omitted from the article, not least I suspect because it takes care of the "unfettered liberty leads to social damage" argument. I have the absolute right of freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom to protest, freedom to march, and not to be spied on, harried, or treated as a criminal in waiting, which is what this authoritarian government has done. Britain today is very much like certain Eastern European countries under Communism. It need not be as extreme as East Germany for you to know that such surveillance of the people and the denial of their basic liberties is simply wrong. Which leads us to the question: why do you hate our freedoms so much? Is it that you don't trust us with them? Shame on you. [This Police State Hysteria, The Guardian, 08 April 2008]
• Once again, you have completely missed the point, Andrew. You have created a strawman with regard to Terry Sanderson, who never, ever said that the man's superstition should count against him. The point is that Cherie Blair is favouring faithheads over rational people (who will, statistically, be fewer in number before the bench, anyway). The real issue here is that the man's beliefs should have absolutely no bearing on the sentence, but on this occasion, Blair obviously – by her own words! –gave Miah a lesser sentence than she would have given a freethinker because he was a believer! If the shoe were on the other foot, would you accept that? Say I was a judge, and handed down lesser sentences to freethinkers and humanists, and harsher sentences for the same crime to Muslims or Xians. Would you find that acceptable? No, I didn't think so… [Cherie Booth Unfair To Atheists?, The Guardian, 04 February 2010]
• This article is a strawman from beginning to end. Secularism is the separation of religion and state, yet the author continually conflates secularism with atheism – the act of a scoundrel, and a sign of an impoverished mind. Grayling's (quite correct) argument is that religion cannot be privileged, so if, for example, a schoolgirl can break her school uniform code to wear religious symbols, then all the other pupils can also break the code to wear non-religious symbols. It is only just and fair that superstitions get no special treatment in the public sphere. As to the rest of the article, it's the usual fallacies of the superstitious; equating the absence of religion with being a religion in itself (in which case, health is a disease) and falsely casting secularism as some sort of bogeyman that aims to do religion in. Can you faithheads even come up with a novel argument? And preferably, one that does not reek of dishonesty as this article does. [The Militant Secularists' Inverted Religion, The Guardian, 02 August 2008]
• It's not gods per se that we are hardwired to believe (and would you all please stop talking about "God" in the initial cap singular, meaning the god of Abraham, as if she were the only possibility; there are over 500 gods worshipped worldwide today, the majority mutually exclusive. There is nothing special about the dominant superstition of the culture into which we were all fortuitously born); we are hardwired to identify PATTERNS, and we often see patterns where there are none. Seeing faces (like supposedly Jesus) in a piece of toast is pareidolia; attributing random acts that we passively experience to a consciousness is promiscuous teleology. Oh, and an overload of promiscuous teleology following a run of bad luck is called paranoia. Let's get the details right: AGENCY is the issue, to which we then anthropomorphise the mistaken attribution of consciousness, and we label that anthropomorphisation "god". [Evolving A Belief In God, The Guardian, 09 June 2008]
• You have no right not to be offended. In fact, in the marketplace of ideas, taking offence at something someone has said at some time is inevitable, unless you're a cabbage with no opinions. That does not justify violence on your part, however. What Islamists want is global subjugation to Islam, something that we can never allow as it is antithetical to liberal democracy, with its cherished values of freedom of speech and association. As Voltaire (apocryphally) said, "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Freedom of speech is intrinsic to democracy, and as such, it protects the Danish cartoonists as well as the hatemongering imams who called for the cartoonists to be beheaded. The difference, however, is that the cartoons hurt nobody – whereas the violence committed by the anti-cartoon lobby clearly does. And that is where the difference lies. Ecrasez l'infame – but do it with humour. The Danish cartoonists did. [Denmark Loses Tolerance, The Guardian, 05 June 2008]
• Madeleine, you're confusing secularism with atheism. The expectation was that the march of science would occasion the withering of superstition; secularism (which means the separation of church and state, BTW – it is NOT a synonym for freethought) is a political goal. I personally really don't care if you want to wear a headscarf, but if you are breaking school uniform code to do it, then I can wear a pirate bandanna or a Roman legionnaire's helmet to school in defiance of the school uniform code as well. The one thing that must never happen is that people are allowed to break uniform codes for superstitious reasons; either everyone can break the code, or no one can. Reasons are immaterial. But that's not what you really want, is it? You want us all trembling in superstitious fear before the mighty, all-powerful priest/imam/rabbi/L. Ron Hubbard. Those of us who refuse to comply upset you greatly. And yet, here you are decrying Turkey's censorious impulses. Pot, meet kettle. [Secularists Have Nothing To Fear From Women Wearing Headscarves, The Guardian, 25 February 2008]
• Once again, Harries commits the pratfall of all theists; several times in his article he talks about "how god made the world" and how "god did this, god does that" – without ever offering any evidence for it. This is disingenuous at best, and downright dishonest at worst. All phenomena can be shown to have natural causes. If Harries believes that supernatural causes are at work somewhere, he must show this, or shut up. Appeals to his inner convictions are not evidence. As to "god cannot be proven along the lines of two plus two equals four" – why on earth not? If god can interfere in physical phenomena, then he/she/it must have a physical dimension, which can be examined and demonstrated, like any other physical phenomena. Harries wants to have his cake and eat it; on the one hand, he wants god to be a mysterious other that is beyond rational examination, and on the other hand, he wants god to be accessible to all, the same way that science is. Such muddled thinking is indicative of the theist. Sloppy reasoning such as Harries demonstrates has no place in honest inquiry – and certainly no place in a modern, progressive society. [Science Does Not Challenge My Faith - It Strengthens It, The Guardian, 16 April 2006]
• "Tonight, Jews worldwide celebrate Passover, commemorating the redemption of the Jewish nation from its slavery in Egypt. More profound still than the freedom from physical bondage, this festival expresses religious freedom. The release from the Egyptian yoke took place over 3,000 years ago." No, it never happened. There is zero archaeological evidence to show a Jewish slave presence in Egypt, so you're talking garbage right from the start. And let's not [forget] why it's called "Passover"; because the angel of the Lord flew over the houses and killed all the Egyptian firstborn sons, but left the Jewish houses untouched – passed over. And that's another pile of manure right there (although it's a great SciFi story, I'll grant you. Moses is, after all, a fictional reworking of other, earlier, mythological heroes.) The rest is just nonsense pleading for religious privilege. Secularism – the separation of religion and state – is the only truly fair system. Let parents indoctrinate their children in their own time; it is not the duty of the taxpayer to do so, and religion has no place in the public sphere. All the other claims in this article are merely red herrings. The reality is that Pinter is demanding the taxpayer subsidise the indoctrination of children, driven by a haunting fear of loss of temporal power (not much spirituality there) and terror that if children are actually taught to think critically, they might just (horror of horrors) question the veracity of his nonsensical fairy tales. All else is smoke and mirrors, but Pinter is too intellectually dishonest to admit his real motives. How very… religious… of him… [Face To Faith, The Guardian, 19 April 2006]<
• Regardless of what the Enlightenment may have been in reality, in calling for the defence of reason against the encroachment of religious terrorism, freethinkers like myself are arguing from the standpoint of a set of values BEST EMBODIED by what we think the Enlightenment was supposed to be like. That the historicity is (maybe) wonky is irrelevant. Secondly, the reason why enlightened thinkers like Voltaire and the American founding fathers were deists rather than atheists is because until Darwin in 1859, special creation was the best explanation anyone had for the existence of such biodiversity. As Richard Dawkins observed, Hume was an atheist, but it took Darwin to make one an intellectually satisfied atheist. Thirdly, what has Islam achieved scientifically in the last 500 years? A brief scientific spurt in the Middle Ages does not an enlightened culture make. Today, Islam shares all of the worst characteristics of Xian fundamentalism, such as the denial of evolution and the assertion that the world is only around 600 years old. Further, we know what Islam intends as a future for Europe, not least because Islamic leaders have made it clear time and again in their speeches: that they shall not rest until the entire world has been Islamised, and as population growth in Islamic countries far outstrips that of the secular West, it is not alarmist to see that in half a century or so, some sort of tipping point may well be reached. Where Islam (and Xianity, for that matter) appear to have reached accommodation with enlightened secular values is where the religions have backed down, or been "secularised" in the sense that they have dropped calls for the execution of heretics and apostates. For what Islam as a movement truly desires, see the death sentence passed on a Xian convert in Afghanistan. Ms. Bunting may well be bending over backwards in an attempt to be non-racist, in that she mistakenly conflates religion with race. Those of us who do not commit that error are far better placed to see things as they really are, and are not afraid to speak out against an encroaching evil that seeks to drag us all back to the 14th century. [The Convenient Myth That Changed A Set Of Ideas Into Western Values, The Guardian, 10 April 2006]

Al-Kindi

• We ought not to be ashamed of applauding the truth, nor appropriating the truth from whatever source it may come, even if it be from remote races and nations alien to us. There is nothing that beseems the seeker after truth better than truth itself.

Martin Luther King

• I can't lose hope, because when you lose hope, you die.

Naomi Klein

• Why, consumers demanded, if Wal-Mart had the power to lower prices, alter [censor for 'family' viewing] CD covers and influence magazine content [corporate censorship of things they didn't consider 'fit for the family'], did it not also have the power to demand and enforce ethical labour standards from its suppliers? [No Logo, 2000]
• … attempts to regulate multinationals through the United Nations and trade regulatory bodies have been blocked at every turn. A significant setback came in 1986 when the U.S. government effectively killed the little-known United Nations Commissions on Transnational Corporations. Started in the mid-seventies, the commission set out to draft a universal code of conduct for multinational corporations. … American industry was opposed to its creation from the start and in the heat of Cold War mania managed to secure their government's withdrawal on the grounds that the commission was a Communist plot and that the Soviets were using it for espionage. [No Logo, 2000]
• The only idea that has ever stood up to kings, tyrants and mullahs in the Middle East is the promise of economic justice, brought about through nationalist and socialist policies of agrarian reform and state control over oil. But there is no room for such ideas in the Bush narrative, in which free people are only free to choose so-called free trade. That leaves democrats with little to offer, but empty talk of "human rights" – a weedy weapon against the powerful swords of ethnic glory and eternal salvation. But we shouldn't be surprised that the Bush administration, despite telling stories about its commitment to freedom, continues to actively sabotage democracy in the very countries it claims to have liberated. Rumour has it McDonald's also continues to serve Big Macs. [The Guardian, 14 March 2005]
• Labour groups agree that a living wage for an assembly-line worker in China would be approximately US87 cents an hour. In the United States and Germany, where multinationals have closed down hundreds of domestic textile factories to move to zone production, garment workers are paid an average of US$10 and US$18.50 an hour, respectively. Yet even with these massive savings in labour costs, those who manufacture for the most prominent and richest brands in the world are still refusing to pay workers in China the 87 cents that would cover their cost of living, stave off illness and even allow them to send a little money home to their families. A 1998 study of brand-name manufacturing in the Chinese special economic zones found that Wal-Mart, Ralph Lauren, Ann Taylor, Esprit, Liz Claiborne, Kmart, Nike, Adidas, J.C. Penny and the Limited were only paying a fraction of that miserable 87 cents – some were paying as little as 13 cents an hour. [No Logo, 2000]
• Despite President Bush's insistence that America's enemies resent its liberties, most critics of the US don't actually object to America's stated values. Instead, they point to US unilateralism in the face of international laws, widening wealth disparities, crackdowns on immigrants and human rights violations, most recently in Guantanamo Bay. The anger comes not only from the facts of each case but also from a clear perception of false advertising. In other words, America's problem is not with its brand – which could scarcely be stronger – but with its product. … Having conflicting views about the US – admiring its creativity, for instance, but resenting its double standards – doesn't mean you are "mixed up"; it means you have been paying attention. Besides, much of the anger directed at the US stems from a belief – voiced as readily in Argentina as in France, in India as in Saudi Arabia – that the US already demands far too much "consistency and discipline" from other nations; that beneath its stated commitment to democracy and sovereignty, it is deeply intolerant of deviations from the economic model known as "the Washington consensus". … It's no coincidence that the political leaders most preoccupied with branding themselves and their parties were also allergic to democracy and diversity. Historically, this has been the ugly flipside of politicians striving for consistency of brand: centralised information, state-controlled media, re-education camps, purging of dissidents and much worse. Democracy, thankfully, has other ideas. Unlike strong brands, which are predictable and disciplined, democracy is messy and fractious, if not outright rebellious. [The Guardian, 14 March 2002]

Margaret Knight

• During the ages of faith the Church argued, not illogically, that any degree of cruelty towards sinners and heretics was justified, if there was a chance that it could save them, or others, from the eternal torments of hell. Thus, in the name of the religion of love, hundreds of thousands of people were not merely killed but atrociously tortured in ways that made the gas chambers of Belsen seem humane. [Gentle Jesus, Christianity: The Debit Account, 1975]

Steve Knight

• You think there is a magic pixie that came from nowhere, made the universe, then tortures people eternally for not believing in it, because it loves them? Does that sum it up?

Nanrei Kobori, Abbot, Temple Of The Shining Dragon

• God is an invention of Man. So the nature of God is only a shallow mystery. The deep mystery is the nature of man.

Doug Krueger

• Remember, atheism is not a worldview itself. Atheism is defined by the view it does not have – theism. [That Colossal Wreck]
• The god of the Bible measures up to the level of a petty and vicious tyrant. The god of the bible punishes babies for the sins of their parents (Exodus 20:5, 34:7; Numbers 14:18; 2 Samuel 12:13-19); punishes people by causing them to become cannibals and eat their children (2 Kings 6:24-33, Lamentations 4:10-11); gives people bad laws, even requiring the sacrifice of their firstborn babies, so that they can be filled with horror and know that god is their lord (Ezekiel 20:25-26); causes people to believe lies so that he can send them to hell (2 Thessalonians 2:11), and many other atrocities, far too many to list here. It would not be hard to measure up to, and exceed, that level of moral purity. Atheists surpass it every day. [That Colossal Wreck]
• Even if there were undesirable consequences if atheism were true, this would not make atheism false. To think otherwise is to simply engage in wishful thinking. "If death if final, that would be a bad thing. I don't want to believe anything which results in bad things. Therefore, death is not final." Compare that with the following, which is no doubt on the minds of millions every week: "If this is not the winning lottery ticket, then I will be terribly disappointed. I do not want to believe anything which results in my being terribly disappointed. Therefore, this is the winning lottery ticket." By similar reasoning, no one's house would burn down, no one would go bankrupt, no one would be killed in automobile accidents. All that would be required to avert such disasters is to realise that terrible consequences would follow if those things happened and then realise that one does not want to believe it. Then it wouldn't happen. But clearly that is absurd. [That Colossal Wreck]

Krishnamurti

• … your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.

Kronk

• Think about it. A being capable of flinging hundreds of billions of galaxies into existence comes to one microbial blue speck in the cosmos, assumes the form of a human animal in a minor scrub land province in a primitive age, performs unremarkable tricks which any third rate magician these days can surpass, and he dies in total obscurity, unnoticed and unrecorded by any chronicler of the period, leaving behind only rumours that he was ever here at all – and even the paltry rumours are indistinguishable from the ordinary and commonplace myths that humans think up in abundance. Does that really make sense to you? Does that sound like the modus operandi of an omnipotent god?

"Kublai_Khan"

• Inflammatory publication? Only if youre a delusional, hypersensitive twat. [Police From Several UK Forces Seek Details Of Charlie Hebdo Readers, The Guardian, 10 February 2015]
• Full of shit Warsi. Enough of the victimhood, muslims don't have special rights. [Lady Warsi Launches Bitter Assault On Coalition Strategy Towards Muslims, The Guardian, 25 January 2015]
• The quran specifically tells muslims not to befriend or keep the company of non-muslims. Yet its our fault. Supine. [If France Is To Build A New Identity, It Must Address Its Apartheid, The Guardian, 22 January 2015]
• Down with the West. Hey, leave that there, I was using that. Ok, keep the West around a bit longer, we need to translate all the books on medicine and engineering. Oh bugger it, you can stay but only as our slaves. We're allowed to do this, says so in our peaceful holy book. [Isis Threatens Twitter Employees Over Blocked Accounts, The Guardian, 02 March 2015]
• People who are offended by such drawings to the point of violence probably need psychological assistance. It is simply not a healthy state of mind. [Police From Several Uk Forces Seek Details Of Charlie Hebdo Readers, The Guardian, 11 February 2015]
• Ridiculing a person's football team is footballteamphobic, ridiculing their choice of clothes is fashiophobic. We must stop the offence, offence is wrong! We must not be offended, ever! Ever! [Charlie Hebdo Editors: 'We Are Not Naive', The Guardian, 05 May 2015]
• Halal and kosher slaughter without stunning should be banned. The right to religious belief does not extend to the manifestation of religion. Call me an islamophobe all you like, I'm a proud religiophobe. [Sorry Islamophobes, This Is About Animal Welfare, Not Religion, The Guardian, 03 February 2015]
• It's pathetic. If I said I loved my imaginary friend as much as my own family I'd be laughed out of town. We really must not encourage this kind of ludicrous thinking. Christians are equally as silly, saying you have to love Jesus with all your heart. [Paris Attacks: In This Debate Fear Is The Factor That Dare Not Speak Its Name, The Guardian, 16 January 2015]
• The fact you're blaming the shooting on Charlie Hebdo tells me there's not much worth debating here. Muslims voluntaryily chose to live in the non-Muslim, secular France. You don't start shooting people up because the culture there isn't to your liking. [Police From Several Uk Forces Seek Details Of Charlie Hebdo Readers, The Guardian, 11 February 2015]
• Sorry, but its not the job of governments to put their arm around you and comfort you, we have laws in place that protect a person's wellbeing and integrity, its the job of the muslim communities, if they wish to live as religious communities, to get their house in order. [Lady Warsi Launches Bitter Assault On Coalition Strategy Towards Muslims, The Guardian, 25 January 2015]
• When the police track terror suspects they're being Islamophobic and 'radicalising' people. When they don't, the terrorists' parents demand apologies. Breathtaking. Maybe this wouldn't be happening if the girls didn't believe they were joining an army to please a man in the sky. Who put the silly beliefs in their heads? [Families Of Isis Runaways Demand Scotland Yard Apology, The Guardian, 08 March 2015]
• What the fuck is an Islamic haircut? In 2015, there is no more fascistic and dangerous ideology than Islamic fanaticism. Capitalism is bad but at least you won't be shot for buying Brylcrean and not V05. These fascists are literally in charge of countries and entire populations. Now, those haircuts are pretty poor, but for goodness sake a man or woman should be free to have a shit haircut. [Iran Bans 'Homosexual' And 'Devil Worshipping' Hairstyles, The Guardian, 05 May 2015]
• If some are genuinely offended, they need to get over it. I find Islam offensive, towards me as a non-Muslim and towards other religions. I have to accept that some people are going to believe in 7th century mythology and Muslims are going go have to accept that many of us find all religion quite silly. Dangerously silly. [Paris Attacks: In This Debate Fear Is The Factor That Dare Not Speak Its Name, The Guardian, 16 January 2015]
• If Islamic barbarians are so troubled by living in a non-Islamic environment that they feel the need to shoot people, they shouldn't live there. They have every right to perform dawah, to try to convert other gullible fools to believe in the invisible mute fairy god, but others have the right to counter their efforts and point out the very many flaws in their doctrine. [The Right To Free Speech Means Nothing Without The Right To Offend, The Guardian, 16 February 2015]
• The government doesn't have to talk to councils set up around superstitious belief. We have laws in place which protect everybody. We live in a civilized society. Instead of crying about the government, speak to the small number of your co-religionists that are inciting murder, separatism and the chopping up of girls' private parts. You'll find it'll solve a lot of problems. [Shuja Shafi, Head Of The Muslim Council Of Britain: 'We'Ve Never Claimed To Speak For Everyone', The Guardian, 31 January 2015]
• Not interested in negotiating with a religion which views me and my loved ones as inferior, deficient, immoral, and all the other insults thrown at kafirs. Not interested in negotiating with any other religion, for that matter. God almost certainly is a fictional character, why should I respect the superstitions built around him? Wrapping a piece of cloth around your head in deference to an imaginary sky god is backwards, there is no way around this. [ Stop Calling For A Muslim Enlightenment, The Guardian, 19 February 2015]
• Killing people in order to 'avenge your prophet' is the behaviour of damaged minds. I'd go one step further to say that wrapping a piece of cloth around your head to 'protect your modesty' and please god, despite being a creation of said god, who designed you in such a way as to appear attractive to other humans, is delusional. Why even make humans attracted to one another if sex is so bad, why not click his fingers to make babies. Religion is the ultimate form of cognitive dissonance. All the evidence suggests a natural world with no need for a creator yet people go to great lengths to justify their ignorance. [ Did Charlie Hebdo'S Cover Get It Right? Our Writers' Verdict, The Guardian, 13 January 2015]
• Bit of a PR disaster. Demonstrates the problem of segregation in not only islam but some strands of orthodox judaism christianity too. But then, the initiative is silly. The problem is ideology, namely a superstitious ideology which says women are inferior to men, gays should be killed and unbelievers are like apes and monkeys. Instead of having stupid 'visit my mosque' days (a form of dawah?) and putting on pretend smiles for an afternoon over a brew, why not spend the effort reforming traditional and outdated beliefs which have no place in a modern democratic society? At the core of the Abrahamic religions is the rather perverse idea that there is a personal god who reads thoughts and convicts us of thought crime. They suggest that the universe, with its billions of galaxies and stars, was created for the sole purpose of a the creator performing a moral analysis of the species Homo Sapiens Sapiens. If we look at this concept through sober, rational eyes, does anybody really, truly believe this? If they do, which they have a right to, people must accept that others have a right to point out that belief in the jealous and vindictive god of Abraham is as silly as belief in imaginary friends or fairies. Meeting in a mosque for a cup of rosy lee isn't going to break down the walls built by faith. Evidently, even getting a meeting can prove troublesome. [Cathy Newman Turned Away From Mosque On #Visitmymosque Day, The Guardian, 02 February 2015]

Paul Kurtz

• The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully. [The Transcendental Temptation]

Paul Kurtz & Tim Madigan

• Secular humanism does not have the essential attributes of a religion: belief in a deity, the wish for some sort of afterlife, "sacred" dogma or texts, or an absolutist moral creed. Instead, it expresses a philosophical and ethical point of view, and it draws upon the scientific method in formulating its naturalistic view of the nature. [Free Inquiry]

Cathy Ladman

• All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.

Corliss Lamont

• Supernatural entities simply do not exist. This nonreality of the supernatural means, on the human level, that men do not possess supernatural and immortal souls; and, on the level of the universe as a whole, that our cosmos does not possess a supernatural and eternal God. [The Philosophy Of Humanism, 1988]

Anne Lamott

• You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Gustav Landauer

• The state is not something that can be destroyed by a revolution but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour. We destroy it by behaving differently, by contracting other relationships.

Walter Savage Landor

• The most pernicious of absurdities is that weak, blind, stupid faith is better than the constant practice of every human virtue.

Rose Wilder Lane

• So long as any large group of persons, anywhere on this earth, believe the ancient superstition that some Authority is responsible for their welfare, they will set up some image of that Authority and try to obey it. And the result will be poverty and warfare. [The Discovery Of Freedom]

Kenneth V. Lanning

• The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people, including myself, don't like that statement, but the truth of it is undeniable. [FBI Report – Satanic Ritual Abuse, 1992]
• We live in a very violent society, and yet we have "only" about 23,000 murders a year. Those who accept these stories of mass human sacrifice would have us believe that the satanists and other occult practitioners are murdering more than twice as many people every year in this country as all the other murderers combined. [FBI Report – Satanic Ritual Abuse, 1992]
• Nothing is more simple than "the devil made them do it." If we do not understand something, we make it the work of some supernatural force. During the Middle Ages, serial killers were thought to be vampires and werewolves, and child sexual abuse was the work of demons taking the form of parents and clergy. Even today, especially for those raised to religiously believe so, satanism offers an explanation as to why "good" people do bad things. It may also help to "explain" unusual, bizarre, and compulsive sexual urges and behaviour. [FBI Report – Satanic Ritual Abuse, 1992]
• The large number of people telling the same story is, in fact, the biggest reason to doubt these stories. It is simply too difficult for that many people to commit so many horrendous crimes as part of an organised conspiracy. Two or three people murder a couple of children in a few communities as part of a ritual, and nobody finds out? Possible. Thousands of people do the same thing to tens of thousands of victims over many years? Not likely. Hundreds of communities all over America are run by mayors, police departments, and community leaders who are practising satanists and who regularly murder and eat people? Not likely. [FBI Report – Satanic Ritual Abuse, 1992]
• There are many children in the United States who, starting early in their lives, are severely psychologically, physically, and sexually traumatised by angry, sadistic parents or other adults. Such abuse, however, is not perpetrated only or primarily by satanists. The statistical odds are that such abusers are members of mainstream religions. If 99.9% of satanists and 0.1% of Christians abuse children as part of their spiritual belief system, that still means that the vast majority of children so abused were abused by Christians. Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the public should not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten, that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that satanists are taking over America's day care centres or institutions. No one can prove with absolute certainty that such activity has not occurred. The burden of proof, however, as it would be in a criminal prosecution, is on those who claim that it has occurred. The explanation that the satanists are too organised and law enforcement is too incompetent only goes so far in explaining the lack of evidence. For at least eight years American law enforcement has been aggressively investigating the allegations of victims of ritual abuse. There is little or no evidence for the portion of their allegations that deals with large-scale baby breeding, human sacrifice, and organised satanic conspiracies. Now it is up to mental health professionals, not law enforcement, to explain why victims are alleging things that don't seem to have happened. Professionals in this field must accept the fact that there is still much we do not know about the sexual victimization of children, and that this area desperately needs study and research by rational, objective social scientists. [FBI Report – Satanic Ritual Abuse, 1992]
• Some of what the victims in these cases allege is physically impossible (victim cut up and put back together, offender took the building apart and then rebuilt it); some is possible but improbable (human sacrifice, cannibalism, vampirism ); some is possible and probable (child pornography, clever manipulation of victims); and some is corroborated (medical evidence of vaginal or anal trauma, offender confessions.) The most significant crimes being alleged that do not seem to be true are the human sacrifice and cannibalism by organised satanic cults. In none of the multidimensional child sex ring cases of which I am aware have bodies of the murder victims been found – in spite of major excavations where the abuse victims claim the bodies were located. The alleged explanations for this include: the offenders moved the bodies after the children left, the bodies were burned in portable high-temperature ovens, the bodies were put in double-decker graves under legitimately buried bodies, a mortician member of the cult disposed of the bodies in a crematorium, the offenders ate the bodies, the offenders used corpses and aborted fetuses, or the power of Satan caused the bodies to disappear. Not only are no bodies found, but also, more importantly, there is no physical evidence that a murder took place. Many of those not in law enforcement do not understand that, while it is possible to get rid of a body, it is even more difficult to get rid of the physical evidence that a murder took place, especially a human sacrifice involving sex, blood, and mutilation. Such activity would leave behind trace evidence that could be found using modern crime scene processing techniques in spite of extraordinary efforts to clean it up. The victims of these human sacrifices and murders are alleged to be abducted missing children, runaway and throwaway children, derelicts, and the babies of breeder women. It is interesting to note that many of those espousing these theories are using the long- since-discredited numbers and rhetoric of the missing children hysteria in the early 1980s. [FBI Report – Satanic Ritual Abuse, 1992]

Lewis H. Lapham

• … it doesn't take much talent for reading a cashier's scale at Wal-Mart to know that it is fascism, not democracy, that won the heart and mind of America's "Greatest Generation," added to its weight and strength on America's shining seas and fruited plains. … the fascist terms of political endearment are refreshingly straightforward and mercifully simple, many of them already accepted and understood by a gratifyingly large number of our most forward-thinking fellow citizens, multitasking and safe with Jesus. … We can count it as a blessing that we don't bear the burden of an educated citizenry. The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for the sale and distribution of the government's propaganda posters. The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their profit (books on any and all subjects, some of them even truthful), but to people who don't know how to read or think, they do as little harm as snowflakes falling on a frozen pond. … Thanks to the diligence of our news media and the structure of our tax laws, our affluent and suburban classes have taken to heart the lesson taught to the aspiring serial killers rising through the ranks at West Point and the Harvard Business School – think what you're told to think, … Who doesn't now know that the corporation is immortal, that it is the corporation that grants the privilege of an identity, confers meaning on one's life, gives the pension, a decent credit rating, and the priority standing in the community? Of course the corporation reserves the right to open one's email, test one's blood, listen to the phone calls, examine one's urine, hold the patent on the copyright to any idea generated on its premises. Why ever should it not? As surely as the loyal fascist knew that it was his duty to serve the state, the true American knows that it is his duty to protect the brand. … People trained to the corporate style of thought and movement have no further use for free speech, which is corrupting, overly emotional, reckless, and ill-informed, not calibrated to the time available for television talk or to the performance standards of a Super Bowl halftime show. It is to our advantage that free speech doesn't meet the criteria of the free market. We don't require the inspirational genius of a Joseph Goebbels; we can rely instead on the dictates of the Nielsen ratings and the camera angles, secure in the knowledge that the major media syndicates run the business on strictly corporatist principles – afraid of anything disruptive or inappropriate, committed to the promulgation of what is responsible, rational, and approved by experts. Their willingness to stay on message is a credit to their professionalism. … People who learn to conduct themselves in a manner respectful of the telephone tap and the surveillance camera have no reason to fear the fist of censorship. By removing the chore of having to think for oneself, one frees up more leisure time to enjoy the convenience of the Internet services that know exactly what one likes to hear and see and wear and eat. … we can see how well we've begun the new project for the next millennium – the notion of absolute and eternal truth embraced by the evangelical Christians and embodied in the strict constructions of the Constitution; our national identity provided by anonymous Arabs; Darwin's theory of evolution rescinded by the fiat of "intelligent design"; a state of perpetual war and a government administering, in generous and daily doses, the drug of fear; … On the evidence of the wonderful work currently being done by the Bush Administration with respect to the trade deficit and the national debt – to say nothing of expanding the markets for global terrorism – I think we can look forward with confidence to character-building bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle police. [We Now Live in a Fascist State, Harper's, October 2005]

Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace

• Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis. [to Napoleon, who queried Laplace's omission of an "author" of the universe in his Traite De Mechanique Celeste (Celestial Mechanics)]

Laura —

• The Gashlycrumb Terrors
  A is for anthrax, so deadly and white.
  B is for burglars who break in at night.
  C is for cars that, with minds of their own, accelerate suddenly in a school zone.
  D is for dynamite lit with a fuse.
  E is for everything we have to lose.
  F is for foreigners, different and strange.
  G is for gangs and the crimes they arrange.
  H is for hand lotion, more than three ounces; pray some brave agent sees it and pounces.
  I is for ingenious criminal plans.
  J is for jury-rigged pipe-bombs in vans.
  K is for kids who would recklessly play in playgrounds and parks with their friends every day.
  L is for lead in our toys and our food.
  M is for Mom's cavalier attitude.
  N is for neighbors — you never can tell: is that a book club or terrorist cell?
  O is for ostrich, with head in the sand.
  P is for plots to blow up Disneyland.
  Q is for those who would question authorities.
  R is for radical sects and minorities.
  S is for Satanists, who have been seen giving kids razor blades on Halloween.
  T is for terrorists, by definition.
  U is for uncensored acts of sedition.
  V is for vigilance, our leaders' tool, keeping us safe, both at home and at school.
  W is for warnings with colors and levels.
  X is for x-raying bags at all revels.
  Y is for *you*, my dear daughter or son
  Z is for Zero! No tolerance! None!
  http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/06/]

Anton Szandor LaVey

• On Saturday night, I would see men lusting after half-naked girls dancing at the carnival, and on Sunday morning when I was playing organ for tent-show evangelists at the other end of the carnival lot, I would see these same men sitting in the pews with their wives and children, asking God to forgive them and purge them of carnal desires. And the next Saturday they'd be back at the carnival or some other place of indulgence. I knew then that the Christian church thrives on hypocrisy, and that man's carnal nature will out no matter how much it is purged or scoured by any white-light religion. [The Satanic Bible]

Lord Justice (John) Laws

• The conferment of any legal protection or preference upon a particular substantive moral position on the ground only that it is espoused by the adherents of a particular faith, however long its tradition, however rich its culture, is deeply unprincipled. … The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary. We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens; and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic. The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments. The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law; but the State, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself. [McFarlane v Relate Avon Ltd, 29 April 2010]

Stanislaw J. Lec

• Sometimes the devil tempts me to believe in God. [Unkempt Thoughts, 1962]
• Witches admitted their relations with the devil. Our blood boils – how could they be forced to admit this when there is no devil. But reason tells us this is not true. The devil does exist and was in fact the inquisitor. [Unkempt Thoughts, 1962]

Ursula K. LeGuin

• What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice. [The Day Before The Revolution]

Marty Leipzig

• That reminds me of the psychotic architect fixated on intricate industrial parks; he had a complex complex complex.
• I also deny the existence of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Guess I'm in mortal danger of not receiving presents nor chocolate bunnies.

Doris Lessing

• Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

John Lettice

• So we should be very careful, and resist succumbing to general amnesia – David Blunkett was not laid low by love, but because he played fast and loose with the power he held as Home Secretary, and because he was, and remains, less than truthful about this. He most certainly did not, as Tony Blair claims, leave government "with this integrity intact", and at the very least he left government with his judgment deeply suspect, and his capacity for finally arriving at the truth unproven. By some lights his sins are minor – one small immigration issue expedited, the odd mistake over a rail ticket, deployment of perks and use of country facilities that'd count as pretty low level in the business world. But government ought to be different, the rules in government are different, and a Minister who shows a readiness to grant special favours, alongside an apparent inability to own up to it before being forced to, should give us some pause for thought. This is particularly so in the case of the Home Secretary, who this year gave himself emergency powers to suspend every law in the country, and whose defence of an increasingly repressive raft of legislation leant heavily on 'trust me.' But we can't, and we shouldn't. The trust issue shouldn't simply affect our views of Blunkett and of the department running the police, the security services and ID database, because the approach taken to the presentation of inconvenient and embarrassing facts throughout the Blunkett affair is no different from the way the current government operates in general. The objective is not to report, explain and justify but to present – what is actually true is of little consequence, while what the public can be induced to believe is true is of vital importance. … Ask yourself if the outfit that's played fast and loose with the Blunkett audit trail (and that just told civil servants to delete their emails after three months) is one you can trust with an ID scheme audit trail. The Government is at the moment trying to sell us a whole range of new laws and measures that we will ultimately pay a high price for, and it's doing this on the basis of presentation, not facts. … It's all part of the same, squalid picture. [The Register, 20 December 2004]

Lev

• It saddens me to even see so many even debating the issue of whether or not free speech should be relevant to religion and philosophy. It is distressing for the very simple reason that it proves that too many minds cannot grasp the intent behind having such freedoms. Freedom of speech was never put in place to protect socially acceptable thinking, but the complete opposite. Freedom of speech exists for the very reason of protecting every thought and opinion, no matter how ridiculous, offensive or rude it may seem to you or me. To restrain such a freedom is nothing other than censorship, and should be frowned upon by any freedom loving individual. By hiding behind religious sentiments, many groups, such as Islam, manage to sustain their veracity due to the fact that society today seems to place religion as a topic of taboo – something that we are all brought up to believe must be respected and should not be openly challenged. While we are free to ridicule and criticize one's interests or political association, questioning a religious practice is "treason" to many people. This is a very deadly formula because so many religions have intolerant and even hateful roots, which then leaves room for the justification of the most horrific actions hidden behind a shield we are conditioned to respect. Kill a man because he listens to different music than you and it's murder, yet kill this man because he is a member of a different political party than you and it's war, or even still kill the same man because he is a heathen and it's holy war. [Taintedthoughts, 12 September 2007]

Gideon Levy

• Words do not kill. So there is no statement for which it is permissible to send a person to prison. Freedom of speech is absolute, even when that which is spoken is as despicable and ridiculous as Holocaust denial. Those who start to doubt that principle will not know where to stop. Is denial of the Jewish Holocaust deserving of punishment while denial of the Armenian Holocaust, perpetrated by the Turks, is not? And why not? Because "only" a million and a half people were destroyed there? … Israel must not try to win petty profits from the memory of the Holocaust, and it should not use it over and over for emotional blackmail, as it has done for years. … One of the important lessons is that racism is racism whether it is directed against Jews and expressed in their systematic destruction or whether it is directed against Palestinians and expressed in their ruthless imprisonment in their own villages behind fences and walls. Ignoring this lesson is also a form of Holocaust denial, with far graver and ruthless consequences than another lecture by Irving. [Haaretz, 26 February 2006]

Anthony Lewis

• The nanny philosophy: the view that people's senstivities must be protected by censorship or suppression of things that might offend them. Such a notion underlies the speech codes adopted at a significant number of American universities in the last 10 years. The codes typically provide for punishment of any student who directs at another insulting comments about the latter's race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and so forth: hate speech, as the backers of codes call it. [1995]

C. S. Lewis

• The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.
• Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness. [Mere Xtianity]
• Theocracy is the worst of all government. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep… But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience.

Joseph Lewis

• Imagine using as an authority in the matter of marriage the opinion of a celibate priest!
• There is hardly a form of insanity or delusion that has not been induced by some sort of religious belief. [An Atheist Manifesto, 1954]
• Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter closed? [The Philosophy Of Atheism]
• If I had the power that the New Testament Narrative says that Jesus had, I would not cure one person of blindness, I would make blindness impossible; I would not cure one person of leprosy, I would abolish leprosy. [Answer to Preacher Jack Coe, Miami, 1956]
• If man is a " fallen angel," by the commission of a "sin," then disease and sorrow are part of God's inscrutable plan as a penalty imposed upon him for his "disobedience," and man's entire life is devoted to the expiation of that sin so as to soften the indictment before the "Throne of God." Man's atonement consists in making himself as miserable as possible by praying, fasting, masochism, flagellations and other forms of torture. This sadistic delusion causes him to insist that others – under pain of punishment – be as miserable as himself, for fear that if others fail to do as he does, it will provoke the wrath of his tyrant God to a more severe chastisement. The inevitable result is that Man devotes his life, not to the essentials of living and the making of a happy home, but to the building of temples and churches where he can "lift his voice to God" in a frenzy of fanaticism, and eventually he becomes a victim of hysteria. His time and energy are wasted to cleanse his "soul," which he does not possess, and to save himself from a future punishment in hell which exists only in his imagination. [An Atheist Manifesto, 1954]

Michael Lewis

• One of the qualities that distinguish Americans from other people is their naive suspicion that any foreigner with half a brain would rather be one of them. … The most zealous Japanese patriot doesn't for a minute think that other peoples actually want to be Japanese. Ditto the French.

G. C. Lichtenberg

• There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist. [Aphorisms, Notebook L]

Rush Limbaugh

• … we are certainly more likely to make inroads against those attitudes and make progress toward actual equality if we learn to view one another as human beings, not as blacks, African-Americans, WASPs, Jews, Native Americans, Asians, or Latinos.

Abraham Lincoln

• … I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. [letter to Colonel William Elkins, November 1864] Actually, not by him at all, though it forst appeared shortly after his death.

Robert Lindner

• In the crowd, herd or gang, it is a mass-mind that operates – which is to say, a mind without subtlety, a mind without compassion, a mind, finally, uncivilised. [Must You Conform?, 1956]

Ben N. Lindsey & Wainwright Evans

• The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism, and other burning issues by burning the ismists, which is fine proof that there is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God. [The Revolt Of Modern Youth, 1925]

Walter Lippman

• It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea. [The Nature Of The Battle Over Censorship, Men Of Destiny]

John Locke

• Faith is the assent to any proposition not made out by the deduction of reason but upon the credit of the proposer. [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690]
• … I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly: and where it fails them, they cry out, It is matter of faith, and above reason. And I do not see how they can argue with any one, or ever convince a gainsayer who makes use of the same plea, without setting down strict boundaries between faith and reason; which ought to be the first point established in all questions where faith has anything to do. Reason, therefore, here, as contradistinguished to faith, I take to be the discovery of the certainty or probability of such propositions or truths which the mind arrives at by deduction made from such ideas, which it has got by the use of its natural faculties; viz. by sensation or reflection. Faith, on the other side, is the assent to any proposition, not thus made out by the deductions of reason, but upon the credit of the proposer, as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of communication. This way of discovering truths to men, we call revelation. [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690]
• … If the provinces of faith and reason are not kept distinct by these boundaries, there will, in matters of religion, be no room for reason at all; and those extravagant opinions and ceremonies that are to be found in the several religions of the world will not deserve to be blamed. For, to this crying up of faith in opposition to reason, we may, I think, in good measure ascribe those absurdities that fill almost all the religions which possess and divide mankind. For men having been principled with an opinion that they must not consult reason in the things of religion, however apparently contradictory to common sense and the very principles of all their knowledge, have let loose their fancies and natural superstition; and have been by them led into so strange opinions, and extravagant practices in religion, that a considerate man cannot but stand amazed at their follies, and judge them so far from being acceptable to the great and wise God, that he cannot avoid thinking them ridiculous and offensive to a sober good man. So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves. [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690]

Lucretius

• Fear was the first thing on earth to make gods.
• Nothing exists per se except atoms and the void. [On The Nature Of Things]
• Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. (So vast is the sum of the iniquities that religion has induced.)
• All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
• The nature of the universe has by no means been made through divine power, seeing how great are the faults that mar it. [On The Nature Of Things]
• Even if I knew nothing of the atoms, I would venture to assert on the evidence of the celestial phenomena themselves, supported by many other arguments, that the universe was certainly not created for us by divine power: it is so full of imperfections. [On The Nature Of The Universe]
• If anyone decided to call the sea Neptune, and corn Ceres, and to misapply the name of Bacchus rather than to give liquor its right name, so be it; and let him dub the round world "Mother of the Gods" so long as he is careful not really to infest his mind with base superstitions.

Abu 'l-Ala Ahmad B. 'Abd Allah B. Sulayman Al-Ma'arri

• … the black stone is only a remnant of idols and altarstones.
• The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.
• By fearing whom I trust I find my way to truth; by trusting wholly I betray the trust of wisdom; better far is doubt which brings the false into the light of day.
• So, too, the creeds of man: the one prevails until the other comes; and this one fails when that one triumphs; ay, the lonesome world will always want the latest fairytales.
• O fools, awake! The rites ye sacred hold are but a cheat contrived by men of old who lusted after wealth and gained their lust and died in baseness – and their law is dust.
• The prophets, too, among us come to teach, are one with those who from the pulpit preach; they pray, and slay, and pass away, and yet our ills are as the pebbles on the beach.
• Falsehood hath corrupted all the world, never deal as true friends they shom sects divide; but were not hate Man's natural element, churches and mosques had risen side by side.
• Hanifs [Muslims] are stumbling, Christians all astray Jews wildered, Magians far on error's way. We mortals are composed of two great schools: enlightened knaves or else religious fools.
• Do not suppose the statements of the prophets to be true. Men lived comfortably till they came and spoiled life. The "sacred books" are only such a set of idle tales as any age could have and indeed did actually produce.
• They recite their sacred books, although the fact informs me that these are fiction from first to last. O Reason, thou (alone) speakest the truth. Then perish the fools who forged the religious traditions or interpreted them!
• Traditions come from the past, of high import if they be true; ay, but weak is the chain of those who warrant their truth. Consult thy reason and let perdition take others all: of all the conference Reason best will counsel and guide.
• If a man of sound judgment appeals to his intelligence, he will hold cheap the various creeds and despise them. Do thou take thereof so much as Reason delivered (to thee), and let not ignorance plunge thee in their stagnant pool!

Thomas Babington Macaulay

• The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.
• The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. [History Of England, 1848-1855]
• The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the stronger I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error. [Macintosh's History Of The Revolution]

Sir Ken Macdonald, Former Director Of Public Prosecutions

• The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people. It is a process which can save lives and bring criminals to justice. But no other country is considering such a drastic step. This database would be an unimaginable hell-house of personal private information. It would be a complete readout of every citizen's life in the most intimate and demeaning detail. No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls. [speaking of Jackboot "Jaqui" Smith's proposals to create a privately-run database for the Government containing records (not the contents? yeah, right, we believe that) of every email, phone call, and internet link, The Guardian, 31 December 2008]

Charles Mackay

• How we should pity the arrogance of the worm that crawls at our feet, if we knew that it also desired to know the secrets of futurity, and imagined that meteors shot athwart the sky to warn it that a tom-tit was hovering near to gobble it up; that storms and earthquakes, the revolutions of empires, or the fall of mighty monarchs, only happened to predict its birth, its progress, and its decay! Not a whit less presuming has man shewn himself; not a whit less arrogant are the sciences, so called, of astrology, augury, necromancy, geomancy, palmistry, and divination of every kind. [Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds]

John Mackie

• The Christian religion cannot be believed without a miracle by any reasonable person. [The Miracle Of Theism]
• If there's any miracle in the world, it's that so many people actually believe god exists.

John Macy

• The Old Testament is tribal in its provinciality; its god is a local god, and its village police and sanitary regulations are erected into eternal laws. [The Spirit Of American Literature]

MAD Magazine

• You're a group of Christian-based, conservative organizations with several million dollars to spend. Do you: feed the hungry? Clothe the poor? Don't be so naive! You blow the millions on a series of slickly-worded, logic-bending ads espousing a widely-discredited theory that one can be 'cured' of homosexuality through counselling and prayer. [#337]

James Madison

• A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. [Letter to W. T. Barry, 04 August 1822]

Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães)

• 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. (Also written as "The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.") Oops! Not by him at all, but Robert Ingersoll from his essay Individuality.

Kenan Malik

• Free speech for everyone except anti-Semites and racist demagogues is, however, no free speech at all. It is meaningless to defend the right of free expression for people with whose views we agree. The right to free speech only has political bite when we are forced to defend the rights of people with whose views we profoundly disagree. [Protect The Freedom To Shock]
• The trouble with Islamophobia is that it is an irrational concept. It confuses hatred of, and discrimination against, Muslims on the one hand with criticism of Islam on the other. The charge of 'Islamophobia' is all too often used not to highlight racism but to stifle criticism. And in reality discrimination against Muslims is not as great as is often perceived – but criticism of Islam should be greater. [The Islamophobia Myth]
• The real question to ask in the wake of September 11, then, may not be simply, as many have suggested, "Why do they hate us?" (though this remains an important question), but also "Why do we seem to hate ourselves?". Why is it that Western liberals and radicals have become so disenchanted with modern civilisation that some even welcomed the attack on the Twin Towers as an anti-imperialist act? [All Cultures Are Not Equal]
• … in the wake of the Princess Diana's death, I was talking to another editor on another newspaper. Diana was no victim, I argued. She was rich, privileged, and a great manipulator of the media. Anyone else who ordered their chauffeur to drive them through a city centre at breakneck speed would be condemned for their idiocy, not revered for their compassion. "That would make a great article", the editor told me, "but it's too provocative; it would offend too many people." [Protect The Freedom To Shock]
• The claims of Islamophobia become even less credible if we look at all stop and searches. Stop and searches under the Terrorism Act form only a tiny proportion of the 900,000 stop and searches that took place last year. If there was widespread Islamophobia within the police force we should expect to find Asians in disproportionate numbers in the overall figures. We don't. Asians are stopped and searched roughly in proportion to their population once age structure is taken into account. [The Islamophobia Myth]
• The argument that one can only have free speech if people use speech responsibly is in fact to deny free speech. After all who is to decide when free speech is being used irresponsibly? The government. The authorities. Those with the power to censor and the necessity to do so. The regimes in Iran, North Korea, China all accept that free speech must be used responsibly. That is why they close down irresponsible newspapers, ban irresponsible demonstrations, restrict irresponsible access to the Internet. [Index On Censorship, 1/2006]
• A decade ago, the Independent asked me to write an essay on Tom Paine, the eighteenth century English revolutionary and freethinker. It was the 200th anniversary of his great polemic, The Age of Reason. I began the article with a quote from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses to show the continuing relevance of Paine's battle against religious authority. The quote was cut out because it was deemed too offensive to Muslims. The irony of censoring an essay in celebration of freethinking seemed to elude the editor. [The Islamophobia Myth]
• You can't choose your skin colour; you can choose your beliefs. Religion is a set of beliefs. I can be hateful about other beliefs, such as conservatism or communism. So why can't I be hateful about religion too? It's a question that supporters of the law [Incitement To Racial Hatred] have continually ducked. In practice the law could be a nightmare to enforce. Every Muslim leader I've spoken to wants to use the law to ban Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Several believe that my own articles on Islam and free speech are Islamophobic and should fall under the scope of the law. [The Islamophobia Myth]
• Free speech does not mean accepting all views. It means having all views in the open so that we can challenge the ones we find unconscionable. Today, we do the exact opposite: we ban certain views because they are deemed unpalatable. But there are others we are also frightened of challenging because we don't want to give offence to diverse cultures. The very fact that we talk of ideas as 'offensive' is indicative of the problem. There are many ways of disagreeing with someone's views – we may see them as irrational, reactionary or just plain wrong. But to deem as idea 'offensive' is to put it beyond the bounds of rational debate. [Index On Censorship, 1/2006
• Why should I, as an atheist, be expected to show respect for Christian, Islamic or Jewish cultures whose views and arguments I often find reactionary and often despicable? Why should public arrangements be adapted to fit in with the backward, misogynistic, homophobic claims that religions make? What is wrong with me wishing such cultures to 'wither away'? And how, given that I do view these and many other cultures with contempt, am I supposed to provide them with respect, without disrespecting my own views? Only, the philosopher Brian Barry suggests "with a great deal of encouragement from the Politically Correct Thought Police". [All Cultures Are Not Equal]
• The more that the threat of Islamophobia is exaggerated, the more that ordinary Muslims come to accept that theirs is a community under constant attack. It helps create a siege mentality, stoking up anger and resentment, and making Muslim communities more inward looking and more open to religious extremism. Muslim leaders constantly warn that Islamophobia is alienating Muslims and pushing many into the hands of extremists. However, it's not Islamophobia, but the perception that it blights lives, that is often the bigger problem. In making my Channel 4 documentary I asked dozens of ordinary Muslims across the country about their experience of Islamophobia. Everyone believed that police harassment was common though no one had been stopped and searched. Everyone insisted that physical attacks were rife, though few had been attacked or knew anyone who had. [The Islamophobia Myth]
• A truly plural society would be one in which citizens have full freedom to pursue their different values or practices in private, while in the public sphere all citizens would be treated as political equals whatever the differences in their private lives. Today, however, pluralism has come to mean the very opposite. The right to practice a particular religion, speak a particular language, follow a particular cultural practice is seen as a public good rather than a private freedom. Different interest groups demand to have their 'differences' institutionalised in the public sphere. And to enforce such a vision we have to call in the Thought Police. Multiculturalism is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles. [All Cultures Are Not Equal]
• It is no coincidence that the modern world has been shaped by the ideas and technologies that have emerged from Renaissance and Enlightenment. The scientific method, democratic politics, the concept of universal values - these are palpably better concepts than those that existed previously. Not because Europeans are a superior people, but because many of the idea and philosophies that came out of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment are superior. To argue this today is, of course, to invite the charge of 'Eurocentrism', or even racism. This simply demonstrates the irrationality of contemporary notions of 'racism' and 'antiracism'. Those who actually fought Western imperialism over the past two centuries recognised that their struggles were rooted in the Enlightenment tradition. "I denounce European colonialist scholarship", wrote CLR James, the West Indian writer and political revolutionary. "But I respect the learning and the profound discoveries of Western civilisation." [All Cultures Are Not Equal]
• Muslims, monarchists, anti-Nazis – is there anybody left out there whom one can offend? The world, it seems, is people by sensitive souls, too weak to be confronted by strong opinions, controversial statements and provocative arguments. As a result we all have to live our lives as if in a church service - all hushed tones and reverential attitudes, and no bad language, or bad thoughts. Yet it is the freedom to blaspheme, to transgress, to move beyond the pale that is at heart of all intellectual, artistic and political endeavour. Far from censoring offensive speech, a vibrant and diverse society should encourage it. In any society that is not uniform, grey and homogenous there are bound to be clashes of viewpoints. Inevitably some people will find certain ideas objectionable. This is all for the good. For it is the heretics who take society forward. From Galileo's vision of the universe to Darwin's theory of evolution, from the drive towards secularism to the struggle for equal rights, every scientific or social advance worth having began by outraging the conventions of its time. Without such heresies and transgressions, society may be more ordered, and more polite, but it will also be less progressive and less alive. [Protect The Freedom To Shock]
• Exaggerating the level of anti-Muslim hatred also creates a climate of censorship in which any criticism of Islam can be dismissed as Islamophobic. Every year, the Islamic Human Rights Commission organises a mock awards ceremony for its 'Islamophobe of the Year'. Last year there were two British winners. One was the BNP's Nick Griffin. The other? Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. Toynbee's defence of secularism and women's rights, and criticism of Islam, was, it declared, unacceptable. Isn't it absurd, I asked the IHRC's Massoud Shadrajeh, to equate a liberal anti-racist like Polly Toynbee with the leader of a neo-fascist party. Not at all, he suggested. "There is a difference between disagreeing and actually dismissing certain ideologies and certain principles. We need to engage and discuss. But there's a limit to that." It is difficult to know what engagement and discussion could mean when leading Muslim figures seem unable to distinguish between liberal criticism and neo-fascist attacks. … Marayam Namazie is an Iranian refugee who has long campaigned for both women's rights and against Islamic repression. As a result she has been condemned as an Islamophobe, even by anti-racist organisations. "On the one hand", she says, "you are threatened by the political Islamic movement with assassination or imprisonment or flogging. And on the other you have so-called progressive people who tell you that what you say in defence of humanity, in defence of equal rights for all, is racist. I think it's nothing short of an outrage." [What Hate?]

Michelle Malkin

• Jews bow their heads, Christians get down on their knees, Muslims get down on their knees with their asses in the air. Atheists hold their heads up proudly and kneel to no one and no thing – non-existent deity, threats of a non-existent hell or other humans.

Mangasar Magurditch Mangasarian

• We have in the story of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, an ancient and nearly universal Sun-myth, instead of verifiable historical events. [The Truth About Jesus: Is He A Myth?, 1909]
• A Collection of Writings of Unknown Date and Authorship Rendered into English From Supposed Copies of Supposed Originals Unfortunately Lost. [The Bible Unveiled, 1911]
• The Bible is an Extraordinary Book: A book which claims infallibility; which aspires to absolute authority over mind and body; which demands unconditional surrender to all its pretensions upon penalty of eternal damnation, is an extraordinary book and should, therefore, be subjected to extraordinary tests. But it isn't. Neither Christian priests nor Jewish rabbis approve of applying to the bible the same tests by which other books are tried. Why? Because it will help the bible? It can not be that. Because it might hurt the bible? We can think of no other reason. [The Bible Unveiled, 1911]
• The selection of the twenty-fifth of December as his birthday is not only an arbitrary one, but that date, having been from time immemorial dedicated to the Sun, the inference is that the Son of God and the Sun of heaven enjoying the same birthday, were at one time identical beings. The fact that Jesus's death was accompanied with the darkening of the Sun, and that the date of his resurrection is also associated with the position of the Sun at the time of the vernal equinox, is a further intimation that we have in the story of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, an ancient and nearly universal Sun-myth, instead of verifiable historical events. [The Truth About Jesus: Is He A Myth?, 1909]
• The report that Jesus had twelve apostles seems also mythical. The number twelve, like the number seven or three, or 40, plays an important role in all Sun-myths, and points to the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Jacob had twelve sons; there were twelve tribes of Israel; twelve months in the year; twelve gates or pillars of heaven, etc. In many of the religions of the world, the number twelve is sacred. There have been few god-saviours who did not have twelve apostles or messengers. … The number 40 figures also in many primitive myths. The Jews were in the wilderness for 40 years; Jesus fasted for 40 days; Moses was on the mountain with God for 40 days. An account in which such scrupulous attention is shown to supposed sacred numbers is apt to be more artificial than real. [The Truth About Jesus: Is He A Myth?, 1909]

Irshad Manji

• Muslims were imposing martial law and bludgeoning each other's freedoms before European colonialism took off. To this day, Muslims use the white man as a weapon of mass distraction – a distraction from the fact that we've never needed the 'oppressive' West to oppress our own. [The Trouble with Islam]
• In truth, however, Islam's holy book, the Koran, contains passages that can easily be exploited for vicious ends. There's nothing Islamophobic about recognizing this. Just as moderate Christians and Jews acknowledge the nasty side of their holy texts, modern Muslims ought to come clean about how our sacred text informs terror. If we don't , we can't effectively challenge the actions that flow from certain readings of the Koran. In which case, all we'll be doing is chanting that the terrorists broke the rules, without ever coming to terms with where they got their concept of "the rules" in the first place. Muslims need to say that the Koran has its share of negative passages, and then offer peaceable interpretations that compete with the hateful ones. [The Evening Standard, 07 September 2004]
• Muslims have little integrity demanding respect for our faith if we don't show it for others. When have we demonstrated against Saudi Arabia's policy to prevent Christians and Jews from stepping on the soil of Mecca? They may come for rare business trips, but nothing more. As long as Rome welcomes non-Christians and Jerusalem embraces non-Jews, we Muslims have more to protest against than cartoons. None of this is to dismiss the need to take my religion seriously. Hell, Muslims even take seriously the need to be serious: Islam has a teaching against "excessive laughter". I'm not joking. But does this mean that we should cry "blasphemy" over less-than-flattering depictions of the prophet Muhammad? God, no. … When Muslims put the prophet on a pedestal, we're engaging in idolatry of our own. The point of monotheism is to worship one God, not one of God's emissaries. Which is why humility requires people of faith to mock themselves – and each other – every once in a while. [The Age, 08 February 2006]
• The trouble with Islam today is that literalism is fast becoming mainstream. I recognize that every faith has its share of literalists. American Christianity has its fundamentalists, some of whom populate the White House. Jews have their ultra-orthodox and orthodox. Buddhists, for God's sake, have their evangelicals. But only within Islam is literalism fast becoming mainstream. We Muslims, even here in the West, are routinely raised to believe that because the Koran came after the Torah and the Bible, chronologically and historically, it is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God's will. It is, if I can put it like this, "God 3.0," and none shall come after it. This is a supremacy complex that even mainstream Muslims have toward the Koran. This is dangerous, because when abuse happens under the banner of my faith as it is today, most Muslims have no clue how to debate, dissent, revise or reform. Not because we're stupid, but because we have never been introduced to the possibility, let alone the virtue, of asking questions about our holy book. [17 July 2004]
• In a word, closed-mindedness is the trouble with Islam today. People say "Yeah, but there's closed-mindedness in every religion." No question about it. I point out in my book that there is literalism in American Christianity in the form of the evangelicals, some of whom populate the White House. … But here's the thing, only within Islam today is literalism mainstream worldwide. Let me explain what I mean by that rather sweeping statement: We Muslims, even in America, are routinely raised to believe that because the Koran came after the Torah and the Bible, historically and chronologically, it is the final, and therefore perfect manifesto of God's will. But here's the kicker – moderates even embrace this supremacy complex. When there's abuse under the banner of Islam, most Muslims today, even those of us with fancy titles and formal educations, do not yet know how to debate or dissent with the radicals. Not because we're stupid, but because we have not yet been introduced to the possibility of asking questions about our holy book. The same cannot be said today for moderate Christians and Jews. Please, I beg readers to appreciate that distinction: While literalism is existent in every religion, in Islam it is mainstream. The same cannot be said in Christianity or in Judaism worldwide. … Never has there been a bigger intellectual uphill struggle than to have even a mainstream Muslim acknowledge that there are ambiguities and inconsistencies in our holy book. I cannot begin to express how many times I have heard liberal Christians and liberal Jews accept, acknowledge, and even celebrate that there are such ambiguities and inconsistencies in their holy books. That's what allows interpretation to evolve to fit the new circumstances of new eras. [Alternet, 08 April 2005]

Marilyn Manson (Brian Warner)

• If they think that an artist can destroy their faith, then their faith is rather fragile. [speaking of Catholics trying to ban his concert in Pula, 25 Auguust 2005]
• … I've always tried to show people that the devil we blame our atrocities on is really just each one of us. So don't expect the end of the world to come one day out of the blue – it's been happening every day for a long time. [Columbine: Whose Fault Is It?, Rolling Stone, 24 June 1999]
• 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 inspiring morality, nowhere in the Gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue. [Columbine: Whose Fault Is It?, Rolling Stone, 24 June 1999]
• These two idiots [Harris and Klebold] weren't wearing makeup, and they weren't dressed like me or goths. Since Middle America has not heard of the music they did listen to (KMFDM and Rammstein, among others) the media picked something they thought was similar. Responsible journalists have reported with less publicity that Harris and Klebold were not Marilyn Manson fans – that they even disliked my music. Even if they were fans, that gives them no excuse, nor does it mean that music is to blame. Did we look for James Huberty's inspiration when he gunned down people at McDonalds? What did Timothy McVeigh like to watch? What about David Koresh, Jim Jones? Do you think entertainment inspired Kip Kinkel, or should we blame the fact that his father bought him the guns he used in the Springfield, Oregon murder? What inspires Bill Clinton to blow people up in Kosovo? Was it something that Monica Lewinsky said to him? Isn't killing just killing, regardless if it's in Vietnam or Jonesboro, Arkansas? Why do we justify one, just because it seems to be for the right reasons? Should there ever be a right reason? If a kid is old enough to drive a car or buy a gun, isn't he old enough to be held personally responsible for what he does with his car or gun? Or if he's a teenager, should someone else be blamed because he isn't as enlightened as an eighteen-year-old? [Columbine: Whose Fault Is It?, Rolling Stone, 24 June 1999]

Sarfraz Manzoor

• Today, the fear of causing offence appears to be in the ascendancy; for those who believe in free speech this can only be worrying. … The challenge for unbelievers is how to continue to ask awkward questions and uncover uncomfortable truths when the supporters of religion are armed with ever more sophisticated tools of protest. In this environment, the media and governments must be resolute in arguing that the right to offend might sometimes be the price to be paid to expose truths or produce challenging art. [Index on Censorship, 2/2005]

Jean-Paul Marat

• What use is it to us if we have broken the aristocracy of the nobles if that is replaced by the aristocracy of the riches?

Christopher Marlowe

• I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but innocence. [The Jew Of Malta]

Mike Marqusee

• During the heyday of British, French, Belgian or Portuguese colonialism, if you asked the citizens of London, Paris, Brussels or Lisbon whether their countries were the seats of great transcontinental empires, they would have answered 'yes', unhesitatingly, and most would have taken pride in the fact. But stop an American in the street today, and ask the same question, and you're most likely to get a quizzical look. The US maintains military bases in 140 foreign countries (needless to say, there are no foreign military bases on US territory). Thanks to exorbitant military spending more than the combined total of the 32 next most well-armed nations – the US enjoys a unique and coercive global reach, a monopoly which it intends to preserve at all costs, as the current National Security Strategy makes clear. The US claims and exercises a prerogative to topple other regimes and occupy other countries that it denies to all other nation-states. … Yet, we are told, this is not an empire. True, the US prefers indirect over direct rule; its domination is exercised, for the most part, through military and commercial alliances, rather than outright conquest. But empires of the past have also used these methods. What really makes the US different is the persistence and in most cases the sincerity of its imperial denial. … Somehow the principles of liberty and human happiness always seem magically to coincide with American national self-interest or, more precisely, the economic interests of the US elite. [Counterpunch, 25 October 2005]

Emma Martin

• The person much inclined to ask God's assistance, learns to repose on the hope of its obtainment, instead of actively seeking the good desired by his own labour. [Prayer: The Food Of Priestcraft And Bane Of Common Sense]
• Religion, with an upward glancing eye, asks what there is above. Philosophy looks around her and seeks to make a happy home of earth. Religion asks what God would have her do: - Philosophy, what nature's laws advise. Religion has never given us laws in which cruelty and vice may not be seen, but philosophy's pure moral code may be thus briefly stated: – "Happiness is the great object of human existence…" [A Few Reasons For Renouncing Christianity And Professing And Disseminating Infidel Opinions]

Ian Martin

• Paul Walker, a star of the The Fast and the Furious films, died recently. Two days later an answer on a game show was "The Fast and the Furious", and the producer had to apologise for any distress caused. People have to apologise now for coincidence? For unforeseen context? God almighty, what a sorry world we live in. [I'm Sorry, But We've Got To Stop Apologising, The Guardian, 15 December 2013]

Michael Martin

• Religious experiences in one culture often conflict with those in another. One cannot accept all of them as veridical, yet there does not seem to be any way to separate the veridical experiences from the rest. [Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, 1990]
• Religious experiences are like those induced by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, and sleep deprivation: They tell no uniform or coherent story, and there is no plausible theory to account for discrepancies among them. [Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, 1990]
• Since experiences of God are good grounds for the existence of God, are not experiences of the absence of God good grounds for the nonexistence of God? After all, many people have tried to experience God and have failed. Cannot these experiences of the absence of God be used by atheists to counter the theistic argument based on experience of the presence of God? [Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, 1990]

Harriet Martineau

• I certainly had no idea how little faith Christians have in their own faith till I saw how ill their courage and temper can stand any attack on it. [Harriet Martineau's Autobiography]
• I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet. [letter to Mr. Atkinson, February 1848]
• As the astronomer rejoices in new knowledge which compels him to give up the dignity of our globe as the centre, the pride, and even the final cause of the universe, so do those who have escaped from the Christian mythology enjoy their release from the superstition which fails to make them happy, fails to make them good, fails to make them wise, and has become as great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies which it took the place of two thousand years ago. [Harriet Martineau's Autobiography]

Groucho Marx

• Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
• He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.
• I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.

Karl Marx

• The more of himself man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself.
• Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurences it cannot understand.
• Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. [A Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel's Philosophy Of Right, 1844]

Christopher Masterjohn

• America: Socialising the risks, Privatising the profits, Putting business in the democracy, Taking the democracy out of the business.

Somerset Maugham

• What mean and cruel things men do for the love of God. [A Writer's Notebook]

Maximus of Tyre

• Let all the nations know the divine, that is one; and if the art of Phideas arouses the Greeks to the remembrance of God, the worship of animals the Egyptians and the river others, and fire others again, I do not find fault with their differences. Let them only know, let them only love, let them remember.

Lord May, Outgoing President Of The Royal Society

• All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of the evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding. … Many people and institutions have always found such questioning, attended often by unavoidable certainties, less comfortable than the authoritarian certitudes of dogma or revelation. But the values of the Enlightenment have on balance made the world a better place. … The campaigns waged by those whose belief systems or commercial interests impel them to deny, or even misrepresent, the scientific facts are helped by the widespread public misapprehension that science essentially always gives unambiguous and definite answers. The misapprehension is both understandable and unfortunate. … Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason. … In the US, the aim of a growing network of fundamentalist foundations and lobby groups reaches well beyond 'equal time' for creationism, or its disguised variant 'intelligent design', in the science classroom. Rather, the ultimate aim is the overthrow of 'scientific materialism', in all its manifestations. … The Vatican in particular promotes abstinence outside marriage, and condemns condom use. With added support from fundamentalist groups, these arguments have the effect that aid from the United States for tackling HIV and AIDS seems usually to be tied to promoting abstinence and condemning condom use. … The really sad thing is that none of these fundamentalist beliefs are grounded on, or representative of, the mainstream religions they profess to serve. [Valedictory speech, 30 November 2005]

John Maybury

• What's very interesting to me, though, is that at the first preview of the film that I did in the States, in the kind of response cards or whatever you call them, a lot of the audience didn't like the love scenes, but then I think what frightens me about America is how increasingly more Puritan it becomes. [Commentary to alternative / deleted scenes for The Jacket, 2005]

Ernst Mayr

• Evolution, as such, is no longer a theory for a modern author. It is as much a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun.

Alistair McBay, National Secular Society

• The Reverend Professor argues that some pupils are coming to science classes utterly disinterested in scientific method because, thanks to their indoctrination by pious parents, they already have the answer to the mystery of the universe - "God did it"! However, his approach to prising open these closed, brainwashed minds is to indulge such beliefs in science classes, although in fact they are the very antithesis of the subject. It is astounding that such an eminent scientist should be willing to elevate primitive myth and legend to the status of being accorded respect in a science setting. He clearly has no concept of how religious fundamentalism works. [speaking of Reverend Professor Michael Reiss's assertion that creationism should be taught in science classes because 10% of students already know "god did it", 12 September 2008]

Joseph McCabe

• Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the power. [What Gods Cost Men]
• The theist and the scientist are rival interpreters of nature, the one retreats as the other advances. [The Existence Of God]
• A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts – a "bundle of facts." Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the "law" because they act in that way. [The Existence Of God]
• If a single one of these gentlemen is correct, if a believer of any type is right, the essential truth for man, the real drama of life, in comparison with which the secular story of the race, is a puppet-show and the unfolding of the universe is a triviality, is the dialogue of the immortal soul and the eternal God. Yet it seems that there is nothing in the world so hard to discover as this. The theory refutes itself. [The Psychology Of Religion]

John McCarthy

• An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.

McCullough's Law

• Anyone under the control of an authority tends to be / become inimical to anyone not under control of the same authority.

Ian McEwan

• As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist. This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin [Amis] is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on - we know it well. [The Independent, 22 June 2008]

Bob McHenry

• The President's ignorance of science might have remained a private matter, but he chose to speak on the subject of evolution and "intelligent design." This is a great pity. Science – from the loftiest of theorizing (like that of Einstein or, oh, Darwin) through the conducting of painstakingly difficult experiments to the application of new knowledge to the improvement of human life – science, I say, is the chief engine of our society. The great bulk of business entrepreneurs so celebrated in certain circles as the movers and shakers have made their marks by exploiting the knowledge gained by scientists. Even its opponents grant the prestige and accomplishments of science by pretending to do science themselves, whether in the form of "e-meters" that turn galvanic skin responses into signs of mystic energy flows in the body or in that of ID, which artfully turns "unknown" into "unknowable" in a flourish of bad math and illogic. It is the case that some people don't like where the engine is taking us, indeed, don't want to go anywhere at all. History affords examples of such people and offers a proper model: the Amish. They made their decision in the 17th century to get off the train, and they have lived peaceably ever since, surrounded but largely unaffected by the Industrial Revolution and all that has followed. Unfortunately, our present-day reluctant passengers seem not to want simply off the train. They want the train to stop and for the rest of us to accept their terms. If President Bush has not taken quite so radical a position, he has certainly decided to take a turn walking down the tracks in front of the train, waving a little red flag. Here is where we must rely on the strength of democracy. A minority, however vocal, cannot impose its will on the rest of us if we decline to permit it. Not even if the President seems to side with them; he is, after all, merely the first among equals, and he will not own that flag much longer. [Turning 'Unknown' Into 'Unknowable', 10 August 2005]

Ian McKellen

• Well, I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying 'this is fiction'. I mean, walking on water, it takes an act of faith. [in response to being asked what he thought about a disclaimer at the beginning of the film of the book The Da Vinci Code, Today, 17 May 2006]
• I think it's a sort of disorder that these old men dress up in frocks to go to work and call themselves celibate, then point the finger at other people. The 'eternal truth' is that you should love your neighbour as yourself. The 'truth' is not to be found in the minor reaches of Leviticus, where eating prawns and sleeping with a man are matters of moral concern. [The Guardian, 20 December 2008]

Bill McKibben

• America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behaviour. That paradox – more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese – illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture. … In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it's not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It's also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose – childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool – we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. … Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate – just over half – that compares poorly with the European Union's average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We're at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline – like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask? [What It Means To Be Christian In America, Harpers, 15 September 2005]

Delos B. McKown

• The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

Sir Peter Medawar

• It is naïve to suppose that the acceptance of evolution theory depends upon the evidence of a number of so-called "proofs"; it depends rather upon the fact that the evolutionary theory permeates and supports every branch of biological science, much as the notion of the roundness of the earth underlies all geodesy and all cosmological theories on which the shape of the earth has a bearing. Thus antievolutionism is of the same stature as flat-earthism.

Lucy Mangan

• This is a very specific skill, isn't it? She's a psychic who can only read people's semi-denuded genitalia and tell them whether or not they are going to have a good afternoon. I reckon if I knew what kind of job I'd just made of applying molten lava to AN Other's undersides, I could probably predict with reasonable accuracy whether or not they were going to enjoy the next few hours, too. Maybe I could team up with a crystal-therapising facialist and open our own salon. We could call it the Total F'ckwit. [speaking about a friend's beautician's claim of being psychic, The Guardian, 01 September 2007]
• Now that the season of goodwill has passed, let's make a plea for greater intolerance (carefully directed) in the world. The next time a woman (and it is always a woman – men have many flaws but at least they prefer to seek the answers to their problems in Top Gear and Abi Titmuss rather than the waxings and wanings of the moon) asks you what star sign you are, swears by essential oils, magnet therapy or talks about realigning anything but shelves, make a stand. Back her into a corner and talk at her about Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Crick and Watson and Jeremy Paxman until she admits the error of her ways. For astrology and the rest to flourish it is only necessary that those with an IQ in double figures do nothing. [The Guardian, 05 January 2005]

Herman Melville

• I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has turned out to be hollow courtesy. [Moby Dick]

Pauline Melville

• Three are the sources of insanity in this world: love, religion and politics, all of them so dangerous that we must confine them inside institutions; religion, in churches or temples, as a mad dog. Love, in marriage. Politics, chained to parliaments, because of the genocides and wars that happen when it's on the loose.

Henry Louis Mencken

• There is no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
• Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
• Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
• Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. [Minority Report, 1956]
• The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
• … a candidate for office, if he would get the votes of fundamentalists, must bawl for Genesis before he begins to bawl for anything else. The Baltimore Evening Sun, 17 July 1925]
• The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
• What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.
• Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
• 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. [Minority Report, 1956]
• It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
• The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. [Homo Neanderthalensis, The Baltimore Evening Sun, 29 June 1925]
• The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked…
• 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.
• 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. [Minority Report, 1956]
• To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride. [Coda, Smart Set, December 1920]
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable… A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.
• But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters. [Homo Neanderthalensis, The Baltimore Evening Sun, 29 June 1925]
• It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Clause makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defence of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.
• 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.
• The iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing – that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts. The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe – that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
• 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. Treatise on the Gods]
• That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
• The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame. True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbour and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge. Did Darrow, in the course of his dreadful bombardment of Bryan, drop a few shells, incidentally, into measurably cleaner camps? Then let the garrisons of those camps look to their defences. They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm their enemy. [Aftermath, The Baltimore Evening Sun, 14 September 1925]
• I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
  I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
  I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty…
  I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
  I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech…
  I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
  I believe in the reality of progress.
  I – But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

Joost A. Merloo

• In my own experience, I have been amazed to see how unrealistic are the bases for political opinion in general. Only rarely have I found a person who has chosen any particular political party – democratic or totalitarian – through study and comparison of principles. [The Rape Of The Mind: The Psychology Of Thought Control, Menticide, And Brainwashing, 1956]

Meteorite Debris

• It seems that the more abusive a church is of its worshippers the more loyal they will be. Thus women form a larger portion of a congregation than men. The rabidly mad the church the more pews will be filled. So fundy evangelists have the biggest, and most profitable, congregations. More moderate churches with some respect for humans as intelligent human beings are losing numbers. I think a big revival would happen in the churches if child sacrifice was reintroduced. The old symbolic body and blood just doesn't cut it anymore. S & M for Jebus. [alt.atheism, 24 June 2003]

John Stuart Mill

• Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than action; innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) "thou shalt not" predominates unduly over "thou shalt."

Dennis Miller

• Born again?! No, I'm not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time!
• Now 7-11 has bowed to pressure from the Moral Majority to remove Playboy and Penthouse from their newsstand. I guess to be fair you have to look at it from the fundamentalist perspective – what they're saying is that they don't want pornography out in the open, because what it does is it forces a certain type of literature on somebody in a public place. It would be like, uh, oh, I don't know, say like put the Bible in everybody's hotel room, or something crazy like that. [Black & White Show]

Kenneth R. Miller

• The American creationist movement has entirely bypassed the scientific forum and has concentrated instead on political lobbying and on taking its case to a fair-minded electorate … The reason for this strategy is overwhelmingly apparent: no scientific case can be made for the theories they advance. [Science And Creationism, 1984]
• The fact of the matter is that the fossil record not only documents evolution, but that it was the fossil record itself which forced natural scientists to abandon their idea of the fixity of species and look instead for a plausible mechanism of change, a mechanism of evolution. The fossil record not only demonstrates evolution in extravagant detail, but it dashes all claims of the scientific creationists concerning the origin of living organisms. [Science And Creationism, 1984]
• Although the ICR often emphasises that it is the scientific nature of creationist theory which brings scientists to a belief in a supreme being, it is curious that they include a requirement for membership (the inerrancy of the Christian Bible) which effectively excludes Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and the majority of Christian sects (who do not accept a literal reading of all parts of the Bible) from membership. It is clear that the ICR, which is the most respected of creationist groups in its attempts to appear scientifically legitimate, is essentially an organization composed solely of Christian Fundamentalists. [Science And Creationism, 1984]
• I can give you several examples of new species that have emerged within human observation. The best example that I can give you is the butterfly, the genus of butterfly known as Hedylypta. Hedylypta is a genus of butterfly that feeds on various plants. It's endemic to the Hawaiian Islands, which means it's only found there. And there turn out to be two species of Hedylypta with mouthparts that only allow them to feed on bananas. Now why is that significant? It is significant because bananas are not native to the Hawaiian Islands. They were introduced about 1,000 years ago by the Polynesians. We know this from the written records of the Hawaiian Kingdom and what that means is that by mutation and natural selection, these two species have emerged on the Hawaiian Islands within the last 1,000 years. And I think that's a very good case in point. [Firing Line, 04 December 1997]

Mark Crispin Miller

• In short, the news divisions of the media cartel appears to work against the public interest – and for their parent companies, their advertisers and the Bush Administration. … It is the purpose of the press to help us run the state, not the other way around. [The Nation, 07 January 2002]

A. A. Milne

• The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief – call it what you will – than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

Seamus Milne

• Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force – just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible. Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world – seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world. But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. … Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargoes against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages. … It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth. … All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil – as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. … for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge – until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed. [The Guardian, 13 September 2001]

Dr. Syed Kamran Mirza

• The more I read the holy book, the more I became dismayed. My intention was to search for divinity, philosophy, science, ethics, morality, social and political issues in the Qur'an. But alas, the Qur'an was a book that I found with no chronology, no philosophy, no science at all (but it had plenty of erroneous sciences), plenty of problems in ethics and morality, ample redundancies, unfit social and political teachings by today's standards; and above all it had ample superstitious scriptures. I also found out that Qur'an is a book full of hatred, cruelties, unethical matters and most of all it has no divinity at all. I could not find anything that was impossible for mankind to think or say in the 7th century period. [Frontpage Magazine, 02 january 2009]

George Monbiot

• Such is the institutional power of the corporations that the only people now in a position to hold them to account are other companies. When Amnesty International revealed that Indian police paid by Enron were beating and sexually abusing people living where it wanted to build a power plant, the news was received with horror by campaigners but ignored by almost everyone else. But when institutional shareholders lose their investments, the scandal dominates the headlines all over the world. [The Guardian, 05 February 2002]
• While human life, resulting from a series of evolutionary accidents, is arguably meaningless, individual human lives are not. Those accidents have bequeathed an extraordinary degree of consciousness, which in turn has granted us an enhanced capacity for both sympathy and suffering. Using the one to relieve the other invests our lives with a purpose which surely requires no celestial justification. Nor do we need God to tell us to protect other species and beautiful landscapes: we can do so simply because we love them. [The Guardian, 25 May 2000]
• The role of the media corporations in the US is similar to that of repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will and won't be allowed to hear, and either punish or recruit the social deviants who insist on telling a different story. The journalists they employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalise the demands of the censor, and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not. So, when they are faced with a choice between a fable which helps the Republicans, and a reality which hurts them, they choose the fable. As their fantasies accumulate, the story they tell about the world veers further and further from reality. Anyone who tries to bring the people back down to earth is denounced as a traitor and a fantasist. And anyone who seeks to become president must first learn to live in fairyland. [The Guardian, 18 January 2005]
• In January 2000, an American company called Myriad Genetics claimed that the directive [Directive on the Legal Protection of Biotechnological Inventions] had enabled it to become the European owner of two key human genes, certain of whose mutations predispose people to contract breast cancer. Now that Myriad owned the genes, public health laboratories testing women for the mutations in Britain would, the company warned, no longer be permitted to carry out their own tests. They would have to use the procedure tested and licensed by Myriad. This, British health researchers pointed out, would double the costs of the tests, reducing their availability. Doctors and scientists were outraged, not least because, they claimed, much of the work identifying the genes had been carried out by British Laboratories, at public expense. Myriad had filed its patent applications a few hours before Britain's Institute of Cancer Research reported its own discovery of one of the genes in the scientific journal Nature. [Captive State, 2000]
• The more powerful a nation becomes, the more it asserts its victimhood. … Today the attack on New York is discussed as if it were the worst thing to have happened to any nation in recent times. Few would deny that it was a major atrocity, but we are required to offer the American people a unique and exclusive sympathy. Now that demand is being extended to earlier American losses. … What we are witnessing in both Black Hawk Down and the current war against terrorism is the creation of a new myth of nationhood. America is casting itself simultaneously as the world's saviour and the world's victim; a sacrificial messiah, on a mission to deliver the world from evil. This myth contains incalculable dangers for everyone else on earth. To discharge its sense of unique grievance, the US government has hinted at what may become an asymmetric world war. It is no coincidence that Somalia comes close to the top of the list of nations it may be prepared to attack. This war, if it materialises, will be led not by the generals in their bunkers, but by the people who construct the story the nation chooses to believe. [The Guardian, 29 January 2002]
• The paradox of the Enlightenment is that the universalist project is brokered by individualism. The universality of human rights, in other words, can be defended only by the diversity of opinion. Most of the liberties which permit us to demand the equitable treatment of the human community – privacy, the freedom of speech, belief and movement – imply a dissociation from coherent community. While those who seek to deny our liberties claim to defend individualism, in truth they gently engineer a conformity of belief and action, which is drifting towards a new fundamentalism. This is an inevitable product of the fusion of state and corporate power. Capital, as Adam Smith shows us, strives towards monopoly. The states which defend it permit the planning laws, tax breaks, externalisation and blanket advertising which ensure that most of us shop in the same shops, eat in the same restaurants, wear the same clothes. The World Trade Organisation, World Bank and IMF apply the same economic and commercial prescription worldwide, enabling the biggest corporations to trade under the same conditions everywhere. Some of those who, in defiance of this dispensation, write their own logos on their T-shirts are now being persecuted by the state. The pettiness of its attentions, combined with its ability to scrutinise every detail of our lives, suggest that we could be about to encounter a new form of political control, swollen with success, unchecked by dissent. [The Guardian, 18 December 2001]
• Earlier this year the director of the FBI named the chaotic but harmless organisations Reclaim the Streets and Carnival Against Capitalism in the statement on terrorism he presented to the Senate. Now, partly as a result of his representations, the Senate's new terrorism bill, like Britain's Terrorism Act 2000, redefines the crime so broadly that members of Greenpeace are in danger of being treated like members of al-Qaida. The Bush doctrine – if you're not with us, you're against us – is already being applied. The charge of "anti-Americanism" is itself profoundly anti-American. If the US does not stand for freedom of thought and speech, for diversity and dissent, then we have been deceived as to the nature of the national project. Were the founding fathers to congregate today to discuss the principles enshrined in their declaration of independence, they would be denounced as "anti-American" and investigated as potential terrorists. … Anti-American means today precisely what un-American meant in the 1950s. It is an instrument of dismissal, a means of excluding your critics from rational discourse. Under the new McCarthyism, this dismissal extends to anyone who seeks to promulgate a version of events other than that sanctioned by the US government. … If we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom which President Bush claims to be defending, then we must question everything we see and hear. Though we know that governments lie to us in wartime, most people seem to believe that this universal rule applies to every conflict except the current one. Many of those who now accept that babies were not thrown out of incubators in Kuwait, and that the Belgrano was fleeing when it was hit, are also prepared to believe everything we are being told about Afghanistan and terrorism in the US. … Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public scepticism. Unless we are prepared to question, to expose, to challenge and to dissent, we conspire in the demise of the system for which our governments are supposed to be fighting. The true defenders of America are those who are now being told that they are anti-American. [The Guardian, 16 October 2001]
• There is something almost comical about the prospect of George Bush waging war on another nation because that nation has defied international law. Since Bush came to office, the United States government has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world has in 20 years. It has scuppered the biological weapons convention while experimenting, illegally, with biological weapons of its own. It has refused to grant chemical weapons inspectors full access to its laboratories, and has destroyed attempts to launch chemical inspections in Iraq. It has ripped up the anti-ballistic missile treaty, and appears to be ready to violate the nuclear test ban treaty. It has permitted CIA hit squads to recommence covert operations of the kind that included, in the past, the assassination of foreign heads of state. It has sabotaged the small arms treaty, undermined the international criminal court, refused to sign the climate change protocol and, last month, sought to immobilise the UN convention against torture so that it could keep foreign observers out of its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. Even its preparedness to go to war with Iraq without a mandate from the UN security council is a defiance of international law far graver than Saddam Hussein's non-compliance with UN weapons inspectors. … But the US government has several pressing domestic reasons for going to war. The first is that attacking Iraq gives the impression that the flagging "war on terror" is going somewhere. The second is that the people of all super-dominant nations love war. As Bush found in Afghanistan, whacking foreigners wins votes. Allied to this concern is the need to distract attention from the financial scandals in which both the president and vice-president are enmeshed. … As the US government discovers that it can threaten and attack other nations with impunity, it will surely soon begin to threaten countries that have numbered among its allies. As its insatiable demand for resources prompts ever bolder colonial adventures, it will come to interfere directly with the strategic interests of other quasi-imperial states. As it refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of the use of those resources, it threatens the rest of the world with environmental disaster. It has become openly contemptuous of other governments and prepared to dispose of any treaty or agreement that impedes its strategic objectives. It is starting to construct a new generation of nuclear weapons, and appears to be ready to use them pre-emptively. It could be about to ignite an inferno in the Middle East, into which the rest of the world would be sucked. The United States, in other words, behaves like any other imperial power. Imperial powers expand their empires until they meet with overwhelming resistance. [The Guardian, 06 August 2002]
• In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth. What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow. The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world / Axis of Evil / United Nations / European Union / France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be. The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their efforts. The antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio Berlusconi. The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast. … We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. … So here we have a major political constituency – representing much of the current president's core vote – in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men". … if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. [The Guardian, 20 April 2004]

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

• How many things that were articles of faith yesterday are fables today. [Essays]
• Men of simple understanding, little inquisitive and little instructed, make good Christians. [Essays]
• O senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm and yet will make Gods by the dozen! [An Apology Of Raimond Sebond, Essays]

Ashley Montagu

• The Good Book – one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.
• Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

Micheal Moorcock

• An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world. [Starship Stormtroopers, 1978]
• Gods and their examples are not needed by those who respect themselves and, consequently, respect others. Gods are for children, for little fearful people, for those who would have no responsibility to themselves or their fellows.

Alan Moore

• But we also believe in the absolute freedom of the human imagination, as long as you can remember what's real and what's fiction. The only people that do seem to have a problem with distinguishing between reality and fantasy are psychopaths and magistrates. [The Virtues Of Vice: The Alan Moore Interview, Comicscape, 12 April 2006]
• You've got, on the one hand, a kind of neoconservative agenda in the world today. On the one hand, possibly because it's seeking to appease the Christian fundamentalists, is very anti the idea of a free sexuality. On the other hand, they seem to be very fond of the idea of endless war. Now, this, to me, seems completely ass-backwards. This, to me, seems like an anti-human position. I cannot see it as any other than that. If the people who are actually pushing those values forward could just stop and think for a minute, are they really saying that sexual acts are filthy, dirty, not to be countenant, but they are quite prepared, for the sake of securing enough fuel for their automobiles, to condemn children in another country to hideous death and dismemberment? Is that what their God has told them that He wants? And, if he has, perhaps they ought to sort of check this God guy out a bit look at his record, see if he's wanted anywhere. That sounds psychopathic to me, and I suspect it would to anybody who was remotely normal. [The Virtues Of Vice: The Alan Moore Interview, Comicscape, 12 April 2006]
• They are depictions. Yes, I can't produce the birth certificates of these young-looking people to prove that they are, in fact, midgets at the age of 18, or whatever. You're showing images of fictional children having consensual sex. This could be seen as wrong, whereas I, for the past couple of years, have been turning on my television and seeing pictures of actual, non-fictional children with their arms blown off. But, this is okay, because this is collateral damage. And, after all, they have only blown the arms off the children, killed all of their relatives, and left them with no un-blackened skin below the waist. It's not like they've touched them sexually or anything. Frankly, when you're confronted with that kind of vision on the six o'clock news, it makes all of these arguments about what it is permissible to depict in fiction completely laughable almost an insult to our mutual humanity. If we can get so upset about lines on paper, but cannot somehow get upset about real flesh, real blood, real viscera, then what are we? So yes, I suppose that you could see those sections as deliberately provocative. I felt that I wanted to make a point there. But of course, any coercive sex whether it's between adults, children, animals any coercive act is wrong. That goes without saying. [The Virtues Of Vice: The Alan Moore Interview, Comicscape, 12 April 2006]

Charles Moore

• Why is it that so many people resent religion and turn against it? Surely it is because of its coercive force, its tendency to mistake the worldly power of its priests and mullahs for justified zeal for the truth. It is not God who turns people away, but what people do in the name of God. If a law against religious hatred is passed, even when blessed by St David Blunkett, the natural consequence will be a rise in the hatred of religion. … Iqbal Sacranie, of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain, wants the new law because any "defamation of the character of the prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him)" is a "direct insult and abuse of the Muslim community". In effect, he is asking for the law of libel to be extended beyond the grave, giving religious belief a protection extended to no other creed or version of history. … It says a good deal about the quality of churchmen and politicians in Britain that the most prominent opponent of the Bill is Mr Bean. The Archbishop of Canterbury is more or less invisible. The Government is on the side of repression. [The Telegraph, 11 December 2004]

Mark Morford

• Note to Scientology: first signs that you are not a true religion: You cannot take a joke. You have an army of attack lawyers. You are so unstable as a religion you are unable to handle satire. You think the Kabballah is suing everyone who trashes Madonna? They'd be broke in a week. Just a thought. [SFGate, 06 July 2005]
• Bush hates press conferences because he can't speak extemporaneously and can't form a complete sentence without mashing up the language like a five-year-old and can't express a complex idea to save his life and somewhere deep down, he knows it, and he knows we know it, and it makes him mumble and stutter and wish he could be somewhere else, anywhere else, like sittin' on the back porch in Texas eatin' ribs and dreamin' 'bout baseball. Ahhh, there now. That's better. … Bush is able to speak only at one level, to one level. The level of a child. The level of a simpleton. … Bush is, of course, speaking to children. He is speaking to babies. It is a decidedly shallow and hollow and oddly deflated type of language that offers not a single nutritious or substantive thought to the political or cultural dialogue, other than to expand his staggering collection of embarrassing Bushisms. … His still-appalling inability to speak with any depth or resonance, coupled with his brand of personable, aww-shucks, none-too-bright simpleton worldview is perfect for some cute, redneck, tiny burg. It really is. But for a major world power caught in the throes of a desperate need to change and grow and evolve, he is, of course, imminent death, leading us deeper into a regressive ideological tar pit from which we may never emerge. [SFGate, 03 June 2005]
• I really have little patience for the gutting of our school system and the decimation of science and mysticism and the human mind for the sake of a handful of militant Christian zealots … I cannot tolerate an American president, ostensibly meant to be one of the most articulate and intellectually sophisticated leaders on the planet, mumbling his semicoherent support of the embarrassing nontheory of "Intelligent Design," to the detriment of about 300 years of confirmed science and 10 million years of common sense to the point where America's armies of dumbed-down Ritalin-drunk children look at him and sigh and secretly wish they could have a future devoid of such imbecilic thought but who realize, deep down, they are merely another doomed and fraught generation … I am most intolerant of, well, of those who allow such intolerance. Of those who would, based on their narrow views of sex, God, love, hope, war, the mind, the Earth, soil and animals and air and water and fire and love and spirit and drugs and guns and dildos, work to legislate those neoconservative beliefs, codify them, make them the law of the land, force their regressive beliefs on everyone else under punishment of violence and beatings and prison. I am, in short, intolerant of intolerance. … Don't believe in abortion? Don't understand gay people? Sexuality make you rashy? Think Harry Potter teaches kids evil and witchcraft? Don't marry a sexy gay witch abortionist. But don't you dare, based on your limited understanding of God and life, make laws declaring that I can't. [SFGate, 10 August 2005]
• The church's latest insidious lie wouldn't matter in the slightest, and would, in fact, be merely cute and totally dismissible, like most "official" Vatican doctrine, were it not for the fact that the Vatican is instructing its priests all over the world, including those in AIDS-ravaged countries in Africa and Asia, to condemn condom use. In places, that is, where the disease has killed millions and affects millions more, where misinformation is rampant and treatment sparse, and where increased condom use could have a very serious and beneficial impact on preventing further spread. Nope, no condoms, says the church. Very bad, they sneer. Their solution? Abstinence. Their ignorance and audacity? Appalling. Their karmic debt for continuing to be this ethically dangerous, sexually oppressive, misogynistic, homophobic force in the world? Incalculable. The church restricts doctors from talking about condoms in poor nations. They prohibit AIDS-testing centres from handing out condoms to those most at risk of the deadly disease. Your country's being ravaged by a killer virus and you're at incredible risk of death? Too bad for you. Don't have sex. From Nicaragua to Kenya and the Philippines, where AIDS is raging like wildfire, the lie is the same: The church says condoms can kill. This is nothing new. The Vatican just really, really loathes condoms. And sex. And homosexuals. And women. And anything that might inhibit procreation, or that in any way empowers people to take control over their reproduction options, or that might somehow loosen the church's vicelike grip. [SF Gate, 17 October 2003]
• Already, Spanish and Canadian religious zealots and conservative hatemongers are wringing their hands and scowling heavily and heading for the gay-free bomb shelters, well stocked as they are with Bibles and potatoes and canned corn and secret stashes of German fetish porn and Spanish tapas and Canadian bacon and joylessness. These people are, as you might imagine, deeply pissed and frustrated and wishing they could all be living anywhere but Canada or Spain (or Belgium, or the Netherlands, the only other nations that have legalized gay marriage to date), … Already, the vast majority of Canadian and Spanish children are crying, trembling, sensing something is amiss, aware that the precious balance has been altered, their potential fates as imminent homophobes and conservative ideologues being thrown into question. I mean, what will they become? Who will teach them to hate gays and loathe anyone who is different and where will they learn to be all sexually uptight and sanctimonious and misguided? Oh, right. America. … Children are going to be psychologically damaged and morally mauled and sexually preyed upon by those deviant homos with their crazy beliefs and bizarre sexual practices and their whips and chains and weird paraphernalia and gay agitprop literature and creepy homosexual hand puppets. … Will kids become premature alcoholics? Sexual deviants? Godless heathens? Wiccans and porn addicts and Danielle Steele fans? Will they get tattoos and pierce their labias and vote Green? Or will they merely suffer a ridiculously high divorce rate, 29 percent higher than the U.S. average, like they already do in the "morally virtuous" red states? [SF Gate, 01 July 2005]
• But let's not be too hard on the least articulate, least intellectual, least accountable president in U.S. history. After all, Dubya's just like much of America. He is the perfect embodiment of our world-famous myopia, a selective type of dangerous tunnel vision whereby if we don't see it and don't really feel it and the media doesn't splash it all over us, it must not be true. And, really, what Bush-votin' flag-wavin' God-numbed patriot wants to hear that the U.S. is a world-class hypocrite, committing many of the same crimes and tortures, rapes and humiliations that Saddam himself did, in the very same prison? … And who wants to know that we have become the violent, unwanted clown on the global stage, justifiably ridiculed and thoroughly unsympathetic, as the world boos and hurls rotten foreign policies? … The Powers That Be know one thing: This lack of perspective, of the gruesome details of war, keeps the nation stupid. It makes us compliant. It makes us all go, well sure, I know war is heck and all, but we're the good guys therefore any bloodshed is in the name of democracy and any rapes are necessary evils and all those dead Iraqi women and babies are unfortunate casualties in the quest to protect our president's corporate interests and life goes on and hey "American Idol" is down to three finalists! Woo! Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is also Bush. This is a man who goes on Saudi television to claim rape and torture and sadism is not the American way of conducting a war (but not, actually, to apologise – never that), that such behaviour is contrary to our God and our principles and our morals and our happily imbecilic black-and-white, good-versus-evil worldview. Good one, George. [SF Gate, 12 May 2004]
• God wants oil. This is the message. This is the belief. God wants more oil and also uranium and coal and iron and nuclear waste and whatever the hell else we want to pump into or out of this godforsaken lump of floating space rock. Word to the GOP. In other words, God wants us, if the happily bleak and decidedly nasty interpretation of Bible verse currently extolled by the rabid evangelical mind-set now mauling the American political and social landscape is to be believed, to use up the Earth however we see fit and stomp all over this pointless ecological blob with our macho SUVs and manly tanks and badass army boots because it's all just one giant disposable sandbox o' fun anyway, right? Hey, it's all part of the Master Plan to destroy the Earth and smite our enemies and hasten the arrival of the Rapture. Didn't you know? … Millions of otherwise decent and sincere Americans who actually believe the Bible as literal world-for-word truth, verbatim, no questions asked, not metaphor and not parable and not lovely set of nice, same-as-every-other-religion mythologies by which we set our moral compasses, but a set of actual facts told in cautionary dramedy, like a silly locust-ridden reality-TV show. Extreme Jesus: Apocalypse Edition. … The environment does not matter because the Earth does not matter because all the sinful nonbelievers do not matter and all that does matter is the imminent return of the bloody Christ, and therefore, so what if BushCo supports the most appalling array of environmentally abusive policies in American history? So what if we permanently scar some silly wildlife refuge in Alaska? … What, protect a hunk of land and save some stupid animals when the Rapture is at hand? When Jesus is about to reappear? And when we can, until then, make heaps of cash and stomp the poor and pollute like crazy and have all manner of self-righteous fun? What kind of silly hell is that, you lost sodomite sinner? [SF Gate, 23 March 2005]
• Alabama. Illegal dildos. In the spotlight recently, as the U.S. Supreme Court just declined to review the constitutionality of the state's law banning the sale of such naughty and phallically radiant toys. Did you see the story? Did it make you cringe and sigh and reach for the Hitachi Magic Wand? Aren't we just a proud and deeply misguided nation? Oh, it is fun to laugh. It is fun to mock and point and say, aww, how cute, those lost and weird and backass Southern states where most people are just trying to live noble upstanding honest lives but where they still insist on putting stickers on biology textbooks to warn of the "dangers" of the theory of evolution. Places where raw honest sexuality is a foreign language and homosexuality is considered a disease and where they lovingly allow sales of Viagra and Cialis and where they inject vats of Prozac and Xanax into their bodies alongside truckloads of deep-fried obesity-happy everything, but the thought of someone using a sex toy to please herself or her lover and to add to the overall positive orgasmic vibe of the planet is considered on par, legally speaking, with paedophilia, or burglary, or being from France. … This dildo thing, and the mind-set it represents, it is the type of thing that makes us small, keeps us lost, confused, torn; it's emblematic of what holds us back from true progress and heat and joy. … And moreover, as the last deeply disturbing election proved, we on the dildo-happy side of the fence must be very, very wary, on alert, keenly observant of these rigid and dangerous little laws and of these genital-free religious leaders, as Alabama's is the mind-set that put Bush in office and these are the voting blocs that keep noxious abstinence programs alive in public schools and this is the viewpoint that buys 20 million copies of the Left Behind series of silly apocalyptica, all hoping for the End of the World real soon now so why not abuse the planet as we damn well please and wait for the Rapture, uptight and righteous and dildo free. [SF Gate, 04 March 2005]
• Bush has always been the rich white man's president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman's friend, the thug of the religious right, a big reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism and progress and social responsibility. … out of touch and eternally dumbfounded, a hand puppet of the neoconservative machine built and fluffed up and carefully placed for the very specific job of protecting their interests, no matter what. … Because Bush, he was never actually meant to, you know, lead. … He is, after all, doing a simply beautiful job of kowtowing to his wealthiest supporters while slamming the poor and running the nation into a deep hole and creating the largest deficit in American history, all while his cronies in oil and industry and military supply and Big Energy gain immense and staggering wealth and pay less and less tax on it. This is what he was hired to do. … The truest measure of any president, of any leader, is how well he takes care of his own people. And Bush, well, Bush has done a simply spectacular job of taking care of exactly his own people – the wealthy, the corporate, the extreme religious right, his core base of supporters – while happily and fiercely ignoring, restricting, condemning, destroying the rest. Are you educated or progressive or liberal or alternative-minded or sexually open or homosexual or anti-war? This means you. Are you dirt poor and belong to a minority and don't drive an SUV and contribute six figures per annum to the RNC and maybe live in a flooded swamp in the Louisiana bayou? This means you, squared. Sucker. Here, then, is the new American motto, as reimagined by BushCo: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we'll let them die in a filthy and decrepit storm-ravaged American football stadium while our president languishes on vacation and ponders his oil futures and fondly remembers his good ol' days of getting drunk at Mardi Gras before going AWOL from the military. God bless America. [SFGate, 09 September 2005]

Rev. Donald Morgan

• A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to atheism.
• The certainty with which a religious belief is held is usually in direct proportion to its absurdity.
• Faith is an absolutely marvellous tool. With faith there is no question too big for even the smallest mind.
• If God existed as an all-powerful being, He would not need the money that faithful believers donate to their churches.
• Christians say that – without exception – their God answers all of their prayers; it's just that he sometimes says "yes" and other times "no," "maybe," or "wait." Of course the same could be said of the rain-god, "Bob."
• The biblical concepts of sin and salvation are an integral part of Christian doctrine. Christianity first creates a problem (sin) and then offers a "solution" (salvation). This is not unlike the protection racket; you either buy "protection" – or else!

John Morley

• You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. [On Compromise]

Chris Morris

• We've had this book [the bible] analysed and it reads like the ramblings of a drugged horse. The question tonight – is God confused like his prating truth pimps, or is he dead?

Colin Morris

• Logically, only religious believers can blaspheme. If you think God doesn't exist, then it is no more blasphemous to insult him than to mock Father Christmas. You may cause offence, but that isn't blasphemy. [The Guardian, 31 March 2005]

Rob Morse

• Now the religious right is joining the war against children, saying Halloween is a satanic plot. A Costa Mesa Christian group, Citizens for Excellence in Education, says the witch's broomstick is a phallic symbol of pagan worship. Yet another reason not to clean the house. The group says a "spiritual battle" is raging on this night as covens of witches and other pagan religions call forth their demon spirits. Even kids know demons are make-believe. It's unreal adults you have to worry about. [San Francisco Chronicle, 31 October 1993]

Johann Most

• "God" – as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives – is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to.

Bill Moyers

• We also know that fundamentalists the world over and at home consider the "sacred texts" to be literally God's word on all matters. Inside that logic you cannot read part of the Bible allegorically and the rest of it literally; if you believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection, and the depiction of the Great Judgment at the end times you must also believe that God is sadistic, brutal, vengeful, callow, cruel and savage – that God slaughters. … The ruins were still smouldering when the reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell went on television to proclaim that the terrorist attacks were God's punishment of a corrupted America. They said the government had adopted the agenda "of the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians" not to mention the ACLU and People for the American Way (The God of the Bible apparently holds liberals in the same low esteem as Hittites and Gergushites and Jebusites and all the other pagans of holy writ.) Just as God had sent the Great Flood to wipe out a corrupted world, now – disgusted with a decadent America – "God almighty is lifting his protection from us." Critics said such comments were deranged. But millions of Christian fundamentalists and conservatives didn't think so. They thought Robertson and Falwell were being perfectly consistent with the logic of the Bible as they read it: God withdraws favour from sinful nations – the terrorists were meant to be God's wake-up call: better get right with God. Not many people at the time seemed to notice that Osama bin Laden had also been reading his sacred book closely and literally, and had called on Muslims to resist what he described as a "fierce Judeo-Christian campaign" against Islam, praying to Allah for guidance "to exalt the people who obey Him and humiliate those who disobey Him." … We're talking about a powerful religious constituency that claims the right to tell us what's on God's mind and to decide the laws of the land according to their interpretation of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the nation as a whole. … Their viral intolerance – their loathing of other people's beliefs, of America's secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective knowledge – has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state power. … This silence on economic and political morality is deafening but revealing. … To these fundamentalist radicals there is only one legitimate religion and only one particular brand of that religion that is right; all others who call on God are immoral or wrong. They believe the Bible to be literally true and that they alone know what it means. [9/11 And The Sport Of God, TomPaine.com, 09 September 2005]

Abdal-Hakim Murad

• … Muslims, largely unheeded by the wider world, are counting the cost of the suicide bombings. The backlash against mosques and hijabs has been met by statements from Muslim communities around the globe, some stilted, but others which have clearly found an articulate and passionate voice for the first time. In comparison with the pathetic near-silence that hovered around mosques and major organisations during the Rushdie and Gulf War debacles, the communities now seem alert to their cultural situation and its potential precariousness. … Islam is a great world religion that has produced much of the world's most sensitive art, architecture and literature, and has a rich life of ethics, missionary work, and spirituality. Such are the real, and historically-successful, weapons of Islam, because they are the instruments that make friends of our neighbours, instead of enemies fit for burning alive. Those that refuse them, out of cultural impotence or impatience, will in the longer term be perceived as so radical in their denial of what is necessarily known to be part of Islam, that the authorities of the religion are likely to declare them to be beyond its reach. If that takes place, then future catastrophes by Wahhabi ultras will have little impact on the image of communities, whose spokesmen can simply say that Muslims were not implicated. This is the approach taken by Christian churches when confronted by, say, the Reverend Jim Jones's suicide cult, or the Branch Davidians at Waco. Only a radical amputation of this kind will save Islam's name, and the physical safety of Muslims, particularly women, as they live and work in Western cities. … In particular I am concerned to insist that Muslims distance themselves from, for instance, the janaza prayer for the hijackers that was held two days ago at a London Wahhabi mosque (the term Wahhabi is more useful, since 'Salafi' can also refer to the Abduh-Rida reformism and is hence confusing). Having spoken to the editor of one of this country's major Muslim magazines, it is clear that the small minority of voices which have been raised in support of the terrorist act were in every case of the Wahhabi persuasion. Clearly, we cannot simply ignore this on grounds of 'Muslim unity', since those people appear so determined to destroy Muslim unity, and endanger the security of our community. [Recapturing Islam From The Terrorists]

Douglas Murray

• The night after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities I was pre-recording a Radio 4 programme. My fellow discussant was a very nice Muslim man who works to 'de-radicalise' extremists. We agreed on nearly everything. But at some point he said that one reason Muslims shouldn't react to such cartoons is that Mohammed never objected to critics. There may be some positive things to be said about Mohammed, but I thought this was pushing things too far and mentioned just one occasion when Mohammed didn't welcome a critic. Asma bint Marwan was a female poetess who mocked the 'Prophet' and who, as a result, Mohammed had killed. It is in the texts. It is not a problem for me. But I can understand why it is a problem for decent Muslims. The moment I said this, my Muslim colleague went berserk. How dare I say this? I replied that it was in the Hadith and had a respectable chain of transmission (an important debate). He said it was a fabrication which he would not allow to stand. The upshot was that he refused to continue unless all mention of this was wiped from the recording. The BBC team agreed and I was left trying to find another way to express the same point. The broadcast had this 'offensive' fact left out. I cannot imagine another religious discussion where this would happen, but it is perfectly normal when discussing Islam. On that occasion I chose one case, but I could have chosen many others, such as the hundreds of Jews Mohammed beheaded with his own hand. Again, that's in the mainstream Islamic sources. I haven't made it up. It used to be a problem for Muslims to rationalise, but now there are people trying to imitate such behaviour in our societies it has become a problem for all of us, and I don't see why people in the free world should have to lie about what we read in historical texts. ['Religion Of Peace' Is Not A Harmless Platitude, The Spectator, 27 June 2015]

Fatima Mustaq, Director Of Education, Ghazni, Afghanistan

• They [the Taleban] found out [about our secret schools] and raided us. We managed to persuade them that we were only teaching the Koran. But they spied and found out we were teaching algebra. So they came and beat us. Can you imagine, beating someone for teaching algebra. [commenting after the brutal murder of teacher Mohammed Halim, New Zealand Herald, 30 November 2006]

Shabnam Nadiya

• I rejected religion at first simply because if I continued to believe in what was written in that book [Qur'an], I no longer had the vast spaces of my mind to move through; because it limited and constrained my world instead of making it the place of the unlimited possibilities of my imaginings. That book told me that no matter how much I read, how much I knew, no matter what love and compassion for people I held in my breast, no matter my intelligence, my talents, my love of laughter, I would never ever be as good as even the lowliest of men. Because I was a woman. I was a field for a man to sow his seed, I was part of the spoils of war for a warrior, I was impure at times because I had the power to breed children, my word was not to be trusted against that of a man, I was the gateway to hell because men would desire me. … How could any system of belief compete with the dignity and the respect that non-belief had to offer to me? If I was a religious being I was relegated to the status of second class citizen as a woman. If I was a religious creature I was merely created by a divine being to sing His glory to the stars. Instead I decided that I was human, the highest in the order of life, I was infinite possibility, I was the limitless sky, I was the sun's laughter. I would be captain of my own ship. I would do good and not evil, not because I would be allowed a good time when I died, but because good was worth doing because it was good. Because I, as a human, among all the creatures, had the unique capacity to distinguish between good and evil; and the will to choose between them. … I questioned and rejected religion and became an atheist because I could not answer the inconsistencies of religion to myself, and because religion limited me as a human being – I remain an atheist because I have discovered that I do not need religion to tell me who I am. [Why I Remain An Atheist]

V. S. Naipaul

• There is this ill-informed idea that it was the British, in the short time that they were there, that ruined and defaced all those temples you see. The bitter fact is that the people of India were ill-equipped to face the organised military power of Islam and were destroyed by it. The intellectual life of India, the Sanskrit culture, stops at 1000AD. Islam was the greatest calamity that befell it. Now people think only the Muslims built anything but what they brought was a slave culture that lasted in some parts of India until almost the other day. To be a Muslim you have to destroy your history, to stamp on your ancestral culture. The sands of Arabia is all that matters. This abolition of the self is worse than the colonial abolition, much worse. [21 February 2002]

Maryam Namazie

• Opposing shari'a is not racism. It's racist to demand backward, medieval laws for people living in the 20th century. [Council Of Ex-Muslims Of Britain Conference, 10 October 2008]
• Whilst we may all sometimes be offended by some things, it is religion and the religious that are offended all of the time. They alone seem to have a monopoly on being offended, saying their beliefs are a no go area, and silencing all those who offend. The problem is exacerbated because of the political Islamic movement. Generally, someone like Mel Gibson might just seem like a wacko who has produced a really lame movie but Islamists do it with bomb scares and threats in Europe and of course hangings and assassinations in countries like Iran where they are in power. [Blog, 03 February 2006]
• The repeated calls for an unreserved apology for publishing 'offensive' and 'insulting' caricatures of Mohammad reminds me of the apologies that should be made to me and many like me. I'd like the offended Islamists – from the Islamic Republic of Iran to Islamic Jihad to the Saudi government… – to apologise; not for their backward and medieval superstitions and religious mumbo jumbo but for their imposition of these beliefs in the form of states, Islamic laws and the political Islamic movement. If any of them want to apologise for the mass murder of countless human beings in Iran and the Middle East, and more recently in Europe, for veiling and sexual apartheid, for stoning, amputations, decapitations, Islamic terrorism and for the recent brutal attack on Tehran bus workers and so on and so forth, just email me direct. On a more serious note, though, of course no apology is due them. As if. … In defence of free speech, secularism, and 21 century values, I too am reprinting the caricatures here in line with the daily France-Soir which carried the headline "Yes, We Have the Right to Caricature God" … I urge everyone to do the same. [Blog, 01 February 2006]
• They [Islamists] demand the 'right' to veil for women and children in France when in the Middle East they impose compulsory veiling by throwing acid in the faces of those who refuse and resist. In Britain, they cry racism and Islamophobia against anyone who speaks out against Islam and its political movement, whilst in Iran and its likes they hang 'apostates' and 'Kafirs' from trees and cranes. Here, they demand the prosecution of those who 'incite religious hatred' when everywhere it is they themselves who incite hatred and violence than can be articulated or imagined. Here in the EU, they call for tolerance and respect of their beliefs, when it is they who have issued fatwas and death threats against anyone who they deem disrespectful and intolerable. Here, they call for 'equal' rights demanding a Sharia court for 'Muslim minorities' in Canada and Britain whilst it is their very Sharia courts that have legalised Islamic injustice and barbarity in the Middle East. … We can soon be prosecuted and face up to 7 years imprisonment in Britain for being offensive against or going beyond the 'legitimate' criticism of Islam. We are already called racists and Islamophobes whenever we speak for women and against Islam and its movement. It is we who are deemed extremists by the Mayor of London when we oppose the visit of Qaradawi, the so-called Islamic scholar whose support for women's 'modesty' and violence against women and his condemnation of sexual acts as 'perversions' are no different from the Islamic laws in Iran. … The rise of religion and the erosion of secularism and universal norms are part and parcel of the New World Order, which has transformed citizenship rights into fragmented communities identified by anything but our common humanity, and human and universal values with cultural, religious and backward ones. … Today, more than ever, we are in need of the de-religionisation of society. [Political Islam In The Heart Of Secular Europe, International Humanist & Ethical Union Congress, Paris, 06 July 2005]

Taslima Nasrin

• Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that? [Time, 31 January 1994]
• I write against the religion because if women want to live like human beings, they will have to live outside the religion and Islamic law. [21 June 1994]
• Religion, society and state; from none of these do women get their proper honour. It is religion which has created an unparalleled disparity between men and women.
• When I first went into hiding, I took refuge in the home of total strangers. At that time, if I was found, the family would have been killed along with me. Like Nazi Germany.
• Some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems. But Islam itself oppresses women. Islam itself doesn't permit democracy, and violates human rights.
• They're [moderates] not following Islam honestly. Fundamentalists are. They're following the "word of God," and the orders of Prophet Muhammad exactly. So it's not true that Islam is good for humanity. It's not at all good. Islam completely denies human rights and treats women very badly.
• I find some things about Eastern cultures much better than the individualism of the West – hospitality, kindness, generosity. Individualism can destroy your feelings for other people. We have to take the good things from every culture. But never, never, consider torture as culture. [interview with Irshad Manji, 28 October 2002]
• The real conflict is not between the West and Islam, or even Christianity and Islam. It's been secularism and fundamentalism, irrational blind faith and a rational, logical approach, between innovation and tradition, between past and future, between those who value freedom and those who do not. [interview with Irshad Manji, 28 October 2002]
• Maybe liberal Muslims are morally decent, but they're not following Islam honestly. Fundamentalists are. They're following the "word of God," and the orders of Prophet Muhammad exactly. So it's not true that Islam is good for humanity. It's not at all good. Islam completely denies human rights and treats women very badly. [interview with Irshad Manji, 28 October 2002]
• There can be no difference in the concept of human rights between the East and the West. If the veil is bad for the western women, then it is bad for their oriental sisters as well. If the patriarchy is to be fought against in the West, it should be equally fought against in the East … If modern secular education is good for western women why should the eastern women be deprived of it?
• If you are a Muslim, it means you are obeying Allah's words, which are totally against women. If you are a feminist, it means you support women's rights and you cannot be religious. Actually, I do not understand how women can be religious because religion is made for men, for their own pleasure. Most of Hinduism's gods are female, but look at how women in Hindu society are treated. Reform efforts should focus on removing religious laws. That's what leads to abuse. [interview with Irshad Manji, 28 October 2002]
• I don't find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. I believe religion is the root, and from the root fundamentalism grows as a poisonous stem. If we remove fundamentalism and keep religion, then one day or another fundamentalism will grow again. I need to say that because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems. But Islam itself oppresses women. Islam itself doesn't permit democracy and it violates human rights. [Free Inquiry, winter 1998]
• I thought it was natural to ask "why". I don't understand why they accepted being beaten by their husbands, being prevented from going outside without permission, being forced to marry somebody and stopping their studies after marriage. I know that this is a very, very difficult situation because if you divorce your husband and try to be independent, you'll be called "prostitute." But, you know, I don't care what people call me. Maybe that is the difference. If you want to be a human being, a good person, you first have to be bad in this society's eyes. If you're not willing to be "bad," you'll never be a truly strong and independent person.
• As a child, I was told that Allah knows everything. Well, everything means everything. So Allah should know Bengali, shouldn't he? I was curious: How come I have to pray in Arabic? When I want to talk to Allah, why do I have to use somebody else's language and not my own? My mother did not have any answers. She memorized the Koran because it is written in the hadiths that when you die, two angels will come and ask questions of the soul. The answers will have to be given in Arabic, otherwise your grave will squeeze you so hard. Why wouldn't those angels know Bengali? It's as if God has occupied the minds of Muslims, invaded them. [interview with Irshad Manji, 28 October 2002]
• I am a rational person. I am a rationalist, secularist, humanist. It's not that I want to put scientific ideas higher than religious ones – no. I want to abolish religion only because religion is against humanity. If religion is not against humanity, I have no problem with it. Because I believe in the ideas of secular humanism, I know very well that religion is against humanism. If someone personally wants to believe in religion, I have no problem. But when they try to impose religion on others, then the problem starts. Religious law imposes. The Koran is an historical document. I cannot deny that it exists. But why should we follow it now, in this period, when it's outdated and out of place? Why do we need seventh-century law now? [interview with Irshad Manji, 28 October 2002]

Bushra Nasir, Headmistress, Islamic School, East London

• If 32 per cent of young Muslim men really do believe that British society is immoral and must be brought to an end, then I ask myself, if they hate it so much, why do they live here? [2005]

Gamal Abdel Nasser

• The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing.

George Nathan

• Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Allama Muhammed Farooq Nazimi

• There is no disagreement about this; there is absolutely no doubt about it that the punishment for the person who shows disrespect for the Prophet is death. No one disagrees about this. No one disagrees about this. The Koran, Hadith, the actions of the companions of Prophet Mohammed, all testify to this and there is no room for doubt in it. Whoever shows disrespect for Prophet Mohammed will be given the death penalty. … We salute those who protect the sanctity of our Lord and we pray for ourselves too, "O Allah, accept us among those who protect the sanctity of our beloved Mohammed." There is no privilege in the world greater than this: that the Exalted Allah should select and accept one to protect the sanctity of our beloved Lord. … No one can be more fortunate than the one who loses his life, wealth and children for the sake of glorifying our beloved Lord whom Allah praises and protects. I say the aim of establishing Noor TV, and the slogan of the founder of Noor TV, is the protection of the sanctity of Prophet Mohammed. In the whole world, there should be slaves of Mustafa everywhere, and disrespectful people should be eliminated. … The mission of our life is to protect the sanctity of our beloved Lord. [Noor TV, 03 May 2012] The only surprise to this is that other people are still surprised by these pathetic bleatings. They also of course confirm the sheer stupidity of these idiots and their religion: they believe in a deity who created the entire universe, but can't kill the blaphemers himself, he needs his own creations to do it for him and kill themselves in the process if need be!

Rev. Winston Njongonkulu Ndungane, Archbishop, Cape Town

• There is an attempt to divert us from the major life and death issues in the world. There is a woman waiting to be stoned to death for adultery in Nigeria and yet we are not hearing any fuss from the leadership of the church there about that. People are going hungry across the world, the Israelis are building a fence around the Palestinians, HIV/Aids is a global emergency … these are major, urgent, issues which should be a priority for the Church and we must not lose our focus on that … I am very concerned about this current debate because it seems to me that some kind of hypocrisy is going on in the Church. Gene Robinson and Jeffrey John have been open and honest about their private lives. It is no secret that there are gay clergy and there are gay bishops, and the institutional church seems to be turning a blind eye when we should be encouraging honesty. If Gene Robinson had kept quiet there would have been no issue. … I know people who are gay and lesbian who are African. The issue of orientation knows no culture and my fellow bishops are in denial, they have an ostrich mentality on this subject. Our church must learn how to live together as a diverse community. That's what should be on the agenda, not seeking to cast stones or talking about schisms. [The Guardian, 08 September 2003]

L. Aron Nelson (a.k.a. AronRa)

• If the bible had been written by a supreme being, then it wouldn't contain the mistakes that it does. If it was written by a truly superior being and meant to be read as a literal history, then the bible wouldn't contain anything that it does. [2nd Foundational Falsehood Of Creationism]
• To adequately understand evolution, you not only have to understand how to be scientific, which is the real trick for most people, but you also have to know something about cellular biology, genetics, and anatomy, geology (particularly palaeontology), as well as environmental systems, tectonics, atomic chemistry, and especially taxonomy, which most people don't know squat about at all. Most people who accept evolution also tend to know a whole lot about cosmology, geography, history, sociology, politics, and of course religion. But to believe in creationism, you don't have to know anything… about anything, and it's better if you don't, because creationism relies on ignorance. It is not honest research, it is a scam, a con-job exploiting the common folk and preying on their deepest beliefs and fears. Creationist apologetics depends on mis-represented data and mis-quoted authorities out of date and out of context and uses distorted definitions if it uses definitions at all. [1st Foundational Falsehood Of Creationism]
• Some of their sites even admit that wherever reality conflicts with the bible then reality must be ignored, and why is that? Because if creationists didn't have their beloved books then they wouldn't have a god either: one is the other in their world. Ironically, the faithful reject the works of god as worshipping the creation over the creator, but then they prop up the words of men before god, as god, and even insist that disproving their supposedly holy books would somehow disprove god too. Not just their version of god, but everyone else's version of god as well. Creationist Christians think that if the bible is wrong, then god lied; they cannot accept that god could exist but the bible be wrong because they can't distinguish doctrine from deity, so it is a form of idolatry wherein believers worship man-made compilations as though those books were god himself, because they think it is his word, but god never wrote or dictated any of the scriptures of any religion. Everything men chose to reject from or include in their supposedly inalterable word of whatever god, was conceived, composed, compiled, translated, interpreted, edited and often deliberately altered and enhanced, by mere fallible men. [2nd Foundational Falsehood Of Creationism]

New York Times

• Any organization could profit from a 10-year-old member with enough strength of character to refuse to swear falsely. [on the Boy Scouts' refusing membership to Mark Welsh, who would not sign a religious oath, 12 December 1993]

Isaac Newton

• I know not how I seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with while the vast ocean of undiscovered truth lay before me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

• First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.

Friedrich Nietzsche

• The last Christian died on the cross.
• Belief means not wanting to know what is true.
• There are no moral phenomena at all, only moral interpretations of phenomena. [Beyond Good And Evil]
• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
• In Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality. [The Antichrist]
• What a theologian feels as true, must be false: one has therein almost a criterion of truth. [The Antichrist]
• Madness is something rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule. [Beyond Good And Evil]
• The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night. [Beyond Good And Evil]
• Moral prohibitions, like those of the Decalogue, are suitable only for an age of subjugated reason … [The Wanderer And His Shadow]
• It is their physical impotence which makes their hate so violent and sinister, so cerebral and poisonous. [regarding priests]
• "Where the tree of knowledge stands is always Paradise": thus speak the oldest and youngest serpents. [Beyond Good And Evil]
• … if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire … [letter to his sister, 1865]
• The devil has the widest perspectives for God, and that is why he keeps so far way from him – the devil being the oldest friend of knowledge. [Beyond Good And Evil]
• Do you want to walk along? Or walk ahead? Or walk by yourself? One must know what one wants and that one wants. Fourth question of conscience. [Twilight Of The Idols]
• When stepped on, a worm doubles up. That is clever. In that way he lessens the probability of being stepped on again. In the language of morality: humility. [Twilight Of The Idols]
• He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. [Beyond Good And Evil]
• The Christian faith is from the beginning sacrifice: sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit, at the same time enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation. [Beyond Good And Evil]
• Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life. [The Birth of Tragedy]
• I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers – at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think! [Ecce Homo]
• There is a hatred of lies and simulation, stemming from an easily provoked sense of honour. There is another such hatred, from cowardice, since lies are forbidden by a divine commandment. Too cowardly to lie. [Twilight Of The Idols]
• The schools have no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, cautious judgement, and consistent inference; therefore they should leave alone whatever is not suitable for these operations: religion, for example. [Human, All Too Human]
• I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough – I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind. [The Antichrist]
• When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! this, for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son. The proof of such a claim is lacking. … Can one believe that such things are still believed? [Human, All Too Human]
• One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many. 'Good' is no longer good when your neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there exist a 'common good'! The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value. In the end it must be as it is and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders and delicacies for the refined, and, in sum, all rare things for the rare. [Beyond Good And Evil]
• I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions. It has had the will to the last corruption that it even possible. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its corruption; it has turned every value into an un-value, every truth into a lie, every integrity into a vileness of the soul. Let anyone dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings! To abolish any distress ran counter to its deepest advantages: it lived on distress, it created distress to externalise itself. [The Antichrist]
• Misunderstanding of the dream. In the age of crude primeval culture man believed that in dreams he got to know another real world; here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without the dream one would have found no reason for a division of the world. The separation of body and soul, too, is related to the most ancient conception of the dream; also the assumption of a quasi-body of the soul, which is the origin of all belief in spirits and probably also of the belief in gods. "The dead live on; for they appear to the living in dreams"; this inference went unchallenged for many thousands of years. [Human, All Too Human]
• … You have committed one of the greatest stupidities – for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy … It is a matter of honour with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is pronounced as possible, but the relation with Förster [sister's husband], as well as the aftereffects of my former publisher, the anti-Semitic Schmeitzer, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must belong to them after all. … It arouses mistrust against my character, as if publicly I condemned something which I favoured secretly – and that I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times. … [letter to his sister who, after his death, edited his writing to make him appear anti-semitic, 26 December 1887]

Asra Q. Nomani

• As long as the beating of women is acceptable in Islam, the problem of suicide bombers, jihadists and others who espouse violence will not go away; to me, they form part of a continuum. When 4:34 came into being in the 7th century, its pronouncements toward women were revolutionary, given that women were considered little more than chattel at the time. But 1,400 years later, the world is a different place and so, too, must our interpretations be different, retaining the progressive spirit of that verse. Domestic violence is prevalent today in non-Muslim communities as well, but the apparent religious sanction in Islam makes the challenge especially difficult. Some people seem to understand this and are beginning to push back against the traditionalists. However, their efforts are concentrated in the West, and their impact remains small. In his recent book No god but God, Reza Aslan, an Islam scholar at the University of Southern California, dared to assert that "misogynistic interpretation" has dogged 4:34 because Koranic commentary "has been the exclusive domain of Muslim men." An Iranian American scholar recently published a new 4:34 translation stating that the "beating" step means "go to bed with them (when they are willing). [Washington Post, 22 October 2006]

Max Nordau

• As a literary monument the Bible is of much later origin than the Vedas; as a work of literary value it is surpassed by everything written in the last two thousand years by authors even of the second rank, and to compare it seriously with the productions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe would require a fantasised mind that had entirely lost its power of judgment. Its conception of the universe is childish, and its morality revolting, as revealed in the malicious vengeance attributed to God in the OT and in the New, the parable of the labourers of the eleventh hour and the episodes of Mary Magdelene and the woman taken in adultery.

Charles Eliot Norton

• The loss of religious faith among the most civilised portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity. [letter to Goldwin Smith, 14 June 1897]

Richard Norton-Taylor & Seamas Milne

• The Soviet Union had no intention of launching a military attack on the West at the height of the cold war, British military and intelligence chiefs privately believed, in stark contrast to what Western politicians and military leaders were saying in public about the "Soviet threat". "The Soviet Union will not deliberately start general war or even limited war in Europe," briefing for the British chiefs of staff – marked Top Secret, UK Eyes Only, and headed The Threat: Soviet Aims and Intentions – declared in June 1968. Soviet foreign policy had been "cautious and realistic", the document argued, and despite the Vietnam war, the Russians and their allies had "continued to make contacts in all fields with the West and to maintain a limited but increasing political dialogue with NATO powers". … The report even went on to admit that NATO's nuclear weapons stockpile was "unduly large". There was a prima facie case, Whitehall privately conceded, for a cut. [The Guardian, 01 January 1999]

Rev. John Nugent

• If other faith systems refuse to laugh at themselves and have to resort to fatwahs or other forms of unacceptable protest (like the Sikh protests following 'that' play) then more fool them. It says a lot more about the insecurity of their own personal experience of faith than it does about the sacredness of the faith system in question. Christianity doesn't need to act that way. As a religion system it is more than able to roll with any punches that are thrown its way. [replying to letters of protest at the Christmas issue (#1121) which complained at the use of Breugel's Adoration Of The Magi with a caption of "Apparently, it's David Blunkett's.", Private Eye, 1123 07-20 January 2005]

Sean O'Casey

• What time has been wasted during man's destiny in the struggle to decide what man's next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in. [Shaw's Corner, Sunset and Evening Star, 1954]
• Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle. [letter to Irish Times, 08 June 1957]

Mary Flannery O'Connor

• I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from, and no Redemption because there was no Fall, and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar. [Wise Blood, 1949]

John O'Farrell

• We knew that American voters had an anti-intellectual streak but they didn't have to go that far. But as George said himself "they misunderestimated me". Today, at the dawn of the 21^st century, the global village is finally complete. At last it has a global village idiot. [The Guardian, 20 January 2001]
• Charles has suddenly found himself at the centre of all the conspiracy theories after the Mirror published extracts from a letter by Diana in which she apparently wrote: "My husband is planning 'an accident' in my car, brake failure and serious head injury … " You'd think she'd have worn her seatbelt, really, wouldn't you? Apparently this paranoid premonition proves that his highness took the ceremonial silver wirecutters off the velvet cushion, snipped through the brake cables and said: "I now declare this Mercedes lethal", as assembled dignitaries broke into light applause. … But there is an immutable law of modern celebrity which states that the more famous you are, the less willing people are prepared to believe that your premature death was caused by the rather disappointingly mundane reasons given. Modern celebrities are the stars in a real-life soap opera, and so when reality comes crashing in and pointlessly kills them off, there is a desperate search for some deeper meaning. No decent film or novel would just kill off the heroine in a random accident at the end; the traditions of narrative fiction demand a murderer or a conspiracy which is then exposed. … "Yes, all right, I murdered Diana," Charles will suddenly weep in court, "because she was going to tell everyone the truth about how the CIA killed Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. But then aliens from the Roswell incident kidnapped her, demanding we confess that the moon landings were filmed in Nevada, and that's why Bush had to destroy the twin towers so no one would find out." "At last," they will say, "a story we can believe in … " [The Guardian, 09 January 2004]
• But now America faces an even greater threat to its very survival – yes, it's Simon and Julian, the couple who run Shampoodle, the Pet Pamper Parlor. For this week George Bush has put gay weddings at the top of the political agenda, proposing the radical step of an amendment to the American constitution. The crisis began on Monday when spy satellite photos clearly showed Simon and Julian choosing a wedding cake with two little men on top. Surveillance teams at the Pentagon reported increased present-buying in the soft furnishing department of Bloomingdale's by other suspected local gays and their allies (single women in their forties). Meanwhile, chemical experts reported that Simon and Julian were believed to be secretly stockpiling spumanti and cassis, which could be made into pink champagne within 45 minutes. A gay wedding might occur at any time; America is now in a state of pink alert. This is clearly such a major political issue that it urgently requires a change in the American constitution. Now the famous document will read: "All men are created equal … but when we say men we mean real men, who like a beer and a ball game and leering at cheerleaders, not the effeminate faggoty types who jog through Central Park in tiny silver shorts, not that I was looking at their butts, obviously." … I know in these days of political correctness one is supposed to be tolerant and broad-minded, but I'm sorry, I just think it's disgusting. I mean these Christian Republicans. I don't mind them having these views in private, but why do they have to flaunt them so openly? What they say to each other about gays behind locked doors is their own business, but now you get them ostentatiously parading their anti-gay views, and boasting about it on the television. I mean, what if children were to hear? [The Guardian, 27 February 2004]

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

• An Atheist is simply a person who is free from theism.
• No god ever gave any man anything, nor ever answered any prayer at any time –nor ever will. [An Atheist Epic]
• Intolerance has always been one of the cornerstones of Christianity – the glorious heritage of the Inquisition. [Playboy, October 1965]
• 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.
• Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical out look verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.
• Religion – all religions – create a world of make-believe. Nothing in religion is related to objective reality, to science, to real life. Every religious idea you have goes on only in your head. Every bit of religion is subjective, not objective. No prayer you ever said, no outcry you ever made to god has ever been heard or answered. [22 October 1986]
• But the most heinous crime of the Church has been perpetrated not against churchmen but against churchgoers. With its poisonous concepts of sin and divine punishment, it's warped and brainwashed countless millions. It would be impossible to calculate the psychic damage this has inflicted on generations of children who might have grown up into healthy, happy, productive, zestful human beings but for the burden of antisexual fear and guilt ingrained in them by the Church. This alone is enough to condemn religion. [Playboy, October 1965]

Brendan O'Neill

• We are the most spied-upon nation in the world, with some of us caught on camera hundreds of times a day. Incredibly, no one seems to mind. … Throughout the country are an estimated five million CCTV cameras; that's one for every 12 citizens. We have more than 20 per cent of the world's CCTV cameras, which, considering that Britain occupies a tiny 0.2 per cent of the world's inhabitable land mass, is quite an achievement. The average Londoner going about his or her business may be monitored by 300 CCTV cameras a day. Roughly 1,800 cameras watch over London's railway stations and another 6,000 permanently peer at commuters on the Underground and London buses. In other major city centres, including Manchester and Edinburgh, residents can expect to be sighted on between roughly 50 and 100 cameras a day. Besides the official cameras – such as those operated by Westminster City Council from the Trocadero basement – ever-growing numbers of private companies, banks, building societies, schools, community halls, leisure centres and private residences are using CCTV. … Back at the control centre beneath the Trocadero, I start to feel uncomfortable watching other people. These are my fellow citizens; they are workers, mums pushing buggies, street cleaners, students. Yet, on the numerous TV screens, they become transformed into pixels of suspicion, individuals whose faces, even gaits, must be monitored by camera operators hidden underground. In essence, they are no longer free individuals; they are objects of suspicion. Under the tyrannical gaze of today's CCTV, none of us is really free. Instead, we live in a permanent state of parole, where we must walk, talk and act in a certain way, or risk having our collars felt by a cop or council official alerted by the spies behind the cameras. It is time we took some action against these peeping Toms of officialdom, and told them to switch off their spycams. [New Statesman, 02 October 2006]

P. J. O'Rourke

• There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. … Trouble doesn't come from Slopes, Kikes, Niggers, Spics or White Capitalist Pigs; it comes from the heart.
• No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

Ebenezer Obadare

• I used to teach in the Nigerian University and 90% of my students ended up as Evangelists or pastors. Who is going into industry? Who will do the thinking? [London School Of Economics, 15 June 2005]

Keith Olbermann

• We have lived as if in a trance. We have lived as people in fear. And now – our rights and our freedoms in peril – we slowly awaken to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing. … For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from. We have been here before – and we have been here before, led here by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush. … American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America. … American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America. Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons. And each was a betrayal of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting. … We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists. … The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons. And, always, always wrong. … Sadly – of course – the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you. We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." … You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order. You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom. … And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" – exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you? This President now has his blank check. He lied to get it. He lied as he received it. Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against? … Your words are lies, Sir. They are lies that imperil us all. [Countdown, 19 October 2006]

J. Robert Oppenheimer

• As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress. [Life, 10 October 1949]
• There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. [Life, 10 October 1949]

George Orwell

• War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. [1984]
• In a world of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
• Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent.
• As with the Christian religion, the worst argument for Communism is its adherents.
• To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not need to live in a totalitarian country. [The Prevention Of Literature, Essays]
• If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
• One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.
• Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks the whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.
• The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. [Notes On Nationalism, 1945]
• One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives", from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
• We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue. And then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. [In Front Of Your Nose]
• Recently I was reading somewhere or other about an Italian curio-dealer who attempted to sell a seventeenth-century crucifix to J.P. Morgan. It was not at first sight a particularly interesting work of art. But it turned out that the real point was that the crucifix took to pieces and inside it was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion. [from a notebook published after his death]
• It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. 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 realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. [1984]
• The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news – things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that "it wouldn't do" to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is "not done" to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was "not done" to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. [preface to Animal Farm]

Thomas Otway

• These are rogues that pretend to be of a religion now! Well, all I say is, honest atheism for my money.

Robert Owen

• Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.
• Religion, or superstition – for all religions have proved themselves to be superstitions – by destroying the judgement, irrationalised all the mental faculties of man, and made him the most abject slave, through the fear of non-entities created solely by his own disorganised imagination. [New-Harmony Gazette, 12 July 1826]
• My reason taught me that I could not have made one of my own qualities – they were forced upon me by Nature; that my language, religion, and habits were forced upon me by Society; and that I was entirely the child of Nature and Society; that Nature gave the qualities and Society directed them. Thus was I forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught by man.

Ursula Owen

• The question that must always be asked about censorship is – who decides? We have to allow even those with appalling views to participate in our democratic debate. [22 April 2005]
• … should people in a diverse, multicultural society be protected from offence and insult simply because they demand it in the name of religion, curtailing free speech where necessary? The answer from Index on Censorship has to be a resounding no. Most of our contemporary ideas about freedom of speech and imagination come from the Enlightenment. The battle for the Enlightenment was fought over the church's desire to place limits on thoughts and words. We may have thought we'd won the battle for ever, but we may not have. The government is proposing to bring in a law preventing incitement to religious hatred. It is, as many have pointed out, a dangerous and slippery slope to censorship which will defend no one. What is more, we think it quite wrong that there exists a blasphemy law which is intended to protect Christianity from insult. We will campaign to remove it from the statute books. Offence and insult are part of everyday life for everyone in Britain. If you open a daily paper, there's always plenty to offend. Yes, some groups are more vulnerable than others, but censorship does not protect them in the long run. In democracies people do become extremely upset with each other's ideas, and argue vehemently against each other's positions. The trick surely is that one can be savage about what a person thinks, provided you aren't savage about them as a person. We need to keep our nerve, and persuade all citizens that being offended is an occupational hazard in a free society, that offensive words, whatever they are, whether about sacred or secular matters, should be answered with more words, and not with censorship. And we need a free press to reflect every point of view in this difficult debate. [Conference on Media and Good Governance, 14-16 February 2005]

Heinz Pagels

• I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science. [The Dreams Of Reason]

Sir James Paget

• I know of no book which has been a source of brutality and sadistic conduct, both public and private, that can compare with the Bible.

Camille Paglia

• My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm – as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy.

Thomas Paine

• My country is the world and my religion is to do good. [The Rights of Man, 1791]
• No falsehood is so fatal as that which is made an article of faith.
• A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.
• The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed. [The Theological Works Of Thomas Paine]
• It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.
• The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. [To My Fellow-Citizens Of The United States Of America, 1794]
• That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
• Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
• The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
• Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity.
• 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. [The Age of Reason, 1794]
• Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity. [The Age of Reason, 1794]
• The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar.
• The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. [The Age Of Reason, 1794]
• There is scarcely any part of science, or anything in nature, which those imposters and blasphemers of science, called priests, as well Christians as Jews, have not, at some time or other, perverted, or sought to pervert to the purpose of superstition and falsehood.
• Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins … Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. [Common Sense]
• Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie. [The Age Of Reason, 1794]
• Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.
• Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication –after that it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it can not be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him. [The Age Of Reason, 1794]
• 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. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit. [The Age of Reason, 1794]
• The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most destructive to the peace of man since man began to exist. Among the most detestable villains in history, you could not find one worse than Moses, who gave an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers and then rape the daughters. One of the most horrible atrocities found in the literature of any nation. I would not dishonour my Creator's name by attaching it to this filthy book. [The Age Of Reason, 1794]
• Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but so far as respects the good of man in general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter. [The Age of Reason,1794]

Michael Painter

• People learning to wash their hands before helping in a delivery has saved more lives than all prayer through all time.

Alasdair Palmer

• The two extremes of pro- and anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain are now united in not expecting even the most minimal ethical standards from Islamic countries such as Iran: the pros because they think that Islamic laws should not be criticised for fear of giving offence; the antis because they think all Muslims are just a bunch of irredeemable barbarians. Those two extreme views have infected media coverage. … Of course, it suits our Government – which is pushing for greater trade links with our new-found ally, Iran – just fine if people think that criticism of Islamic judges is inappropriate because standards are different. But respecting Islam does not require accepting the judicial murder of 16-year-olds (or indeed anyone, of any age) for having sex. That's wrong wherever it happens. We need a Government, and a press, that says so. [commenting on the Sharia murder of Atefeh Rajabi, The Telegraph, 28 August 2004]

Catherine Leah Palmer

• With God, everything is justified. [with no apologies to Dostoevsky's "If God does not exist, everything is permitted," from The Brothers Karamazov, because he never actually wrote the phrase. The nearest he comes to it is "If there is no immortality, there is no virtue." ]
• Never attribute to a conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence, stupidity, or greed.
• Catholic vs Protestant, Sunni vs Shi'ite: it's like listening to flat-earthers arguing about whether the shape is a square or a rectangle.
• YHWH is actually a mnemonic for what to do in airport arrival lounges: as words, shout "Yoo-Hoo, We're Here!" or as action, Yell Hard & Wave Hands.
• Never attribute to hypothetical metaphysical constructs (soul, chi, feng shui) what can be explained by known physical phenomena (emotions, muscles, aesthetics).

David Pannick, QC

• We respect the right of everyone to believe whatever they like: that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, Muhammad was God's prophet, the Red Sea was parted for the Children of Israel or L. Ron Hubbard identified the path to total happiness. But there are two important limits to religious tolerance. First, I have no right to legal protection against your scepticism, criticism or ridicule. Religion is too powerful a force, and is too often a cause of injustice or evil, for it to be immune from discussion and debate. … Muslims are, of course, entitled to feel offended by the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. They have the right to express their outrage in a peaceful manner. But in Europe it is not the role of the law, far less the Government, to prohibit or punish publications that sections of the community (whether Christians, Jews, Muslims or atheists) find offensive. … The law prohibits harmful conduct (such as setting fire to an abortion clinic), however sincerely a person may believe that such acts are commanded by his or her god. Abraham would be very fortunate today to escape with a bindover for the binding, and attempted murder, of his son Isaac. "God told me to do it" is not recognised as a defence in St Albans Crown Court. [The Times, 14 February 2006]

Michael Parenti

• The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominate political mythology.
• The problem with capitalism is that it best rewards the worst part of us: the ruthless, competitive, conniving, opportunistic, acquisitive drives, giving little reward and often much punishment – or at least much handicap – to honesty, compassion, fair play, many forms of hard work, love of justice, and a concern for those in need. [Land Of Idols, 1994]

Robert Park

• In Deepak Chopra's Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative To Growing Old we read that "the physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer … beliefs, thoughts and emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold life in every cell." This is a tenet of ayurveda, the traditional religious healing of India, which goes back thousands of years. Quantum theory is invoked by Chopra to convey the impression that ayurvedic medicine has somehow been validated by modern science. We cannot help but notice, however, that the author of Ageless Body shows unmistakable signs of growing old right along with the rest of us. [Voodoo Science, 2000]

Rebecca Ann Parker, Unitarian-Universalist

• God required his son to suffer in order to save the world. That is an image of God as a child abuser, and Jesus is imaged as the perfect victim. He accepts the abuse and does it silently. He is praised in his religious community for accepting abuse as the highest form of love. … If the virtue of God's son is that he accepts the requirement that he suffer and that is an act of love, how is the victim of the priest's abuse going to find a justification for raising a protest? If God is sacrificing his child, how is the child sacrificed at the hand of a priest supposed to speak out? … How is the church going to see the perpetrators of abuse clearly if it can't see its own conceptualisation of God as abuser? … Jesus died because he had enemies that killed him. It was an act of state terrorism to try to control his followers. I believe Jesus saved us by how he lived, not by how he died. [she was abused aged 4, though not by a priest, and is the author of Proverbs Of Ashes – Violence, Redemptive Suffering And The Search For What Saves Us, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 April 2002]

Matthew Parris

• Do you, all of you [Chris Patten, Iain Duncan Smith, Hugo Young, General Sir Charles Guthrie, Charles Moore, William Rees-Mogg, Paul Johnson, Charles Kennedy, Bill Cash, Cherie Blair], really think that from Heaven an Albanian nun [Mother Teresa] cured an Indian peasant [Monika Besra] of a terminal medical condition [a tumour]? Do you think a piece of metal [a silver medallion that had been placed on Mother Teresa's body after her death] could carry such power? That touching a cadaver's skin made the difference? Because I don't. I think the whole idea is plumb crazy. I cannot see how any intelligent person with a good knowledge of the world, a careful judgment and a proper distrust of superstition, could believe such things. I am dumbfounded, vexed, bewildered – gobsmacked – that some apparently sane people still do. How often do we confront them? Who asks them these questions? We move among and socialise with people with an unbelievably weird credo, and never discuss it. Glenn Hoddle was hounded out of a job to which his personal faith was irrelevant because he believed we are reincarnated according to our deserts. Yet European Commissioners, newspaper editors and respected columnists, party leaders and prime ministers' wives believe – or apparently do – that from a Heaven where souls have gone according to their deserts a deceased nun is being promoted among us by God through the strange agency of a piece of metal that touched her corpse. Do these men and women accept in all its simplicity the claim that priests will soon be making to simple, desperate people all over the world? Or do they acknowledge it as a necessary invention, promulgated knowingly in the higher cause of winning converts? And, if so, what other lies have been promoted in the same cause; and which of them have we believed? [The Times, 01 September 2001]

Richard Lloyd Parry

• In another room are the only riches that these people had, six dead cows lying higgledy-piggledy and distended by decay. And all this is very strange because, on Saturday morning – when American B-52s unloaded dozen of bombs that killed 115 men, women and children – nothing happened. We know this because the US Department of Defence told us so. That evening, a Pentagon spokesman, questioned about reports of civilian casualties in eastern Afghanistan, explained that they were not true, because the US is meticulous in selecting only military targets associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network. Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject have wobbled somewhat, but there has been no retraction of that initial decisive statement: "It just didn't happen." … I had only one moment of real fear, when an American B-52 flew overhead. We halted our convoy, clambered out of the cars and trotted into the fields on either side. The plane did a slow circle; I was conscious of electronic eyes looking down on us, the only traffic on the road. Then, to everyone's relief, the bomber veered away. Before we left the city, an American colleague in Jalalabad telephoned the Pentagon and informed them of our plans to travel to the village where nothing happened. I can't help wondering, in these looking-glass times, what that B-52 would have done to our convoy if that telephone call had not been made. Perhaps nothing would have happened to me too. [The Independent, 04 December 2001]

Keith Parsons

• Scientific hypotheses are always tentative; they are designed to be held only so long as they conform to the evidence. Proponents of the theistic hypothesis, on the other hand, are already sure that their hypothesis is correct; the only seek evidence to buttress a foregone conclusion. [Does God Exist?, 1991]

Blaise Pascal

• Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. [Pensees, 1670]

Boris Pasternak

• Men who are not free always idealise their bondage.

Christina Patterson

• More than 500 years after the Pope suggested to another happy ruling couple that they set up a kind of Star Chamber to do with cuts (fingers, toe-nails, bowels etc), an awful lot of people seemed to be awfully busy protecting God's honour. First, a nutcase in Godknowswhereville had said he was going to take a book he'd never read and set it alight, and then maybe not tidy his bedroom, and then maybe not eat his tea (though that would be surprising for an American) because he wanted to teach some pesky foreigners a thing or two, although what exactly he wanted to teach them wasn't quite clear, and the President of the world's only remaining superpower actually made a statement about it, and so did the Secretary of State, and so did every Tom, Dick and Ali in every newspaper all over the world, and then a lot of people who didn't seem to be terribly good at group efforts when it came to helping their brothers and sisters in Pakistan took to the streets and started doing what they are very, very good at: threatening violence. Then, a lot of people who would probably not think that raping children was a great idea, particularly if those children were vulnerable and in your care and trusted you, and whose families are not of a size to indicate the forgoing of all contraception all the time, have been rushing to the defence of a man who, for many years, sought to cover up the rape of children in the institution over which he now presides, and who believes that it's better to spread a deadly disease than use a condom. A man, by the way, who has refused to meet some of the people whose lives have been wrecked by the sexual appetites of his colleagues during his visit to this country, which starts tomorrow and will, at a time when many people are about to lose their jobs, cost the taxpayer millions. And a scientist, whose job it is to observe the behaviour of waves and particles, and not of angels on pin-heads, a scientist who has never claimed any kind of religious belief, published a book about quantum mechanics and relativity and failed to relate them to anyone called Jesus, Mary or Mohamed, and said that "it is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going" and, in a predominantly secular country, this triggered waves of outrage and was deemed front page news. [The Independent, 15 September 2010]

Ron Patterson

• In the Bible we are asked to believe that the entire human race was plunged into sin because one woman took the advice of a talking snake – before she had any knowledge of good and evil.
• The Bible tells us that Jesus was sacrificed for the redemption of our sins in order that we may be saved from everlasting fire. The Bible also tells us that if we do not believe this we are subject to burn in everlasting fire.
• So-called Scientific Creationism is really nothing more than an attempt to give credence to an ancient Hebrew myth, by trying to prove that virtually all the world's biologists, geologists, and palaeontologists are a bunch of incompetent buffoons.

Gregory S. Paul

• Correlations between popular acceptance of human evolution and belief in and worship of a creator and Bible literalism are negative. The least religious nation, Japan, exhibits the highest agreement with the scientific theory, the lowest level of acceptance is found in the most religious developing democracy, the U.S. [Journal Of Religion & Society, vol 7, 2005]
• There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularisation, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms. [Journal Of Religion & Society, vol 7, 2005]
• If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, proevolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical "cultures of life" that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developing democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted. Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data – a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends. [Journal Of Religion & Society, vol 7, 2005]
• In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a "shining city on the hill" to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularised, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developing democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so. [Journal Of Religion & Society, vol 7, 2005]

Penn & Teller

• Conspicuous by their absence: Our Lord Jesus Christ, His Holy Mother Mary, Our Father, The Lord of Us All, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, Yahweh, Sasquatch, His Blessed Mother, Mother Earth, Gaia, The Great Spirit, The Muses, The Holy Ghost, Bill W., Higher Power, Mohammed, Allah, Buddha. [Penn & Teller's How To Play In Traffic]

Laurence Peter

• A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
• There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

Gallus Petronius

• It is fear that first brought Gods into the world.

Emo Phillips

• Oh god, please bend the laws of the universe for my convenience.
• When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord, in his wisdom, didn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked him to forgive me.
• I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!"
  "Why shouldn't I?" he said.
  I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
  He said, "Like what?"
  I said, "Well… are you religious or atheist?"
  He said, "Religious."
  I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?"
  He said, "Christian."
  I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?"
  He said, "Protestant."
  I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?"
  He said, "Baptist!"
  I said, "Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?"
  He said, "Baptist church of god!"
  I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?"
  He said, "Reformed Baptist church of god!"
  I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?"
  He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!"
  I said, "Die, heretic scum," and pushed him off.

Wendell Phillips

• The community which does not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack. [1863]

John Pilger

• The job of disassociating the September 11 atrocities from the source of half a century of American crusades, economic wars and homicidal adventures, is understandably urgent. For Bush and Blair to "wage war against terrorism", assaulting countries, killing innocents and creating famine, international law must be set aside and a monomania must take over politics and the "free" media. Fortunately public opinion is not yet fully Murdochised and is already uneasy and suspicious; 60% oppose massive bombing, says an Observer poll. And the more Blair, our little Lord Palmerston, opens his mouth on the subject the more suspicions will grow and the crusaders' contortions of intellect and morality will show. When Blair tells David Frost that his war plans are aimed at "the people who gave [the terrorists] the weapons", can he mean we are about to attack America? For it was mostly America that destroyed a moderate regime in Afghanistan and created a fanatical one. On the day of the twin towers attack, an arms fair, selling weapons of terror to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the backing of the Blair government. Now Bush and Blair have created what the UN calls "the world's worst humanitarian crisis", with up to 7m people facing starvation. The initial American reaction was to demand that Pakistan stop supplying food to the starving who, of course, fail to qualify as worthy victims. [The Guardian, 04 October 2001]
• How very appropriate that the bombing of Afghanistan is being conducted, in part, by the same B52 bombers that destroyed much of Indochina 30 years ago. In Cambodia alone, 600,000 people died beneath American bombs, providing the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot, as CIA files make clear. Once again, newsreaders refer to Diego Garcia without explanation. It is where the B52s refuel. Thirty-five years ago, in high secrecy and in defiance of the United Nations, the British government of Harold Wilson expelled the entire population of the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in order to hand it to the Americans in perpetuity as a nuclear arms dump and a base from which its long-range bombers could police the Middle East. Until the islanders finally won a high court action last year, almost nothing about their imperial dispossession appeared in the British media. How appropriate that John Negroponte is Bush's ambassador at the United Nations. This week, he delivered America's threat to the world that it may "require" to attack more and more countries. As US ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, Negroponte oversaw American funding of the regime's death squads, known as Battalion 316, that wiped out the democratic opposition, while the CIA ran its "contra" war of terror against neighbouring Nicaragua. Murdering teachers and slitting the throats of midwives were a speciality. This was typical of the terrorism that Latin America has long suffered, with its principal torturers and tyrants trained and financed by the great warrior against "global terrorism", which probably harbours more terrorists and assassins in Florida than any country on earth. [New Statesman, 15 October 2001]

Robert M. Pirsig

• Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
• When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
• You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths, or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt. [Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance]

William Pitt

• Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. [1783]

Ian Plimer

• The creationists have this creator who is evil, who is small-minded, who is malevolent, and who is not very bright and can't even get his science right. Creationists have made their creator in their own image, in my view. [The Skeptic, Vol 13, No 2]

Plutarch

• We must not treat legend as if it were history. [Isis & Osiris, 374]

Edgar Allan Poe

• The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.
• The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.

Katha Pollitt

• For me, religion is serious business – a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom. [Subject To Debate, The Nation, 26 December 1994]

Karl Popper

• No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

Henry Porter

• Every day, there is some new example of madness or spite perpetrated by a government that seems now in its final gibbering months to be waging war on normality itself. What better betrays the suspicion and dread that writhe in the minds of civil servants and ministers than a law which requires every parent to join a government database and be vetted before accompanying their children's friends to some sport event or scout meeting, where, incidentally, the traditional penknife is now banned? How have they got away with this presumption, with the lunatic idea that everyone who has contact with vulnerable people or children is a potential abuser? [The Guardian, 13 September 2009]
• I quote from a lawyer's commentary: "Restraining orders can be issued following conviction for any offence rather than just offences covered by the 1997 act; and secondly restraining orders can also be issued following an acquittal for any offence." Yes, that's right - following acquittal for any offence. So the innocent will become subject of an order which, if breached, may result in a maximum jail term of five years. Lewis Carroll must have had a hand in drafting this clause. If you are innocent, you are guilty - off with your head. [The Guardian, 13 September 2009]
• Every time you get a library card, make a hire-purchase agreement, apply for a fishing or gun licence, buy a piece of property, withdraw a fairly small amount of your money from your bank, take a prescription to your chemist, apply for a resident's parking permit, buy a plane ticket, or pay for your car to be unclamped you will be required to swipe your card and the database will silently record the transaction. There will be almost no part of your life that the state will not be able to inspect. And it will be able to use the database to draw very precise conclusions about the sort of person you are - your spending habits, your ethnicity, your religion, your political leanings, your health and even perhaps your sexual preferences. Little wonder that MI5 desired – and was granted – free access to the database. Little wonder that the police, customs and tax authorities welcome the database as a magnificent aid to investigation. But know this: from the moment the database goes live, we will become subjects not citizens and each one of us will be diminished in relation to the state's power. Something enormous and revolutionary is about to happen to us. We are giving the most precious part of ourselves to the government, allowing it complete freedom to roam through our privacy. And it's not just to this government, but to the governments of the future, the nature of which we cannot possibly know. And it's not just our privacy - it is the rights and privacy of future generations. … In a free country I believe that every human being has the right to define him or herself independently and without reference to the government of the time. This, I believe, is particularly important in a multicultural society such as ours. The ID card and NIR require and will bring about a kind of psychological conformity, which is utterly at odds with a culture that has thrived on individualism, defiance and the freedom to go your own way. And it will remove the right of those who for whatever reason wish to withdraw from the cares of the world and the influence of society, to resort to the consolations of solitude and privacy without inspection from a centralised authority. Privacy, anonymity and solitude are rights, and we are about to lose them for ever. People say that everything about you is known already. Someone has calculated that each of us appears on up to 700 databases. But the real point is that everything that is known about you will become linked up on the NIR. The register will take on a life of its own, for once you set up a system like this it becomes ineluctably compelled to find out more and more about you. That will be its hardwired purpose. [The Guardian, 11 July 2006]

Dennis Potter

• Religion to me has always been the wound, not the bandage.

Ezra Pound

• The act of bellringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

Terry Pratchett

• In the beginning there was nothing, and God said, Let there be light. And there was still nothing, but you could see it.

Protogaras

• Respecting the gods, I am unable to know whether they exist or do not exist.
• Man is the measure of all things; of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

• The government of man by man is servitude.
• Communism is inequality … Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak.
• Whoever lays a hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant. I declare him to be my enemy.
• To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue. … To be governed means that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered, entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed, authorised, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right, corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolised, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility and the general good. Then, at the first sign of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garroted, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged, and dishonoured. That is government, that is its justice and its morality! … O human personality! How can it be that you have cowered in such subjection for sixty centuries?

Tim Radford

• What is shocking about the intelligent design argument is that it isn't true and can hardly be honest. It looks, from a distance, like a cynical attempt to introduce a literal version of Biblical teaching into the American school curriculum, against the intention of America's own founding fathers and the US constitution. The chiefs of the American Geophysical Union and the American Astronomical Society have both written to Bush arguing that he is mistaken in believing that intelligent design is a scientific theory in the way that evolution, relativity and plate tectonics are scientific theories: because the last three are based on hypotheses that have survived extensive testing and verification, while intelligent design is not. How much more straightforward it would have been if the scientists had just said: "It's not science, it's not true, and it's not honest." Right now, Washington looks more like Vanity Fair than the Celestial City. It may be full of people who see themselves as born-again believers and right-on fundamentalists, neo-conservatives and other avatars of moral robustness. They do not, however, look quite like the kind of Christians who might have listened to the sermon on the mount: the one that blessed the meek and the peacemakers. They are free to believe whatever they like: for the first 1,600 years of Christianity all Christians believed that God made the world in seven days, around about 6,000 years ago. That, however, has for the past 400 years been increasingly difficult to square with the evidence in every stone and every streambed. Even so, some people manage to take the Bible literally, and call it faith. It is quite another thing to believe it, and call it science, which is what George Bush seems to be proposing. Scientists are not the only people who should be shocked. [The Guardian, 11 August 2005]

Ayn Rand

• The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
• To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies – that one has no rational arguments to offer.
• Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
• I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion. I must also mention that I do respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in the sense that it represents an early form of philosophy.
• What identity are they able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say – and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge – God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out. [Atlas Shrugged]

James Randi

• No amount of belief makes something a fact.
• That's it for now. I must get back to a real world.
• Prayer : a recited incantation designed to force or cajole a deity or deities into changing the normal, existing or probable course of events in the universe, obtain an advantage, or avoid a divine penalty. Also, an expression of gratitude or adulation, or an affirmation of continual fear, made to a deity. A prayer is often accompanied by a promise or a sacrifice (the first-born, money, giving up a favourite vice, not lying, a select bit of food the priests can eat) to seal or satisfy the agreement. A spell. [The Supernatural A-Z]
• To make sure that my blasphemy is thoroughly expressed, I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition, that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s), that devils, demons, angels and saints are myths, that there is no life after death, heaven nor hell, that the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and that the Holy Ghost is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision. I accuse the Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place – not to mention the "ethnic cleansing" presently being performed by Christians in our world – and I condemn and vilify this mythical deity for encouraging racial prejudice and commanding the degradation of women. [challenging blasphemy laws in several US states]
• A chap named William Miller, back in the nineteenth century, predicted for his faithful followers (by means of much arithmetic) that between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844, the End of the World would come. His adherents gathered atop mountains to await this important event as the deadline approached. It failed to arrive, and Miller took another look at his calculations. Seems he had dropped a few fractions, and the new date was given as October 22, 1844. Again the dummies gathered expectantly, and when the prediction again fizzled on them, a few abandoned the group. But not all. Today, more than 135 years after the fiasco, the Millerites are still with us, preaching the End and warning of doom. But now they are known as the Seventh-Day Adventist Church or the Advent Christian Church and by a few other names. Nothing succeeds like failure. [Flim-Flam!]

Al-Rawandi

• The miracles attributed to the prophets, persons who may reasonably be compared to sorcerers and magicians, are pure invention.
• [The Qu'ran] is hardly relevant, as probative evidence, in regard to foreigners to whom Arabic is an alien language.

L. Raymond

• While watching the news this evening, hearing the Moslems say this and the Catholics respond with that, with both sides defending the indefensible idea of an invisible super being who looks out for them, I was struck by the idea that they all resemble nothing so much as two tribes of monkeys flinging feces at each other in an attempt to prove which one is more civilized. [alt.atheism, 18 September 2006]

Ishmael Reed

• The duty of the true patriot, a citizen of the world, is to expose nationalism as the village idiot of the Global Village.

Salomon Reinach

• With the exception of papias, who speaks of a narrative by Mark, and a collection of sayings by Jesus, no Christian writer of the first half of the second century (i.e., up to 150 A.D.) quotes the Gospels or their reputed authors.
• From the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader at every turn. It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries, and that millions of men are still wasting time absorbing it.

John E. Remsberg

• This doctrine of forgiveness of sin is a premium on crime. "Forgive us our sins" means "Let us continue in our iniquity." It is one of the most pernicious of doctrines, and one of the most fruitful sources of immorality. It has been the chief cause of making Christian nations the most immoral of nations. In teaching this doctrine Christ committed a sin for which his death did not atone, and which can never be forgiven. There is no forgiveness of sin. Every cause has its effect; every sinner must suffer the consequences of his sins. [The Christ]

Joseph Ernest Renan

• Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.
• No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe them. [The Life Of Jesus, 1863]
• It is evident, indeed, that such a doctrine, taken by itself in a literal manner, had no future. The world, in continuing to exist, caused it to crumble. One generation of man at the most was the limit of its endurance. The faith of the first Christian generation is intelligible, but the faith of the second generation is no longer so. After the death of John, or of the last survivor, whoever he might be, of the group which had seen the master, the word of Jesus was convicted of falsehood.

William H. Reynolds

• Average Americans are not willing, nor intellectually mature enough, to handle such heady stuff as questioning any religion except upon tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee issues. Undoubtedly, this results from living under a Constitution which, in its consummate fairness in not favouring one religion above another, has made attacks on religion nearly needless and obsolete. But in the First Amendment's success lies a great danger to our liberties. If we never question our religions or their motives, they will ultimately destroy our freedom to do so. [Creationism: The Fossil Record And The Flood]

David Rice

• Claiming to be 'exhorted' on how to treat women and children based upon the Bible is like being 'exhorted' on how to treat Jews based upon Mein Kampf.

Fredric Rice

• "I am saved." From what? Having to think for yourself?

Robert S. Richardson, Astronomer, Griffith Observatory

• In talking to these 'alarmed' individuals, one gets the impression very strongly of an insecure personality, torn this way and that by vague doubts and fears. When confronted by a problem, they seem incapable of forming an independent opinion concerning it, but tend to rely on the judgement of others. They are so highly susceptible to suggestion that it would be very easy for anyone who has gained their confidence to take advantage of them. The barest hint that there might be something wrong could drive them to suicide or hysterics. [describing people during a conjunction and partial solar-eclipse on 04 February 1962, Griffith Observer]

Marilla Ricker

• A religious person is a dangerous person. He may not become a thief or a murderer, but he is liable to become a nuisance. He carries with him many foolish and harmful superstitions, and he is possessed with the notion that it is his duty to give these superstitions to others. [Science Against Creeds, I Am Not Afraid Are You?]
• Man has asked for the truth and the Church has given him miracles. He has asked for knowledge, and the Church has given him theology. He has asked for facts, and the Church has given him the Bible. This foolishness should stop. The Church has nothing to give man that has not been in cold storage for two thousand years. Anything would become stale in that time. [Science Against Creeds, I Am Not Afraid Are You?]

Malise Rithven

• The only visible reminder of their presence was a plastic wigwam with life-size human dummies garbed in chiefly regalia and aimed, I presumed, at some kind of tourist promotion. I wondered what other exterminating nation would celebrate the culture of its victims for commercial ends: would the Third Reich, a hundred years on, have displayed full-size plastic models of rabbis or frock-coated merchants with fur-trimmed hats? [whilst travelling through Oregon in an area that had once been the territory of the Blackfoot Indians, The Divine Supermarket]

Rius

• Have you ever thought that if God existed, there would be no need to prove his existence?

Mary Riddell

• Like other forms of private succour, such as Valium, Horlicks or a litre tub of chocolate-chip ice-cream, religion has limited use in the public domain. [The Observer, 01 April 2001]

Matt Ridley

• Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.

Stephen Roberts

• I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

J. M. Robertson

• The theory that religion is not only hostile to magic but quite separate from it is as fallacious as the distinction between religion and superstition. [Pagan Christs, 1903]

Tim Robbins

• We have seen our democracy compromised by fear and hatred. Basic rights, due process and the sanctity of the home have been quickly compromised in a climate of fear. A world population that had profound sympathy and support for us has grown contemptuous, viewing us as we once viewed the Soviet Union, as a rogue state. [Empire, December 2004]
• I do not like fundamentalism of any kind. Any movement that connects violence with God loses me, whether it's the murder of a doctor at an abortion clinic or the murder of busboys, firemen or businessmen in the World Trade Centre. Radical fundamentalism at its core hates all the things I love: art, free expression, music, independent women, theatre, good movies. We must be very wise in the way we frame our argument and how we proceed as we resist this new war. This is not the chickens coming home to roost, Al Qaeda are not farmers looking for self-determination and land rights in Central America. Al Qaeda are not Vietnamese peasants dealing with the napalm from a government that purports to care about them. Al Qaeda will not stand shoulder to shoulder with those struggling to call attention to Third World sweatshop labour. In fact, Al Qaeda's actions have hurt this burgeoning and important movement more than any other. … What is our fundamentalism? Cloaked in patriotism and our doctrine of spreading democracy throughout the world, our fundamentalism is business, the unfettered spread of our economic interests throughout the globe. Our resistance to this war should be our resistance to profit at the cost of human life. Because that is what these drums beating over Iraq are really about. This is about business. The business of distracting American attention from Enron and Halliburton, the financial scandals that directly connect this Administration to the heart of what is now wrong with the American economy. [anti-war rally, New York, 06 October 2002]

Tom Robbins

• Human beings were invented by water as a means of transporting itself from one place to another.

Kenneth Robinson

• I do not think any further inquiry is necessary to establish that the activities of this organisation are potentially harmful. I have no doubt that Scientology is totally valueless in promoting health and, in particular, that people seeking help with problems of mental health can gain nothing from the attentions of this organisation. [Hansard 737, 05 December 1966]
• What they do, however, is to direct themselves deliberately towards the weak, the unbalanced, the immature, the rootless and the mentally or emotionally unstable; to promise them remoulded, mature personalities and to set about fulfilling the promise by means of untrained staff, ignorantly practising quasi-psychological techniques, including hypnosis. It is true that the scientologists claim not to accept as clients people known to be mentally sick, but the evidence strongly suggests that they do. [Hansard 472, 06 March 1967]

Richard Robinson

• Freedom is to be obtained in spite of the government rather than through it. [An Atheist's Value, 1964]
• The theist sometimes rebukes the pleasure-seeker by saying: 'We were not put here to enjoy ourselves; man has a sterner and nobler purpose than that.' The atheist's conception of man is, however, still sterner and nobler than that of the theist. According to the theist we were put here by an all-powerful and all-benevolent god who will give us eternal victory and happiness if we only obey him. According to the atheist our situation is far sterner than that. There is no one to look after us but ourselves, and we shall certainly be defeated. As our situation is far sterner than the theist dares to think, so our possible attitude towards it is far nobler than he conceives. When we contemplate the friendless position of man in the universe, as it is right sometimes to do, our attitude should be the tragic poet's affirmation of man's ideals of behaviour. Our dignity, and our finest occupation, is to assert and maintain our own selfchosen goods as long as we can, those great goods of beauty and truth and virtue. And among the virtues it is proper to mention in this connection above all the virtues of courage and love. There is no person in this universe to love us except ourselves; therefore let us love one another. The human race is alone; but individual men need not be alone, because we have each other. We are brothers without a father; let us all the more for that behave brotherly to each other. The finest achievement for humanity is to recognise our predicament, including our insecurity and our coming extinction, and to maintain our cheerfulness and love and decency in spite of it, to prosecute our ideals in spite of it. We have good things to contemplate and high things to do. Let us do them. [An Atheist's Value, 1964

Emily Robison, The Dixie Chicks

• They've set this tone that they're not to be questioned and if you do then you are unpatriotic. That's somehow gotten into the American psyche and that's scary. If you can't question your government then you are just mindless followers. [commenting on fellow band-member Natalie Maines' remark that they were "ashamed that the president of the United States of America is from Texas", The Guardian, 22 August 2003]

Phil Rockstroh

• The time is long past due the rest of us ceased our cowering and stood up to you Christo-fascists bullies. The hour has come round that we look you straight in your bulging, true believer eyes, and told you that we've had it with your smugness, with your blood-drenched crusades, with your victim mentality – and with the madness begot by this cracked-brain belief system of yours, which all began (according to your sacred delusions) more than 2,000 years ago, when, at the behest of a wicked cabal, a mob of mammon-worshipping, blood-lusting rabble went on a cosmic killing-spree and murdered your god. … Also, you can cease playing the persecuted party, whenever someone stands up to you, because we're no longer buying that ploy. Remember, you're the ones who threw the first epitaphic stones. It was you who labelled us a mob of Hell-bound, Satan-pimping sodomists … And tell me this, you medievalist simps, you delusional, retrograde dip-shits, how is it possible that you became privy to such timeless truths – that the mind of the "One True God" is available to you, and that God's words and wishes resonate through yawning millennia to be understood only by you and you alone? Looking back on the rise of you Christo-fascist bastards, I'm mortified as to how it came to be socially and politically acceptable for you to bandy such vicious and demented assertions in the public arena, without them meeting with the derision they deserve … And don't bother going into one of your pat victim-swoons over being called on it, because when you go so far as to claim that you alone have been bestowed with the secrets of boundless creation – and that anyone who chooses not to buy into your version of events will be condemned to the torments of eternal damnation – then you can bet your fatuous asses that your asinine assertions will be ridiculed. What in the blue blazes did you expect, for us simply to fall to our collective knees before you? Yet, I fear that's exactly what you expect from us. [Online Journal, 26 August 2005]

Gene Roddenberry

• We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. [Free Inquiry, autumn 1992]
• I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will – and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. [The Humanist, March-April 1991]

Eleanor Roosevelt

• No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Ernestine L. Rose

• Whatever good you would do out of fear of punishment, or hope of reward hereafter, the Atheist would do simply because it is good; and being so, he would receive the far surer and more certain reward, springing from well-doing, which would constitute his pleasure, and promote his happiness. [Women Without Superstition]
• Do you tell me that the bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written who knows when, or by whom … books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters. [1856]
• If the belief in god were natural, there would be no need to teach it. Children would possess it as well as adults, the layman as the priest, the heathen as much as the missionary. We don't have to teach the general elements of human nature; the five senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. They are universal; so would religion be were it natural, but it is not. On the contrary, it is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are Atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so. Even as it is, they are great sceptics, until made sensible of the potent weapon by which religion has ever been propagated, namely, fear – fear of the lash of public opinion here, and of jealous, vindictive God hereafter. No; there is no religion in human nature, nor human nature in religion. It is purely artificial, the result of education, while Atheism is natural, and, were the human mind not perverted and bewildered by the mysteries and follies of superstition, would be universal.

W. S. Ross

• It would require higher authority than that of Christ and his biographers to convince any classical scholar that he escaped from the tomb after the Roman guard had been set. That every soldier on the vigil slept at his post is one of the most incredible of the incredible statements we are expected to believe in order to be "saved." [Did Jesus Christ Rise From The Dead?, An Anthology Of Atheism And Rationalism, 1980]
• The story of the Roman soldiers falling asleep is too feeble and clumsy to merit serious refutation; and that the soldiers were bribed to say they slept is, if possible, more preposterous still. The penalty while doing sentry work would be death, and it requires a rather liberal bribe to induce a man to offer himself for instant execution. If there be any such bravo on record, I have not heard of him, and I cannot quite see what use the bribe for which he gave his life would be to him, even if he took it with him into his coffin. [Did Jesus Christ Rise From The Dead?, An Anthology Of Atheism And Rationalism, 1980]
• The most extraordinary Roman soldiers that Rome ever heard of were those soldiers that were set to watch the tomb of Jesus. They managed to fall asleep simultaneously in order to allow Jesus to pass unseen, and when they awoke, for a bribe they deliberately committed suicide by admitting that they had slept – an admission that meant instant execution. Was ever invention so stupidly desperate and mendacity so recklessly absurd as that invention and that mendacity upon which rests the story of the Resurrection, upon which the whole fabric of the Christian faith has elected to stand or fall? The basis is too puerile to support a story told by an idiot for the purpose of imposing upon a fool. [Did Jesus Christ Rise From The Dead?, An Anthology Of Atheism And Rationalism, 1980]

Jean Rostand

• Kill a man one is a murderer; kill a million, a conqueror; kill them all, a God. [Pensées d'un Biologist, 1939]

Jean Jacques Rousseau

• But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not mind; this short life counts for too little in their eyes. [Contrat Social]

Chris Rowland

• … basing one's attitudes towards gay and lesbian people merely on two verses from Romans and Corinthians I runs the risk of ending up with a form of religion which is based on the letter of the text – something Paul empathically opposes – rather than on what a loving God is doing in transforming lives in the present. On the Damascus road, Saul's world was turned upside down. He encountered Christ in the outsiders, the heretics, the misfits and aliens, the very people whom he had been commissioned to round up. It was this experience that transformed his life. Such a turnaround was not the result of minute attention to text and precedent. The era of Paul and the early church was a time of experimentation as to what it meant to be God's people. As such, it may be particularly apposite for our time. When Canon Jeffrey John had to step down from the appointment to the Bishopric of Oxford in 2003 because of his long-term partnership, it was, for many of us, our "Antioch incident", when a stand has to be taken to bear witness to that which is true – our experience of God. The appeal to precedent and tradition may have to be jettisoned in favour of the recognition that the same gift is at work in gay and lesbian Christians as in heterosexual Christians, and that the God who called Paul to explore new patterns of relationship is at work in committed same-sex relationships. [Ekklesia, 20 June 2005]

Anne Royall

• Good works instead of long prayers.

Michael Ruse

• It is difficult to imagine evolutionists signing a comparable statement, that they will never deviate from the literal text of Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species. The non-scientific nature of creation-science is evident for all to see, as is also its religious nature. [But Is It Science?, 1996]
• Creation-science is not like physics, which exists as part of humanity's common cultural heritage and domain. It exists solely in the imaginations and writing of a relatively small group of people. Their publications (and stated intentions) show that, for example, there is no way they will relinquish belief in the Flood, whatever the evidence. In this sense, their doctrines are truly unfalsifiable. [But Is It Science?, 1996]
• Scientific Creationism in not just wrong, it is ludicrously implausible. It is a grotesque parody of human thought, and a downright misuse of human intelligence. In short, to the believer, it is an insult to god. [Darwinism Defended]

Salman Rushdie

• Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power.
• I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
• If I were asked for a one-sentence soundbite on religion, I would say I was against it. [17 April 1996]
• The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes. [Is Nothing Sacred?, Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture, 06 February 1990]
• And yet religions continue to insist that they provide special access to ethical truths, and consequently deserve special treatment and protection. And they continue to emerge from the world of private life, where they belong, like so many other things that are acceptable when done in private between consenting adults but unacceptable in the town square, and to bid for power. The emergence of radical Islam needs no re-description here; but the resurgence of faith is a larger subject than that. … Journalists, lawyers and a long list of public figures have warned that this law [incitement to religious hatred] will dramatically hinder free speech and fail to meet its objective - that religious disturbances will increase rather than diminish. Blair's government seems to view the whole subject of civil liberties with disdain - what do freedoms matter, hard-won and long-cherished though they may be, when set against the requirements of a government facing re-election? [The Guardian, 14 March 2005]
• It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it. … It ought to be fascinating to Muslims everywhere to see how deeply their beloved book is a product of its place and time, and in how many ways it reflects the Prophet's own experiences. However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence within Islam that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical scholarly discourse all but impossible . … The traditionalists' refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the 7th century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st. The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities. Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace. This is how to take up the "profound challenge" of the bombers. [The Times, 11 August 2005]

John Ruskin

• Morality does not depend on religion.
• Incidents from the Iliad and the Exodus come within the same degrees of credibility.

Bertrand Russell

• Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
• Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
• So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
• What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. [Skeptical Essays, 1928]
• The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
• One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. [Why I Am Not A Christian]
• A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. [The History Of Western Philosophy]
• I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
• I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were not others. [Human Knowledge: Its Scope And Limits, 1948]
• 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 likely to be foolish than sensible. [Christian Ethics, Marriage and Morals, 1950]
• What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.
• No man treats a motor car as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behaviour to sin, he does not say, "You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go." He attempts to find out what is wrong and set it right.
• The standpoint of modern liberal theologians is well set forth by Dr. Tennant in his book The Concept of Sin. To him sin consists in acts of will that are in conscious opposition to a known law, the moral law being known by Revelation as God's will. It follows that a man destitute of religion cannot sin.
• The objections to religion are of two sorts – intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow. [Has Religion Made Useful Contributions To Civilization?, 1930]
• If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based upon faith, you will realise that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting the minds of the young in what is called "education."
• We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.
• Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. [Why I Am Not A Christian, lecture, 06 March 1927]
• What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful though, he finds a balance of evidence in their favour, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem. [The Value of Free Thought: How To Become A Truth-Seeker And Break The Chains Of Mental Slavery, 1944]
• There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed. [Human Society In Ethics And Politics, 1954]
• Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion. [Why I Am Not A Christian]
• My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others. [Has Religion Made Useful Contributions To Civilization?]
• The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by some people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
• If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Indian's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that.
• From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes. Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions. Normal perceptions, since they have to be useful in the struggle for life, must have some correspondence with fact; but in abnormal perceptions there is no reason to expect such correspondence, and their testimony, therefore, cannot outweigh that of normal perception. [Religion And Science]
• Over a billion people believe in Allah without truly knowing what Allah supposedly stands for or what he really demands of them. And the minority that do understand continue to be Moslems because they have redefined their morality and ethics to fit within the teachings of Islam, which are floridly lacking in morality. They therefore redefine what is good and evil in order to fit their lives into what is preached by Islam, instead of examining Islam to see if it fits within the good life. Backwards thinking, imposed by a backward religion.
• I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them. 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. [A History Of Western Philosophy, 1945]
• I think that in philosophical strictness at the level where one doubts the existence of material objects and holds that the world may have existed for only five minutes, I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.
• The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
• We read in the Old Testament that it was a religious duty to exterminate conquered races completely, and that to spare even their cattle and sheep was an impiety. Dark terrors and misfortunes in the life to come oppressed the Egyptians and Etruscans, but never reached their full development until the victory of Christianity. Gloomy saints who abstained from all pleasures of sense, who lived in solitude in the desert, denying themselves meat and wine and the society of women, were, nevertheless, not obliged to abstain from all pleasures. The pleasures of the mind were considered to be superior to those of the body, and a high place among the pleasures of the mind was assigned to the contemplation of the eternal tortures to which the pagans and heretics would hereafter be subjected.

Reverend Susan Russell, Senior Associate For Pastoral Life, All Saints Episcopal Church

• Christianity teaches us to respect all our sisters and brothers, and that includes lesbians and gays. Whether in Nigeria or in the United States, the Christian value of human dignity for all is paramount. We call upon the government of Nigeria to respect basic human dignity and reject the persecution of lesbians and gays by withdrawing the proposed law. [speaking of the The Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act 2006, to criminalise anyone who is gay, or anyone who aids and abets or even hosts them, or even shows affection in private, 01 March 2007]

Marquis de Sade

• The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind. [Aline et Valcour]
• Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change. [Marquis de Sade's Last Will And Testament]

Carl Sagan

• Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.
• "Every government that prepares for war paints its adversaries as monsters," she said. "They don't want you thinking of the other side as human. If the enemy can think and feel, you might hesitate to kill them. And killing is very important. Better to see them as monsters." [Eleanor Arroway, Contact, 1985]
• I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. [The Demon Haunted World]
• When the movie Jurassic Park was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago, when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashanah and every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old.
• We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering.
• 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. [CSICOP Keynote Address, 1987]
• She did not see how there could be light and days before the Sun was made, and had trouble figuring out exactly who it was that Cain had married. In the stories of Lot and his daughters, of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt, of the betrothal of Dinah, of Jacon and Esau, she found herself amazed. She understood that cowardice might occur in the real world – that sons might deceive and defraud an aged father, that a man might give craven consent to the seduction of his wife by the King, or even encourage the rape of his daughters. But in this holy book there was not a word of protest against such outrages. Instead, it seemed, the crimes were approved, even praised. [Contact, 1985]
• The record will show that no psychic, seer, prophet, or soothsayer, no person with claimed precognitive abilities, no astrologer, no numerologist, and no late-December copywriter on 'The Year Ahead' had predicted the Message of the Machine – much less Vega, prime numbers, Adolf Hitler, the Olympics, and the rest. There were many claims, however, by those who had clearly foreseen the events but had carelessly neglected to write the precognition down. Predictions of surprising events always prove more accurate if not set down on paper beforehand. It is one of those odd regularities of everyday life. Many religions were in a slightly different category: A careful and imaginative perusal of their sacred writings will reveal, it was argued, a clear foretelling of these wondrous happenings. [Contact, 1985]
• You see, the religious people – most of them – really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods let well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would have listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition. [Sol Hadden, Contact, 1985]

Sallustius

• The story of Attis represents an eternal cosmic process, not an isolated event in the past. As the story is intimately related to the ordered universe, we reproduce it ritually to gain order in ourselves. We, like Attis, have fallen from Heaven. We mystically die with him and are reborn.

Margaret Sanger

• No gods, no masters.

George Santayana

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. [Reason In Common Sense, Life of Reason]
• The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
• Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes. [Supernaturalism, Little Essays]
• 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. [Soliloquies In England, On My Friendly Critics1922]
• Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul. [Prosaic Misunderstandings, Little Essays]

"satin_is_real"

• "We simply respect their beliefs and don't draw him" That is no way for any Free Person to live - caving in to the demands of irrational murderers. So, here's the so-called prophet with a bomb in his turban: *`O:-D. [Two Dozen Writers Join Charlie Hebdo PEN Award Protest, The Guardian, 30 April 2015]
• "They aren't against freedom of expression." Yes, they are. They are effectively calling for the cessation of drawings of the Muslim so-called prophet, because it offends someone - the "marginalized, embattled, and victimized" of their pathetic letter. That is the *very definition* of being against freedom of expression. [Two Dozen Writers Join Charlie Hebdo PEN Award Protest, The Guardian, 30 April 2015]
• Oh dear, not this silly line again. Hating Islam - a violent, misogynistic, medieval superstitious cult, which is anti-enlightenment and anti-civilization - at least if followed to the last letter of Quran, like Islamic State does - is not "hating Muslims". Muslims are the first victims of it. Especially those who want to leave it, for which a third of their co-religionists worldwide would murder them: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7jJ6sOCUAELob6.jpg. [Two Dozen Writers Join Charlie Hebdo PEN Award Protest, The Guardian, 30 April 2015]
• "infantile racists" The only person looking infantile on here is you, dear. "mocking downtrodden immigrants " They were mocking the very powerful radical Muslims who eventually managed to murder them. And in any case, you do *not* get to force an entire free society to submit to your irrational internal blasphemy codes about the depiction of your so-called prophet, regardless of your social status. [Two Dozen Writers Join Charlie Hebdo PEN Award Protest, The Guardian, 30 April 2015]
• There is nothing complex to understand about this PEN protesters' position. They are advocating submission of the entire society - non-Muslims included - to internal Muslim blasphemy code regarding the depiction of their so-called prophet, because Muslims are "already marginalized, embattled, and victimized", and one must not offend such people, but must rather self-censor and cease speaking freely. Salman Rushdie simply called it like it is. [Charlie Hebdo Row Leads To Facebook Fallout Between Salman Rushdie And Francine Prose, The Guardian, 01 May 2015]
• But it really *is* a simple dividing line: Are you for, or against, the notion that Muslim demands that their internal blasphemy code must be respected by the entire world - in other words, nobody, Muslim or non-Muslim, is allowed to draw the so-called prophet under pain of death, as the fate of Charlie Hebdo journalists and cartoonists shows - are to be accommodated simply because you view that Muslims are "poor, marginalized, oppressed" etc., or is this irrational, insane demand to be rejected regardless of the Muslim community's social status? [Charlie Hebdo Row Leads To Facebook Fallout Between Salman Rushdie And Francine Prose, The Guardian, 01 May 2015]
• Threats by Islamist extremists have effectively made United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland a Sharia-compliant state when it comes to observing the internal Muslim blasphemy code regarding the depiction of their so-called prophet. And not only that, UK museums, even though they have such objects in their possession, do not publicly show a single example of medieval Muslim book manuscript art depicting their prophet, and they are even removing reference to such objects from their websites. So the claim that "Press freedom has been considerably curtailed by violent Islamists" is 100% true. But the scope of the loss is even broader. [Two Dozen Writers Join Charlie Hebdo PEN Award Protest, The Guardian, 30 April 2015]
• "but denigrating a race, a religion, or an ethnic group to me seems like bigotry" You are trying to group together things of completely different kinds here by listing them in sequence as they were the same. Islam is not a race. No possible definition of race or ethnic group includes being "able to choose race/ethnic group". On the other hand we hear all the time that in Islam there is no compulsion in religion, and people are free to choose it or not. Inciting hatred for others based on characteristics that a person can't choose is in my view absolutely wrong, and is for example prohibited by law in France. But religions are ideological systems and they must not be protected from being scrutinized, denied, mocked and ridiculed. [The Guardian View On Free Speech After The Dallas Shootings: The Award To Charlie Hebdo Is Justified, The Guardian, 05 May 2015]
• "the cartoons would cause upset and offence to millions of Muslims" That is a consequence of living in a free society. Nobody has the right to not be offended. Islam is a laughable, misogynist, medieval superstition, and it deserves to be mocked just as any other religion does. But Charlie Hebdo wasn't doing that *at all* - they were standing up to radical Muslims whose goal is the imperial conquest of the globe; they were standing up to those supposedly "powerless" and "marginalized" people who are now butchering and murdering their way through their Islamic State towards their Islamic caliphate following the example of their "perfect man". Western civilization will not submit to this demand to accept the Muslim blasphemy code regarding depictions of their so-called prophet as something that should be respected by all, under pain of death. That is why what you ludicrously see as "repugnant" demands to republish the cartoons was actually very much needed, and The Guardian can justly take pride in their ultimate decision to print the cover. [Charlie Hebdo Row Leads To Facebook Fallout Between Salman Rushdie And Francine Prose, The Guardian, 01 May 2015]
• People are free to build bridges. What they are *not* free to do is to demand the submission of an entire society to their religion's internal codes. To rephrase: however dumb that may seem to me, they are free to police the blasphemy codes and other "cultural" values - like for example gender-segregated seating - *within* their ideology as long as that is a free choice of those affected, so in a sense things like self-censorship - "I will not draw pictures of Mohammed", and self-debasement - "I, as a woman, will freely choose to sit on the left side of the aisle while Tom Watson is addressing me, because my tradition considers the left side to be the debased, lower, weaker one" - are OK as long as they are a conscious choice of someone who wishes to be a Muslim. But wishing to *impose* that on *everyone else* is a simply irrational demand, and it must never be accepted. I must confess that I simply can't understand why are we even having to debate something so self-evidently rational as this. [The Guardian View On Free Speech After The Dallas Shootings: The Award To Charlie Hebdo Is Justified, The Guardian, 05 May 2015]

Dan Savage

• I realised if I wanted to live in a fabulous house and have sex with young men I didn't need to be a priest to do that anymore. It used to be the only way you could do that, but the world has changed now for the better. [Metro, 10 August 2000]

Tashbih Sayyed

• The fact that the world fears Muslims speaks volumes about the image of my co-religionists. These developments are clearly not a positive sign. People do not fear GOOD. They fear EVIL. The majority of Muslims have somehow have failed to convey to the world that they are good. And I am not surprised. Muslims need to pause and think about why world does not respect them. Why are they feared rather than being loved? Why it is that more and more people in the world have an image of them as being fanatical as a rule, compared to the adherents of other religions where fanaticism is an exception. Muslims will have to contemplate why the communities that welcomed the Muslim immigrants with open arms are now afraid to have them living amongst them. According to Carl Berglund, Muslims have polarized the Swedish society. "Their religion is so stifling and unaccommodating. They expect us to accommodate their religion when they don't respect our beliefs." Carl Berglund doesn't want to live with the Muslims any more and wants them to be expelled from Sweden. He states: "We should stop being afraid of Muslims. This is our country, our world, and those who can't accommodate us, should get out of Sweden." … I am deeply concerned that fear of Muslims will result in a serious revulsion of Islam in western society. Contrary to the claims by the political Islamist establishment that Islam is a peaceful faith, their deeds convey just the opposite – there is nothing peaceful in what is happening in the Muslim communities today or what Islamists are doing in the world. The faith that the radical Islamists promotes is one of "perpetual outrage." In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "I have judged other's religions by their lives, for it is from our lives and not our words that our religions must be read." [Muslim World Today, 05 October 2006]

Albert Scardino

• The most devout of the radical right dreamed of imposing new restrictions on immigration similar to the 1890 Chinese Exclusion Act. They even achieved, at least temporarily in one state, a rejection of the theory of evolution and natural selection. With Darwin shelved, they had set the scene for the second coming of Christ, in the unlikely event he were to choose Kansas as his re-entry point. Rationalists among us don't take this kind of politics seriously. There must be other explanations – a lust for power, a craven desire to satisfy corporate contributors. They forget the ability of religious faith to drive governmental decision-making. To such rationalists, the Taliban, the mullahs, the religious right in Israel, represent only bizarre aberrations in the political process. But if so, America is suffering from the same suspension of reason in politics. [The Guardian, 05 June 2001]

John H. Schaar

• A fundamentalist is someone who hates sin more than he loves virtue.

Arthur Schopenhauer

• To free a man from error is to give, not take away.
• Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
• Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think. [Parerga Und Paralipomena, 1851)

Frithjof Schuon

• The intellectual – and thereby the rational – foundation of Islam results in the average Muslim having a curious tendency to believe that non-Muslims either know that Islam is the truth and reject it out of pure obstinacy, or else are simply ignorant of it and can be converted by elementary explanations; that anyone should be able to oppose Islam with a good conscience quite exceeds the Muslims' powers of imagination, precisely because Islam coincides in his mind with the irresistible logic of things. [Stations Of Wisdom, 1961]

Scientific American

• In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. … Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? … As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence. Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details. … Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. [Editorial, 01 April 2005]

George Secrett, Executive Director, Friends Of The Earth

• Economics, especially at the planetary scale, does not work for the environment nor the majority of citizens. If it did, we would not have climate change, rampant deforestation in the tropics and boreal zone, extensive synthetic chemical pollution, nor billions of poor people. Global markets, and the laissez-faire principles the underpin them, work for the 500 companies that control two-thirds of world trade. … Nation states, the regions within them, must have the authority to decide how to protect local producers and trading networks from the economies of scale and massive resources of very large companies. This is sovereignty. Citizens and their governments should determine these priorities, not companies. [Earthmatters, #52, Summer 2002]

Seneca

• Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
• It is the characteristic of a weak and diseased mind to fear the unfamiliar. [Moral Epistles]
• Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Madhav Sharma

• Are some liberals trying to have their cake and eat it, by proclaiming free speech is necessary in principle while arguing that, in practice, one should give up that right because of the need to appease minority religious sensibilities? This has been described with exquisite politeness as tiptoeing around, doing our best not to irritate other people by disagreeing with their opinions. Does freedom of speech not include the right to irritate, annoy, dismay and shock anyone who listens? [A View From Inside, Free Expression Is No Offence, 2005]

General David Sharp, Former US Marine Commandant

• I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans. [1966]

Paula Sharzer

• Here in Phoenix, where the surrounding natural desert is plowed under daily to make way for new strip malls and where gas-powered leaf blowers drone from dawn to dusk, the average family car is a Quad Cab four-wheel-drive pick-up truck. The prevailing "wisdom" here is that global warming is a liberal-media hoax. One fellow even said to me that the reason so many Europeans died in the lethal heat wave of 2003 was that "Europeans are too stupid to install air-conditioning." The environment is doomed. [letter to Vanity Fair, June 2005]

George Bernard Shaw

• I never expect a soldier to think. [The Devil's Disciple]
• Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. [The Rejected Statement]
• The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty. [Major Barbara]
• Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. [Man And Superman]
• Do not do unto others as you would they should do to you. Their tastes may not be the same. [Maxims For Revolutionists, Man And Superman]
• When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind. [Major Barbara]
• No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.
• 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 unreasonable men. [Maxims For Revolutionists, Man And Superman]
• The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality. [Androcles And The Lion]
• What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say "I know" instead of "I am learning," and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for scepticism and activity. [The Doctor's Dilemma]
• All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. [Mrs. Warren's Profession]

Martin Sheen

• I think "My God, this is too important for me not to step over the line." Like Bush's SDI programme – nuclear weapons in outer space. My God, what could be more horrifying? It's madness! We can't even get rid of the weapons we have now. If aliens landed on Earth they'd think we were insane. "What, you have all these weapons that could destroy the planet and you have them pointed right at you?" It's like a guy walking into a bank with a gun to his head and saying, "Give me the money or I'll pull the trigger." It's madness! And we're considered a civilised people. [Empire, November 2002]

Percy Bysshe Shelley

• If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction. [The Necessity of Atheism]
• God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist. [The Necessity Of Atheism]
• … – it is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it: … [The Necessity Of Atheism]
• When this reasoning is applied to the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created: until that is clearly demonstrated we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design before we can infer a designer. [The Necessity Of Atheism]
• It is only by hearsay (by word of mouth passed down from generation to generation) that whole peoples adore the God of their fathers and of their priests: authority, confidence, submission and custom with them take the place of conviction or of proofs: they prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers taught them to prostrate themselves and pray: but why did their fathers fall on their knees? [The Necessity Of Atheism]
• If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has, filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? If he has spoken, why is the world not convinced? [The Necessity Of Atheism]

Susan Shields

• When Mother [Teresa] spoke publicly, she never asked for money, but she did encourage people to make sacrifices for the poor, to "give until it hurts." Many people did – and they gave it to her. We received touching letters from people, sometimes apparently poor themselves, who were making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people in Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India. Most of the money sat in our bank accounts. The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God's approval of Mother Teresa's congregation. We were told by our superiors that we received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life. Most of the sisters had no idea how much money the congregation was amassing. After all, we were taught not to collect anything. One summer the sisters living on the outskirts of Rome were given more crates of tomatoes than they could distribute. None of their neighbours wanted them because the crop had been so prolific that year. The sisters decided to can the tomatoes rather than let them spoil, but when Mother found out what they had done she was very displeased. Storing things showed lack of trust in Divine Providence. The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives and very little effect on the lives of the poor we were trying to help. We lived a simple life, bare of all superfluities. We had three sets of clothes, which we mended until the material was too rotten to patch anymore. We washed our own clothes by hand. The never-ending piles of sheets and towels from our night shelter for the homeless we washed by hand, too. Our bathing was accomplished with only one bucket of water. Dental and medical checkups were seen as an unnecessary luxury. Mother was very concerned that we preserve our spirit of poverty. Spending money would destroy that poverty. She seemed obsessed with using only the simplest of means for our work. Was this in the best interests of the people we were trying to help, or were we in fact using them as a tool to advance our own "sanctity?" In Haiti, to keep the spirit of poverty, the sisters reused needles until they became blunt. Seeing the pain caused by the blunt needles, some of the volunteers offered to procure more needles, but the sisters refused. [Mother Teresa's House Of Illusions – How She Harmed Her Helpers As Well As Those They 'Helped', Free Inquiry, Vol 18 No 1]

Lionel Shriver

• Freedom of speech that does not embrace the right to offend is a farce. The stipulation that you may say whatever you like so long as you don't hurt anyone's feelings canonizes the milquetoast homily, "If you can't say anything nice…" Since rare is the sentiment that does not incense someone, rest assured that in that instance you don't say anything at all. The concept of religious "tolerance" seems to be warping apace these days, and we appear to forget that commonly one tolerates through gritted teeth. It is rapidly becoming accepted social cant that to "tolerate" other people's religions is to accord them respect. In fact, respect for one's beliefs is gradually achieving the status of a hallowed "human right." I am under no obligation to respect your beliefs. Respect is earned; it is not an entitlement. I may regard creationists as plain wrong, which would make holding their beliefs in high regard nonsensical. In kind, if I proclaim on a street corner that a certain Japanese beetle in my back garden is the new Messiah, you are also within your rights to ridicule me as a fruitcake. … The spokesman for the Roman Catholic Bishop of Birmingham applauded the cancellation of "Behzti" last week, intoning that "with freedom of speech and artistic license must come responsibility." But the familiar "with rights come responsibilities" line is standard-issue blarney for, "It's all very well to hold rights in theory, so long as you don't choose to exercise them." Making this case all the more pointed, even the right of a woman to criticize her own religion has been trammelled. Apparently contemporary "tolerance" does not merely allow others to practice whatever goofy or incomprehensible religion they like – and sometimes with a rolled eye – but surrounds any faith with a hands-off halo of sanctity, so that whatever is sacred to you must also be sacred to me. [Wall Street Journal, 28 December 2004]

Andrew Simms, New Economics Foundation

• Banality has taken root like a relative from abroad invited to stay because their foreignness seemed interesting, before realising they were tiresome and refused to leave. [Clone Town Britain, 06 June 2005]
• The homogenisation of high streets is not benign or inevitable. Just as regulatory changes have allowed it, the right changes can begin to turn back the tide. … By promoting local shops we can enhance diversity, and increase the vitality and stability of local economies. That way we can begin to reverse the trend in the towns that have already been overtaken by clones. [Clone Town Britain, 06 June 2005]
• Clone stores have a triple whammy on communities: they bleed the local economy of money, destroy the social glue provided by real local shops that holds communities together, and they steal the identity of our towns and cities. Then we are left with soulless clone towns. The argument that big retail is good because it provides consumers with choice is ironic, because in the end it leaves us with no choice at all. [Clone Town Britain, 06 June 2005]

Rev. Timothy F. Simpson, Christian Alliance For Progress

• I understand that the truth can be spoken by Muslims, and the truth can be spoken by Jews. The truth can be spoken by atheists. And listen: An atheist who stands for the interests of the neighbour, an atheist who stands for the interests of poor people at the margins, for the oppressed, is worth more than a hundred Christians who have made their bed with the fat cats, because that atheist is actually articulating the ends of the kingdom of God. [24 June 2005]
• We must tell you [Religious Rightards] now that you do not speak for us, or for our politics. We say 'No' to the ways you are using the name and language of Christianity to advance what we see as extremist political goals. We do not support your agenda to erode the separation of church and state, to blur the vital distinction between your interpretation of Christianity and our shared democratic institutions. Moreover, we do not accept what seems to be your understanding of Christian values. We reject a Christianity co-opted by any government and used as a tool to ostracize, to subjugate, or to condone bigotry, greed and injustice.

Peter Singer

• If the OIC wishes to change many people's perception that Islam violates human rights, suppressing freedom of speech is hardly the best way to go about it. The way to change such a perception would be to marshal evidence against it, and to make the case that human rights – including the rights of women – are as well protected in Islamic countries as they are in non-Islamic countries. To demonstrate that it is wrong to associate Islam with terrorism, the OIC might begin to compile statistics on the religious affiliations of those who engage in terrorism. By contrast, suppressing the freedom of speech of Islam's critics merely gives rise to the suspicion that evidence and sound argument cannot show their arguments to be mistaken. [To Defame Religion Is A Human Right, The Guardian, 15 April 2009] But this comment, by its mere existence, is 'Islamophobic' for not giving them the freedom to discriminate that they demand, thus reinforcing their paranoid prejudices.

Gary Sloan

• True believers aren't about to be seduced by the facts. [Did Jesus Exist And Does It Matter?]

Charles Smith

• The Bible is the greatest hoax in all history. The leading characters of the Old Testament would today be in the penitentiary and those of the New would be under observation in psychopathic wards.

Frederick Smith

• We often hear about ID (Intelligent Design) these days. While most religions have their own version of creation, we now have some wealthy and well connected nuts here in America that want to teach ID as science. … "ID theory" is not a science, of course, since it doesn't meet the basic criteria of a scientific theory. … Of course, the notion of God must be accepted going in by ID proponents; why else would this "being" have god-like attributes? This invalidates the "theory" - for this to be science, we would first need proof of God. We can't say God exists because the universe is here, and the universe is here because God created it – that's circular logic. These ideas may be fine as non-science philosophies or religious dogma, but science they aren't. Besides, to use a popular argument from that crowd, if the universe is so complex that it implies a creator, that creator must then be even more complex – and would therefore also need a creator and so on, which would seem to indicate an infinite number of gods. Some would at this point shout, "we can't ask the question, 'who created the creator!'" What? Why? Maybe not in religion, but science has no such taboo. [27 April 2005]

George H. Smith

• Faith is possible only in the case of beliefs that lack rational demonstration. All propositions of faith – regardless of their specific content – are irrational. To believe on faith is to believe in defiance of rational guidelines, and this is the essence of irrationalism. [Atheism, The Case Against God, 1979]
• If acorns start growing into theologians, or if women begin turning into pillars of salt, then we may wish to hypothesize about a supernatural influence. But until such time as nature becomes hopelessly unintelligible and unpredictable, we need look no further than nature itself for explanations.
• When the atheist is told that God is unknowable, he may interpret this claim in one of two ways. He may suppose, first, that the theist has acquired knowledge of a being that, by his own admission, cannot possibly be known; or, second, he may assume that the theist simply does not know what he is talking about. [Why Atheism?, 2000]
• The leap of faith is a strategic impasse that confronts every Christian in search of converts; and, as he sees the matter, there is no wrong way to become a Christian. It is the end that is important, not the means; it does not matter why you believe, so long as you believe. For the philosopher, in contrast, the paramount issue is the justification of belief, not the fact of belief itself. [Why Atheism?, 2000]
• In exchange for obedience, Christianity promises salvation in an afterlife; but in order to elicit obedience to this promise, Christianity must convince men that they need salvation, that there is something to be "saved" from. Christianity has nothing to offer a happy man living in a natural, intelligible universe. If Christianity is to gain a motivational foothold, it must declare war on earthly pleasure and happiness, and this, historically, has been its precise course of action. In the eyes of Christianity, man in sinful and helpless in the face of God, and is potential fuel for the flames of hell. Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation. [Atheism, The Case Against God, 1979]

Quentin Smith

• So how do theists respond to arguments like this? They say there is a reason for evil, but it is a mystery. Well, let me tell you this: I'm actually one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall. You ask me for proof of this. I have a simple answer: it's a mystery. Just accept my word for it on faith. And that's just the logic theists use in their discussions of evil. [Two Ways To Defend Atheism]
• God does not exist if Big Bang cosmology, or some relevantly similar theory, is true. If this cosmology is true, our universe exists without cause and without explanation. There are numerous possible universes, and there is possibly no universe at all, and there is no reason why this one is actual rather than some other one or none at all. Now the theistically alleged human need for a reason for existence, and other alleged needs, are unsatisfied. But I suggest that humans do or can possess a deeper level of experience than such anthropocentric despairs. We can forget about ourselves for a moment and open ourselves up to the startling impingement of reality itself. We can let ourselves become profoundly astonished by the fact that this universe exists at all. [Theism, Atheism, And Big Bang Cosmology, 1993]

Barbara Smoker

• To imagine that "God moves in mysterious ways" is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts. [So You Believe In God, 1974]
• 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. [Why I Am An Atheist, June 1985]
• The one function that most gods seem to have in common is to give human existence some ultimate purpose – and, while it is not possible to disprove an ultimate purpose, there does not seem to be any evidence for it. This is not to say, of course, that there is no purpose in life at all: we all make our own purposes as we go through life. And life does not lose its value simply because it it not going to last forever. [Why I Am An Atheist, June 1985]

Ailbhe Smyth

• Christianity tells us that we have to help the poor, but we don't have to like them. It is a Christian duty, for your greater glory, not theirs. There is, in this context, an absence of any recognition that tenderness should be the norm in relations between adults and children.

Gerry Spence

• I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

Herbert Spencer

• Religion has been compelled by science to give up one after another of its dogmas, of those assumed cognitions which it could not substantiate. [First Principles, 1862]
• We hear with surprise of the savage who, falling down a precipice, ascribes the failure of his foothold to a malicious demon; and we smile at the kindred notion of the ancient Greek, that his death was prevented by a goddess who unfastened for him the thong of the helmet by which his enemy was dragging him. But daily, without surprise, we hear men who describe themselves as saved from shipwreck by "divine interposition" … and the Christian priest who says prayers over a sick man in the expectation that the course of the disease will be stayed, differ only in respect of the agent from whom they expect supernatural aid. [First Principles, 1862]

Robert Spencer

• If a Qur'an had indeed been flushed, Muslims would have justifiably been offended. They may justifiably have considered the perpetrators boors, or barbarians, or hell-bound unbelievers. They may justifiably have issued denunciations accordingly. But that is all. To kill people thousands of miles away who had nothing to do with the act, and to fulminate with threats and murder against the entire Western world, all because of this alleged act, is not just disproportionate. It is not just excessive. It is mad. And every decent person in the world ought to have the courage to stand up and say that it is mad. [Frontpagemag, 18 February 2005]

Benedict Spinoza

• I call him free who is led solely by reason.
• The will of God is the sanctuary of ignorance.
• In a free state every man can think what he wants and say what he thinks.
• Philosophy has no end in view, save truth. Faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.
• The most tyrannical governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts. [Theological Political Treatise, 1670]
• Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds. [Theological Political Treatise, 1670]
• Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that once ignorance is put aside that wonderment would be taken away which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

David A. Spitz

• One might be asked "How can you prove that a god does not exist?" One can only reply that it is scarcely necessary to disprove what has never been proved.

Lysander Spooner

• The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a "protector," and that he takes men's money against their will, merely to enable him to "protect" those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful "sovereign," on account of the "protection" he affords you. He does not keep "protecting" you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave. The proceedings of those robbers and murderers, who call themselves "the government," are directly the opposite of these of the single highwayman. [No Treason, 1870]

Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong

• What the mind cannot believe the heart can finally never adore. [Rescuing The Bible From Fundamentalism, 1991]
• … not one of them has been from an atheist. They've all been from true believers. [commenting on the "only 16" death-threats he has received, theage.com, 21 June 2001]
• The God the church traditionally understands is a supernatural being who lives somewhere above the sky and invades the world periodically through miracles. [theage.com, 21 June 2001]
• I think Jesus was divine because he was fully human. In Jesus, I see the life of God being lived, the love of God being shared, the being of God manifested. Does that mean I think God impregnated a Jewish maiden on a Galilean hillside and created a half-God, half-man? To me, that's nonsensical. [theage.com, 21 June 2001]
• If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable. [Resurrection: Myth Or Reality?, 1994]
• For most people, religion doesn't serve the function of searching for the truth. It's about making people feel secure. If you're a Protestant and you accept that the Bible is the unerring word of God, or if you're a Catholic and you believe the Pope is infallible, you don't have to think. You just accept the authority of the church. [theage.com, 21 June 2001]
• I could not believe that anyone who has read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly misinformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naivete?
• A major function of fundamentalist religion is to bolster deeply insecure and fearful people. This is done by justifying a way of life with all of its defining prejudices. It thereby provides an appropriate and legitimate outlet for one's anger. The authority of an inerrant Bible that can be readily quoted to buttress this point of view becomes an essential ingredient to such a life. When that Bible is challenged, or relativised, the resulting anger proves the point categorically. [Rescuing The Bible From Fundamentalism, 1991]
• When will we recognise that religion is always in the mind control business? Religion purges its critical thinkers by removing them from official positions, indexing their writings or silencing them officially until they recant. If that does not work, eternal and God- sponsored punishment is made quite vivid. Organised religion is cultic at its core, but seeks to keep this fact well concealed. It is revealed only when its authority is questioned, or when some group takes the neurotic aspects of religion to their natural conclusion. That is the final meaning of the Heaven's Gate community in San Diego. [Heaven's Gate And The Death of Religion, May 1997]
• It is difficult for people who are not part of the Christian Church to understand the power its members attribute to the Bible. That attribution appears to non-church goers to be so irrational and so excessive as to be almost inconceivable. After all, they reason, the Bible is an ancient book with its earliest narrative, the Yahwist document, being written around 1000 B.C.E. and its latest narrative, probably the 2nd Epistle of Peter, being written somewhere around 135 C.E. There is no other piece of literature written in that period of history which people today still treat as a source of ultimate truth. A doctor or pharmacist practising medicine or dispensing drugs in our time based on either the writings of Aristotle or the formulas of an ancient medicine man would be laughed at first, and then if this activity were not stopped immediately, they would be accused of malpractice, removed from their professions and even imprisoned. While that harsh a treatment might not be the fate of a chemist, biologist, architect or astronomer who acted on the basis of the knowledge available in the time the Bible was written, such behaviour would nonetheless be considered ignorant at best, mentally ill at worst. [Homosexuality And The Bible]
• Buttressing every debate on every issue was an appeal to "Holy Scripture." Yet it was clear that those who employed this phrase meant something quite different from what most of us would mean. Many appeared to be oblivious to the last 150 years of biblical scholarship that has shaped Western Christianity. They still appeal to a literalised reading of this ancient biblical text to solve in a definitive way contemporary, complex moral issues. There seemed to be no acknowledgment of the fact that this attitude toward the Bible has been employed to condemn Galileo, Darwin and Freud. Time has demonstrated in each case that this view of the Bible did not prevail. The Bible has also been used to justify slavery, segregation and apartheid. Once again history's judgement has been that the Bible was wrong. This sacred book has been used to oppress women, to reject left-handed people, to bless the church's refusal to bury a victim of suicide and to oppose birth control. Both church and society have moved so far away from these antiquated ideas that Christians are today embarrassed to recall this history. At this Lambeth Conference, however, the Bible was being used in a similar manner to uphold negativity and violence against gay and lesbian people. A literalised Bible claiming inerrancy for its words has historically been a source of death far more often than it has been a source of life. Yet this kind of fundamentalism was clearly once again alive and well in this communion, making it all but impossible to build in our time a modern and relevant Christianity. Christianity Caught In A Timewarp, September 1998]

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

• Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask: by whom has it been elected, and to whom is it responsible?

Special Representative of the Commission of the Human Rights of The United Nations in the Islamic Republic of Iran

• To rape women prisoners, especially virgin girls, who are accused of being against the regime, is a normal and daily practice in the Islamic Republic's prisons, and by doing so, the clergies declare that they adhere to the merits of the Islamic principles and laws, preventing a virgin girl to go to Heaven. Mullahs believe that these are ungodly creatures and they do not deserve it, therefore they are raped to be sure they will be sent to hell. [1992]

Dr. Derek Stanesby, expelled as Canon of Uppingham, Rutland

• People talk about the Bible as the word of God. That can be so misleading. In fact, the elevation of the Bible to close on divine status had done more damage to the Christian message than all the slings and arrows of the sceptics. The Bible helps to point to the word of God, but it is not the word of God. … The Church is steeped in superstition and wishful and weak thinking. … It is one thing to find great wisdom in the Bible, but absurd to treat it as the source of all knowledge. It is a plain and undeniable fact that the Bible was written by the hand of Man. [The Times, 23 July 2001]

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women. [Eight Years And More, 1898]
• The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.
• My heart's desire is to lift women out of all these dangerous, degrading superstitions, and to this end I will labour my remaining days on earth. [1896]
• Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions.

Ronald Steel

• … the other nations of the world have not assigned Washington the right to decide when, where, and how their interests should be served.
• A nation that seeks not only to protect the world but also to inspire other countries with its values and achievements must be able to offer at least as much to its own people as to those it seeks to guard. Yet at home, even more than in our foreign policy, we have failed abjectly. [The Atlantic, June 1995]
• We suffer from some of the highest rates of illiteracy, malnutrition, infant mortality, violent crime, homelessness, imprisonment, and poverty in the industrialised world. Our country is hobbled by debt, weakened by fears for personal safety, suspicious of its leaders, and increasingly divided between the skilled and the unskilled, the jobholders and the unemployable. [The Atlantic, June 1995]

Lincoln Steffens

• Why is is that the less intelligence people have, the more spiritual they are? They seem to fill all the vacant, ignorant spaces in their heads with soul. Which explains how it is that the less knowledge they have, the more religion.

Mary-Ann Stephenson

• Under Bush, the US has led attempts to reverse gains made on sexual and reproductive rights. One of his first presidential acts was to reinstate the global gag rule, which means any organisation in the world that receives any US funding is banned from providing abortion services, including counselling or referrals for abortion. The rule has forced family planning organisations to close clinics, cut services and increase fees. Shipments of US condoms and contraceptives have ceased to 16 developing countries. Family planning organisations in another 16 countries have lost access to condoms because they have refused to accept the restrictions. It's not just abortion rights that the US is opposed to. At an Asian and Pacific conference last year on population and development, the US delegation tried to eliminate all references to condom use as a way of preventing the spread of HIV/Aids, insisting on a policy of "simple abstinence". The US was isolated, and its position was defeated by 32 votes to one. [The Guardian, 08 March 2005]

Howard Stern

• Here's what happens when you die – you sit in a box and get eaten by worms. [E! network show, 12 December 1995]
• I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there is any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

Mark Steyn

• … the United Kingdom's descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and "pig-related items" will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee's box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. And, as we know, Muslims regard pigs as "unclean", even an anthropomorphised cartoon pig wearing a scarf and a bright, colourful singlet. … Only the other day, Burger King withdrew its ice-cream cones from its British restaurants because Mr Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe, after a trip to the Park Royal branch, complained that the creamy swirl on the lid resembled the word "Allah" in Arabic script. It doesn't, not really, not except that in the sense any twirly motif looks vaguely Arabic. After all, Burger King isn't suicidal enough to launch Allah Ice-Cream. But, after Mr Akhtar urged Muslims to boycott the chain and claimed that "this is my jihad", Burger King yanked the ice-cream and announced that, design-wise, it was going back to the old drawing-board. … Is it really a victory for "tolerance" to say that a council worker cannot have a Piglet coffee mug on her desk? And isn't an ability to turn a blind eye to animated piglets the very least the West is entitled to expect from its Muslim citizens? If Islam cannot "co-exist" even with Pooh or the abstract swirl on a Burger King ice-cream, how likely is it that it can co-exist with the more basic principles of a pluralist society? As A. A. Milne almost said: "They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace / Her Majesty's Law is replaced by Allah's." By the way, isn't it grossly offensive to British Wahhabis to have a head of state who is female and uncovered? I doubt whether the Post Office will be in any rush to issue another set of Pooh commemorative stamps, or the BBC to revive Pinky and Perky. Forty years ago, Britain's Islamic minority didn't have the numbers to ban Piglet and change the Burger King menu. Now they do. What will be deemed "unacceptable" in the interests of "tolerance" in 20 or even five years' time? [The Telegraph, 04 October 2005]

Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt)

• The State calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.

Matt Stone, co-creator, South Park

• In 10 years and over 150 episodes of South Park, Isaac [Hayes, voice of Chef] never had a problem with the show making fun of Christians, Muslim, Mormons or Jews. He got a sudden case of religious sensitivity when it was his religion featured on the show … He has no problem – and he's cashed plenty of checks – with our show making fun of Christians. … [We] never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin. [13 March 2006]

Joe Michael Straczynski

• As I've noted before, I'm an atheist. If I can't see it, smell it, measure it or poke it with a stick, it ain't there.
• Would raise a glass of champagne, but I don't drink. Won't thank the great Mojo since I'm an atheist. But there's always chocolate.

Paul Street

• Democracy is a political system where each person has an equal vote and equal policy influence. It cannot meaningfully exist in a society structured along the lines of the contemporary US, where 1 percent of the population owns 47 percent of the nation's wealth and considerably more of its politicians, policymakers, and media. It cannot exist where ordinary people lacking cohesive organization, meaningful institutions of autonomous power, popular expression, and democratic organization, and even a sense of common interests face off against highly organised and extremely class-conscious wealthy interests. It cannot exist where such people are worked, commuted, and shopped to the point of exhaustion and must rely on a highly concentrated privately owned media for basic information. It is especially absent from the making of foreign policy, which is even more insulated from popular influence than domestic policy and whose largely hidden conception and execution carries vast consequences for the entire planet without anything but the slightest input from world citizens. [Misunderstanding Power, ZNet, 06 June 2002]

Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus)

• If you did not know at the age of five that the gods are made up beings and the myths impossible stories, you are a fool.

Farooq Sulehria

• However, the solution to all our [Muslim] problems is always simple: return to an imagined past which, mercifully for the people of the seventh century, never existed. Every time a scientist in the West is ready with an invention, our readymade answer is: we knew about it 1,400 years ago what the West has found only now. We kill Theo van Gogh when confronted with a film. We burn down our own cities in response to a blasphemous and racist caricature. Still, we refuse to understand that our answer to every "provocation" is either a fatwa or mindless violence – perhaps because creativity is anathema to us. Not because we lack fertile minds, but because we lack liberation and freedom – liberation from self-imposed mental, moral, and cultural censors. And freedom to think and express. [thenews.com.pk, 17 June 2008]

Andrew Sullivan

• Someone somewhere won't let you see the Scientology episode of South Park. You can go to the Comedy Central website and view it on the internet – the last refuge for free speech. But you won't see it on television. In a battle between satire and religion, although some deny that Scientology deserves that moniker, religion wins again. We need those truths and benefit from those fantasies. A free society survives partly because the powerful are mocked, and their pretensions undermined. Religions, which guard their own illusions carefully, are particularly ripe for satire. And they should be. Whenever one human being is claiming to tell the truth about the meaning of life he is making a very powerful claim – and in a free society he also runs the risk of getting a raspberry. Laughter matters because piety begets power. Orwell once remarked that one reason fascism never took off in Britain was because the sight of a goose-stepping soldier would prompt your average Englishman to giggle. Someone is now silencing the giggles. And our world is a lot creepier because of it. [The Sunday Times, 26 March 2006]

Morris Sullivan

• Religion – or at least Christianity – insists that certain things be considered facts, based purely on faith. In other words, you are supposed to believe, just because the religious view says to. The faithful will tell you, for example, that God exists in fact, in spite of the total lack of empirical evidence for God's existence. If pressed for evidence, they will come up with a series of irrational statements like, "Well, the world couldn't possibly exist unless God made it," or "There has to be a reason for all this to exist." According to the religious world-view, too, all of creation exists for the benefit of man. [Creationism: Monkeying With Science Education, 1999]
• The truth is that "family values," as used by the American Family Association, Dan Quayle, and the southern Baptists, has nothing to do with either family or values, nor does it really have anything to do with homosexuals, abortionists, or pornographers. Those groups actually only serve as windmills to tilt at. The true agenda is power – power over the intellectually weak, emotionally immature, and ethically deficient Americans who are incapable of critical thinking and independent decision-making, and who are easily manipulated by the basest of human emotions – fear and the desire for revenge. [Family Values: Witch-Hunting In The Nineties, 1997]

Ron Suskind

• The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility – a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains – is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. … The nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe's state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority. But suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush – both captive and creator of this moment – has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency. The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. [New York Times, 17 October 2004]
• In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about [G.W.] Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you." When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, "Look, I'm not going to debate it with you." [New York Times, 17 October 2004]

Jonathan Swift

• It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into.

Algernon Sydney

• Implicit faith belongs to fools; and truth is comprehended by examining principles.

Symmachus

• It is reasonable that all worship be considered one. We look at the same stars, the sky belongs to all, the same universe surrounds us. What does it matter by what method each seeks the truth? One cannot arrive at so great a secret by only one road. [383]

Mary Ellen Synon

• Extreme sexual violence did not start with the internet. And it goes on in cultures where, even now, the possession of pornography is somewhere between impossible and suicidal or do you imagine that the village elders of rural Pakistan who sanction the gang rape of virgins as a judicial punishment for the transgressions of the girls' brothers and fathers got the idea from something they recently downloaded from shariababes.com? … Evil was not invented by the worldwide web. Nor indeed by the Red Army. Think of what we now know was going on in Ireland at the same time the Russians were raping their way along the road to Berlin. The priests and monks who sodomised little boys and the fathers who raped little daughters in the Ireland of the Forties needed no porn to encourage them. … Such is the level of sexual violence that we feel it is all around us that no doubt there will be some move in the next Dil for legislation similar to the new legislation in England and Wales. The decent people of Ireland, like the decent people of England, demand that something must be done. So they will try to control the web (impossible). They will give police intrusive powers to examine the computers of innocent adults (outrageous). They will manage a few prosecutions of men who have watched videos of consenting adults engaged in Black & Decker sexual acts (a waste of police time). And they will not stop sexual violence, not that way. Porn doesn't make perverts. Perverts go looking for porn. Yet such is the anger and impotence of decent people in the face of sexual violence that they will try new laws anyway. There is a drive now to force so-called sex shops here to be controlled or shut down. … What is needed is for Ireland and England to embrace a philosophy that does not stir in its men an uncontrolled lust for sex with a goat or sodomy with a small boy or intercourse with a corpse or the rape of a helpless and terrified woman. A rational ideology in the meaning of sex is needed here; indeed, a rational ideology in the meaning of many things is needed here. [Daily Mail, 11 September 2006]

Thomas Szasz

• If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. [The Second Sin, 1973]

2ymoon

• I think muslims in this country should fundamentally respect the norms and values of british society as chosen by the majority of british people. I also think that the personal choices of individuals should be held as sacred within the law, including a woman's right to wear a headscarf (or not) without fear of intimidation from any side and a woman's right to choose whom she marries. I also think that homophobia and anti-semitism have no place in this society along with any other bigoted views. Oh, and just so you know, I am a muslim male. I hate the fact that muslims are faced with bigotry, intolerance and discrimination far too much, but at the same time i recognise that within the muslim community there is a fair share of bigotry also… I hope that things will change on both fronts, and fast! [Comment Is Free, The Guardian, 10 August 2006]

Dr. H. Tabar

• As a Muslim, I would regard a God who rejoices in the blood of 6,000 of his innocent children as a false God and, therefore, the perpetrators, their supporters and those who knew what was planned as apostates and enemies of Allah. The cowardice of our clerics in pushing their heads firmly in the sand, not confronting the misguided and the extremists amongst us, is an affront to all that I regard as holy. If they have not the courage to declare the Islamic suicide terrorists as apostates, then perhaps they would be good enough to declare me as one, for I would rather burn in the eternal flames of Hell than share a Paradise with the likes of them. [letter to The Times, 05 November 2001]

Tacitus

• Christianity is a pestilent superstition.
• The more corrupt the government, the greater the number of laws.

Matthew Tanase

• A vocal minority always claims that one must be doing something wrong if he prefers to remain anonymous. That's most often not the case and it troubles me when people employ such reasoning. There will always be those who abuse certain privileges or liberties, but those few cannot ruin an entitlement for the rest. There are many factors why privacy is important. First there are repressive governments that forbid access to certain sites, censor the internet, and then track users who show interest in particular topics. There are people who want to tell the truth without fear of repercussion, such as corporate whistleblowers and bloggers. There are intelligence needs, in both corporate and government sectors. But most importantly, we live in an age where our names, social security numbers, phone numbers, dates of birth, buying habits, credit reports, demographics and surfing tendencies are traded like commodities amongst big companies. We all knew this day was coming, the information age has been upon us for some time. But even in these digital times, it remains our right to protect our privacy, our identities, our true names. [The Register, 22 September 2005]

Peter Tatchell

• Female genital mutilation is a crime against humanity. Don't we have a duty of international solidarity with the victims? Fearful of accusations of "racism", much of the left is reluctant to speak out against human rights violations perpetrated by people who happen to be non-white. … The threat of being labelled "Islamophobic" is inducing a new wave of moral paralysis, as evidenced by the way most leftists ignore the role of fundamentalist Islam in the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, where racist Islamists are exterminating the black African population. We see similar double standards in Britain when many left-wingers fail to speak out against the sexism and homophobia of organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain, the Islamic Human Rights Commission and the Muslim Association of Britain. Sections of the left now openly tolerate – and even seek to excuse – attacks on human rights by Muslim fundamentalists, when they would never tolerate similar attacks by fundamentalist Christians or Jews. This is a patronizing inverse racism. It judges Muslims by different standards than it judges others. … Is it really Islamophobic to condemn the stoning of adulteresses in northern Nigeria and the arrest and torture of gay people by the PLO and the Palestinian Authority? Can we remain silent when Muslims are suffering persecution at the hands of fellow Muslims? Is Muslim-on-Muslim oppression any less worthy of our concern? … We are campaigning against the murder of gay Jamaicans, and against eight reggae singers who encourage these homophobic killings. Some black and left activists accuse us of "cultural imperialism". … How can it be cultural imperialism to ask the Jamaican government to honour the international human rights agreements it has signed and pledged to uphold? What is neo-colonial about backing the struggle of Jamaican human rights campaigners who want an end to the killing of their gay Jamaican brothers and sisters? [18 December 2004]

Teller (of Penn & Teller)

• I had a correct moral upbringing. (Laughs) My parents told me it was wrong to do evil. (Laughs) And so I don't do evil. In fact, most of the really, really successful people I have encountered have not been scumbags. You become a scumbag when you can't cut it by legitimate means. It is not the person who has all the talent of a professional sleight-of-hand artist who becomes a pickpocket. The people who have that talent become professional sleight-of-hand artists. They don't become pickpockets, because to be a pickpocket, you don't have to be as good. You can resort to things like stepping on the arch of the other person's foot and beating them up while you're picking their pocket. People of inferior abilities and inferior morality have always done wrong things. And people of quality have never been tempted by that. [The New England Journal Of Skepticism Vol. 1 Issue 3 (Summer 1998)]
• For a while we thought it would be really cool to do some intimate home seances, where we would come in and say, "This is trickery. You are about to witness trickery. But it's very good trickery, and it's really going to fool you." We probably only did it half a dozen times, and we stopped doing it because we couldn't stand getting people saying, "Oh, well, I know the part where the glass broke, that was some kind of magic trick. But when you were reading our minds in the beginning, that was for real." We'd say, "No, it's a trick," and they'd say "No, it can't be. I'm a smart person. I'd know if I were being tricked there. That was for real." And people would look us in the eye when we were telling them they were watching tricks and tell us we were doing these things for real. And it was just insanely aggravating! (Laughs) It was unbearable to have someone look at you and dismiss your hard work, your art, with this superstitious explanation that contradicts everything we stand for. [The New England Journal of Skepticism Vol. 1 Issue 3 (Summer 1998)]

Nikola Tesla

• War cannot be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only through annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife. … Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment. [Electrical Experimenter Magazine, 1919]

Rev. John H. Thomas, United Church of Christ

• It's ironic that after a political season awash in commercials based on fear and deception by both parties seen on all the major networks, an ad with a message of welcome and inclusion would be deemed too controversial. [commenting on CBS & NBC's ban of their 'controversial' commercial ("Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we. … No matter who you are, or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here."), as it mentioned the exclusion of gays from some areas of life, 30 November 2004]

Lisa Walsh Thomas

• Young people of our country are killing people who never threatened our nation or our lives. They are killing women and children because a man who never served honourably in the military and who spent his youth blowing up frogs with firecrackers moved from alcohol and cocaine to Jesus and now says we have to kill anyone he accuses of siding with "tearists" or who he fears might acquire a "nukular" bomb. He waves a bible in the air, says to hell with the wishes of the rest of the world, prides himself on following instinct rather than knowledge, and half the country falls to its knees in admiration of this unctuous "man of God." If we object to his obsessional commands, we are branded traitors, accused of supporting Saddam, just as Vietnam war protestors were once called "commies." Same tired, repressive mentality. [Open Wings, Darkened Skies, 09 April 2003]

Mark Thomas

• On 7 October, the FBI seized Indymedia's servers in London. The seizure orders came as a result of a request from the Italian and Swiss governments. With the servers' removal, 20 Indymedia sites in countries all over the world went down. This was an act of censorship and intimidation. It was the equivalent of the FBI storming the Guardian's offices and demanding that the paper hand over all its computers, including those that hold details of its writers and photographers. The odd thing is that the FBI seized the servers at the request of foreign authorities – and yet the Home Office claims to know nothing about it. Apparently, there is no protection of privacy for Indymedia contributors. There is no accountability for the actions taken by the FBI. The Home Office just shrugs its shoulders. There is no greater censor than the fear of Big Brother watching over your shoulder. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a jackboot on a human face for ever – and a rather cute black guide dog sitting next to it. [New Statesman, 08 November 2004]

David Thompson

• Some argue that there must be limits on what can be said – as if the solution to stupidity is to inhibit public discourse. "What about Holocaust deniers", I was once asked, indignantly. "Would you let them say the Holocaust didn't happen?" But proscribing idiocy of this kind achieves very little and betrays a lack of confidence. If a person insists that Jews, gypsies and homosexuals were not systematically exterminated on an industrial scale, one can always produce the documents, the testimony, the photographs and the films and demonstrate that it did happen. And demonstrating what did happen – and can happen – allows us to revisit our own ideas about the world. A free society is defined by contrasting opinions and the testing of ideas. This is how we learn. Being pious (or pretending to be pious) doesn't exonerate one from this. If a person is so aggrieved by contrary voices, one has to question what it is that is posing such an existential threat.

The Three Imposters

• Those who ignore physical causes have a natural fear born of doubt. Where there exists a power which to them is dark or unseen, from thence comes a desire to pretend the existence of invisible Beings, that is to say their own phantoms which they invoke in adversity, whom they praise in prosperity, and of whom in the end they make Gods. And as the visions of men go to extremes, must we be astonished if there are created an innumerable quantity of Divinities? It is the same perceptible fear of invisible powers which has been the origin of Religions, that each forms to his fashion. Many individuals to whom it was important that mankind should possess such fancies, have not scrupled to encourage mankind in such beliefs, and they have made it their law until they have prevailed upon the people to blindly obey them by the fear of the future. The Gods having thus been invented, it is easy to imagine that they resembled man, and who, like them, created everything for some purpose, for they unanimously agree that God has made nothing except for man, and reciprocally that man is made only for God. (Man is the noblest work of God – but nobody ever said so but man. – Fra Elbertus.) This conclusion being general, we can see why man has so thoroughly accepted it, and know for that reason that they have taken occasion to create false ideas of good and evil, merit and sin, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and deformity – and similar qualities. … reflecting that they did not make this world, they believe it to be a well-founded proposition to imagine a Supreme Being who has made it for them such as it is, for after satisfying themselves that they could not have made it, they conclude that it was the work of one or several Gods who intended it for the use and pleasure of man alone. On the other hand, the nature of the Gods whom man has admitted, being unknown, they have concluded in their own minds that these Gods susceptible of the same passions as men, have made the earth only for them, and that man to them was extremely precious. But as each one has different inclinations it became proper to adore God according to the humour of each, to attract his blessings and to cause Him to make all Nature subject to his desires. By this method this precedent becomes Superstition, and it is implanted so that the grossest natures are believed capable of penetrating the doctrine of final causes as if they had perfect knowledge. Thus in place of showing that nature has made nothing in vain, they show that God and Nature dream as well as men, and that they may not be accused of doubting things, let us see how they have put forth their false reasoning on this subject. Experience causing them to see a myriad of inconveniences marring the pleasure of life, such as storms, earthquakes, sickness, famine and thirst, they draw the conclusion that nature has not been made for them alone. They attribute all these evils to the wrath of the Gods, who are vexed by the offences of man, and they cannot be disabused of these ideas by the daily instances which should prove to them that blessings and evils have been always common to the wicked and the good, and they will not agree to a proposition so plain and perceptible. The reason for that is, it is more easy to remain in ignorance than to abolish a belief established for many centuries and introduce something more probable. This precedent has caused another, which is the belief that the judgments of God were incomprehensible, and that for this reason, the knowledge of truth is beyond the human mind; and mankind would still dwell in error were it not that mathematics and several other sciences had destroyed these prejudices.

Farrell Till

• The Bible: The inerrant, inspired Word of an omnipotent, omniscient deity who lived in a tent that desert nomads carried around with them some 3500 years ago.

Emma Tom

• Year after year, increasing numbers of your followers called you out of touch and ignored you. Yet year after year your hectoring just got shriller. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is one definition of insanity. I know you want to protect the future of your church by enforcing the most hardline interpretations of your holy texts. … In a Sydney cafe on Sunday, I overheard two young, gay men comfort each other over your death. These boys are the ones you've said are part of an ideology of evil. Yet they still grieved for you. They'd forgiven your all-out assault on their values and had focused on the things you have in common rather than ranting about your differences. They knew spiritual unity didn't have to mean doctrinal unity. Is it really too much to ask you and your team to return the favour? [commenting on the death of Pope John Paul II, The Australian, 06 April 2005]

Leo Tolstoy

• Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

Guillermo del Toro

• I had a terrible childhood. Part of that was being raised by a very strict Catholic grandmother who was a truly devout religious nut. She would send me to school with upside-down bottle caps inside my shoes to mortify my flesh, and she would make me pray to this and that. From the earliest age the only thing I wanted to draw was monsters. She thought I had the devil in me so she exorcised me. I started laughing at how silly that was and she thought that was proof that I was truly possessed. The mere notion of original sin is really hard to stomach for a child – to be told that you are going to burn in hell or you are going to go to purgatory – and all of that permeated my life and therefore my movies. Now I'm a lapsed Catholic, or an atheist, but lapsed Catholic is a much better description because you're screwed for life. [The Guardian, 28 November 2001]

Linus Torvalds

• Hmmm, completely a-religious – atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both. [Linux Journal, November 1999]

Polly Toynbee

• US politics reduce all difficult issues to TV attack soundbites, making it impossible for politicians to debate what works: anything but "Just Say No", is a sure-fire election loser. So, yet again, US policies are imposed, and the crude deficiencies of American democracy are played out globally. [The Guardian, 23 April 2003]
• American paranoia will be all the greater for seeing the worst nightmares come true. The nation that is the world's great fount of technological, financial, artistic and intellectual brilliance is fatally burdened by a primitive and unsophisticated political culture. Its warped political institutions, its leaders' debilitated and febrile dependence on hour-by-hour opinion polling, its constitutionally split powers, reliance on big business and its perpetual cycle of elections all add up to a politics unfit to bear such responsibility. [The Guardian, 12 September 2001]
• This week Bush, flush with corporate bribes of $140m to spend on mind-drilling 10-second soundbites, opened his campaign with a ritual assault on the lack of patriotism of his opponents. In Iraq the US is decreeing the type of democracy it thinks fit. Meanwhile the world watches US democracy bought and sold by corporate cash and fixed by a politically gerrymandered supreme court in a deeply unjust first-past-the-post system. American elections make the case against Iranian-style 'Islamic democracy' a little harder. Which is more democratic: rule by moolah or mullah? [The Guardian, 25 February 2004]
• The right to die at the right time belongs in the liberal canon alongside the right to abortion. People own their bodies and neither church nor state can impose on anyone the obligation to live longer than they wish nor to bear a child against their will. It is an atheist tenet: the living body is all we have, all we inhabit and no higher power summons it to life nor decrees when that life ends. Catholics and other religions are the chief opponents of voluntary euthanasia because for them, only God disposes of life. When I interviewed Mother Teresa years ago, she explained that she would fight against contraception and euthanasia to her dying day because every soul born to starve on Calcutta's streets was still another soul to the glory of God – and every old person who gasped out one more agonising breath somehow contributed to this too. Religious opponents of euthanasia and abortion tend to hide theological objections in the practical problems of framing safe laws – but polls consistently show over 85% believe people should have the right to die when they want. Once life is not holy, people are free to do as they like with their own. [writing about Diane Pretty who is in the last stages of motor neurone disease and whose husband would risk a jail sentence of up to 14 years if he assisted her suicide, The Guardian, 22 August 2001] Diane died on 11 May 2002 after experiencing difficulties with breathing – the very thing she wanted to be spared.
• The religious hatred bill will inflame rather than calm religious passions … Presumably to test the proposed law to destruction, Charles Moore last week wrote a deliberately provocative article opening with the words: "Was the prophet Mohammed a paedophile?" (He married a nine-year-old.) He says the new bill might prevent some raising this question, "rude and mistaken" though it might be. It had, of course, exactly the desired effect. The bill's Muslim supporters plunged straight into his crude elephant trap. The Muslim Association of Britain called for Moore's sacking and said the paper should have known better in the light of the Salman Rushdie affair – distinctly threatening. The Islamic Human Rights Commission called for a boycott of the Telegraph – a more reasonable riposte. Iqbal Sacranie of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain said that linking the Prophet's name with this crime "will have shocked Muslim readers" who are "calling for safeguards against vilification of dearly cherished beliefs". And there it is. He expects the new law to protect "cherished beliefs", while David Blunkett in the Commons assured his critics it would do no such thing. Dead prophets and holy books would be as open to criticism and ridicule as ever. The law will protect the believers, not their beliefs. That difference appears to escape most Muslims. [The Guardian, 15 December 2004]
• With its ban on condoms the church has caused the death of millions of Catholics and others in areas dominated by Catholic missionaries, in Africa and right across the world. In countries where 50% are infected, millions of very young Aids orphans are today's immediate victims of the curia. Refusing support to all who offer condoms, spreading the lie that the Aids virus passes easily through microscopic holes in condoms - this irresponsibility is beyond all comprehension. … if the Vatican learned anything about humanity, it would humbly meditate on 4,450 Catholic clergy in the US alone accused of molesting children since 1950, and no doubt as many in Catholic churches elsewhere still in denial. … A Vatican edict in the 1960s threatened to excommunicate anyone breaking secrecy on child sex allegations, and guaranteed that ever more children continued to suffer. And within its walls the Vatican shields an American priest from allegations. Still the Vatican turns a blind eye to this most repugnant and damaging of all sexual practices, the suffering little children whose priests come unto them. Yet at the same time it thunders disapproval of sex in every other more innocent circumstance, blighting the lives of millions with its teaching on gays, divorce, abortion and unrealistic self-denial. There is no reckoning how many of the world's poorest women have died giving birth to more children than they can survive; contraception is women's true saviour. [The Guardian, 08 April 2005]
• In his own inimitable words, let no one "misunderestimate" George W Bush. He is the most rightwing president in living memory. If this is compassionate conservatism, what does the other sort look like? In less than 100 days he has turned America into a pariah, made enemies of the entire world, his only friends the dirty polluters of the oil industry who put him there. His foreign non-policy is a calamity, brilliantly uniting Russia and China with gratuitous offence and threat. … Ungracious in victory, absolute power corrupting absolutely, the only super-power is morphing into an evil empire of its own. Where to begin on America the Horrible? Start with it tearing up the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty to install a national missile defence system, recreating a new cold war with China as No 1 enemy. North Korean "sunshine" detente is over. NDM only gives the US an illusion of invulnerability in a world it makes more dangerous. World trade negotiations were wrecked by US self-interest. Not a cent has been paid of the US promised $600m for third world debt-relief. While US wealth soared in the last decade, only 20% of its citizens gained but his budget includes a $1.6 trillion tax cut, most for the richest. The toxic Texan (he left behind the filthiest state) denies global warming and urges oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Arctic Refuge. He even abolished regulations limiting arsenic in drinking water and cut black-lung benefits. This richest nation on earth will never lead a redistributive global politics while so unconcerned about third world poverty among its own. [The Guardian, 04 April 2001]
• What's at stake here is the right to be insulting and cause offence. Many Muslim groups think it will protect their religious sensitivities – and so it will, by shifting the cultural balance away from free speech towards a sanctimonious right to feel offended. It puts religious belief into a sacred compound protected by legal razor-wire from robust mockery or public abuse. In this inquisition of a bill, religion will become a minefield, a no-go area in the world of ideas. … It is already happening under employment law with certain kinds of harassment: if someone says they feel harassed, then lawyers warn no other evidence is required. … Dr Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP leader of parliamentary argument against the bill, says it would prevent him talking of "loathsome fundamentalist Christian homophobic bigots" though it would let him abuse politicians, as in "loathsome US Republican homophobic bigots". For some, political beliefs are far more personal than non-existent religious ones, yet no one demands sacred respect for political passions. Nor will it be lawful to say "loathsome Islamic jihadist terrorists" (even if you add the current caveat "perverted-form-of-Islamic"). One thing is certain: those who hold passionate religious beliefs see no difference between themselves and their creeds. Calling people's religion a dangerous and misogynist primitive fetish feels to them like incitement to hatred. Already there is a frosty caution about disrespect towards religion: it causes a more shocking frisson than it did five years ago. Abuse of religious beliefs feels like a personal insult, the religious want it silenced and they are winning. [The Guardian, 31 January 2006]
• Religious extremism must not be put beyond criticism by legislation – or accusations of Islamophobia … The only good religion is a moribund religion: only when the faithful are weak are they tolerant and peaceful. The horrible history of Christianity shows that whenever religion grabs temporal power it turns lethal. Those who believe theirs is the only way, truth and light will kill to create their heavens on earth if they get the chance. Tolerance only thrives when religion is banished to the private sphere, but bizarrely this government is marching backwards, with more faith schools, more use of "faith communities" and now Blunkett's new laws against "religious hatred" to save religion from vulgar abuse. … Religions never accept universal human rights because their notion of rights derives from a higher revealed truth. … This may be the last chance to say so before emergency measures ban "incitement to religious hatred". To say that religion is dangerous nonsense is indeed intended to incite people against irrational superstition in favour of reason. But this law will insulate religious ideas in a sanctuary beyond scrutiny, refutation or ridicule. Why does religion deserve a realm beyond questioning? … Religions will seek to use these new laws against anything they deem blasphemous. Incitement to religious hatred will be an offence, along with "religious hatred" as an aggravating factor lengthening the sentences of people caught committing a crime. … The danger is that they intend to use it as a proxy blasphemy law: it is indeed disgraceful that our archaic blasphemy law covers only Christianity – but it should be abolished altogether. [The Guardian, 05 October 2001]
• There is a new nervousness about criticising, let alone mocking, any religious belief, a jumpiness about challenging Islam or Roman Catholicism. This most secular state in the world, with fewest worshippers at any altars, should be a beacon of secularism in a world beset by religious bloodshed. Instead, our politicians twitch nervously in a lily-livered capitulation to unreason. Why? Because this clever blending between race and faith has tied all tongues. This law springs from a cult of phoney racial/religious respect that makes it harder than it ever was to dare to criticise, let alone mock. There is a new caution about "causing offence". What kind of offence? Not to people's race but to ideas in their head. If I want to write that I find the hijab a gesture of obeisance to the nasty notion that women are obscene and should be modestly covered up, I may offend a lot of Muslim women. I am not for banning it or tearing it off them, nor am I being racist. But that is becoming an argument that growing numbers of feminist women no longer dare articulate. Unless the Commons comes to its senses, there will be those who regard this view as religious hatred and will expect the law to stop it. (This crime attracts a seven-year sentence.) Laws change cultural climates: it's what they are for. Religion will become out of bounds in many spheres. Schools, universities, the arts, broadcasting, will feel social pressures that induce self-censorship. A small example: if you wonder why there have been no penetrating exposes of cults like Scientology in recent years, it is because they have sued so often that the media caved in – fear of litigation outweighs the story. That is how the law cast its shadow. [The Guardian, 10 June 2005]
• How could those who preach the absolute revealed truth of every word of a primitive book not be prone to insanity? There have been sects of killer Christians and indeed the whole of Christendom has been at times bent on wiping out heathens. Jewish zealots in their settlements crazily claim legal rights to land from the Old Testament. Some African Pentecostal churches harbour sects of torturing exorcism and child abuse. Muslims have a very long tradition of jihadist slaughter. Sikhs rose up to stop a play that exposed deformities of abuse within their temples. Buddhism too has its sinister wing. See how far-right evangelicals have kidnapped US politics and warped its secular, liberal founding traditions. Intense belief, incantations, secrecy and all-male rituals breed perversions and danger, abusing women and children and infecting young men with frenzy, no matter what the name of the faith. … Meanwhile the far left, forever thrilled by the whiff of cordite, has bizarrely decided to fellow-travel with primitive Islamic extremism as the best available anti-Americanism around. (Never mind their new friends' views on women, gays and democracy.) … All the state can do is hold on to secular values. It can encourage the moderate but it must not appease religion. The constitutional absurdity of an established church once seemed an irrelevance, but now it obliges similar privileges to all other faiths. There is still time – it may take a nonreligious leader – to stop this madness and separate the state and its schools from all religion. It won't stop the bombing now but at least it would not encourage continued school segregation for generations to come. And it might clear the air of the clouds of hypocrisy, twisted thinking and circumlocution whenever a politician mentions religion. [The Guardian, 22 July 2005]
• It is curious how this government clings to religion. Here we are, the most secular nation (48% proclaim no particular religion, only 7% are Christian churchgoers and 3% practising Muslims and Hindus), yet a Cool Britannia leadership eagerly courts its tattered remnants. They chase after religion as if it were a short cut to the national soul. When David Blunkett says he wishes he could bottle religion to spread its values throughout his school system, or Tony Blair lavishes praise on religious organisations, it only suggests that New Labour's own core values may be a bit weak. … Now the Home Office is considering legislation to ban religious discrimination whose effect would be to stifle free speech and ridicule, extending blasphemy laws that should be abolished. The ever vigilant campaigners of the National Secular Society keep pointing up the anomalies in the state's wooing of the church. Why in the last budget was there VAT relief for church buildings, but not for secular historic monuments? … Although they [church schools] are by nature discriminatory and contrary to Labour's proclaimed pluralism and multiculturalism, the government is promising yet more. The miraculous special "ethos" of church schools extolled by David Blunkett is quite simple to explain. Their popularity has less to do with God than selection, often done with waiting lists which help the quick-off-the-mark middle classes congregate together there. Parents mumbling through psalms and catechisms to get a vicar's letter for school entry is a good pew-filler. Church schools deter Muslim parents, while more Muslim schools only add to the risk of keeping children culturally segregated. Religious schools are by faith likely to be anti-gay, anti-abortion, Catholic and anti-contraception or Muslims teaching that women's place is "one step behind". [The Guardian, 13 April 2001]
• Religious schools, whose "ethos and success" David Blunkett famously yearned to bottle, have become a serious embarrassment. … There will be considerably fewer new religious schools than previously threatened. … Shocking scenes in Ardoyne with Catholic girls spat at by Protestant parents showed the worst face of apartheid schools. After September 11 the hot breath of religious passion made that special ethos look more sinister. … A brief summary of the facts: at most 7% of the UK population go to church, 3% are devout Muslims or Sikhs, yet a third of all state schools are religious. Some 45% of the population has no religious belief: church schools are popular for very secular reasons. … Lord Ouseley, former head of the commission for racial equality reporting on Bradford after the riots, damned segregated schools as a prime cause of racial hatred. "There are signs that communities are fragmenting along racial, cultural and faith lines" he wrote. "Segregation in schools is one indicator of this trend." He spoke of "attitudes hardening and intolerance to differences growing". However, demand for all-Muslim schools is increasing. A new girls' Muslim state school opened in Bradford this term, despite growing concern among local councillors, whom Ouseley accused of cowardice in not confronting divisive schools. … The under-achievement of Bangladeshi and Pakistani children was blamed this week on the amount of time they spend in mosques studying the Koran, in a report by Dr Mohammed Ali, chief executive of a Bradford charity: "Quantity not quality is provided in most British mosques and madrasahs and that is probably one of the reasons for the poor educational performance of British Pakistani pupils." Bradford has 18 private Muslim schools that fall outside Ofsted scrutiny (though why private education is excluded from equal inspection is a mystery). [The Guardian, 09 November 2001]
• Many years ago, before she ['Mother' Teresa] was famous, I interviewed her when she was visiting her London convent and we argued about contraception. Couldn't she see the effects of her teaching on the Calcutta streets where babies were born to starve and die in misery? She said that every baby that takes a breath is another soul to the glory of God and that was all that mattered, the creation of souls. Suffering? We are all born to suffer. All this is dismissed by papal apologists as a sideline, an irritating irrelevance seized on by liberals and feminists as an excuse for attacking Catholics. … Clashing against the modern world, religions founder on their sexual fetishes. Their high spiritual ambitions are brought crashing to earth by obsession with the filthy human body. Sex always means women, Eve for ever responsible for Adam's lust, for ever in need of subjugation. All the Middle Eastern religions define their identity through fixation with women's bodies – ritual baths, churching, shaving heads, denying abortion and contraception, purdah and keeping unclean women from the altar. This perverted abhorrence of women destines religions to collide with modernity everywhere, for to be modern is to set women free. In the end, Islam, too, will modernise. Any attempt to stop sex leads to extravagant hypocrisy. It is no secret that a high proportion of both Catholic and CoE clergy are gay, and some of the "celibate" are child abusers whose activities were shielded for years by the same Vatican that makes sexual purity the impossible keystone of its identity. … East European Catholics are fighting to have God included in the new EU constitution, and ahead lies a major row about whether Europe is confined to Christendom – keeping out the Islamic hordes of Turkey. But for many non-religious EU citizens, the difference between the mullahs across the Bosporous and the mullah in the Vatican might be hard to detect. What matters is keeping private Gods out of the public realm. [The Guardian, 17 October 2003]
• It is there in the born-again Christian fundamentalism demanded of every US politician, turning them all into "crusaders". It drives on the murderous Islamic jihadists. It makes mad the biblical land-grabbing Israeli settlers. It threatens nuclear nemesis between the Hindus and Muslims along the India-Pakistan border. It still hurls pipebombs on the Ulster streets. The Falun Gong are killed for it, extremist Sikhs die for it too. The Pope kills millions through his reckless spreading of Aids. When absolute God-given righteousness beckons, blood flows and women are in chains. Ah, apologists say, religion is only used as a battle flag for other causes – tribalism, nationalism or ancient racial hatreds. Islam is only used (or abused) as the underdogs' banner for all those oppressed by the west. That may be so, but religious certainty is what gives other grievances their murdering edge. True, Stalin and Hitler's secular dogmas mimicked religious fervour horribly, but that only adds to the warning against any absolutist belief. … But religion is not nice, it kills: it is toxic in the places where people really believe it. It only becomes civilised when it loses all temporal power in a multicultural, secular society. Only then, as its followers dwindle, does it turn into a gentle talisman of cultural tradition, a mode of meditation with little literal belief in ancient miracles or long dead warlords. True, some of the religious do much community good: in some of the worst inner-city areas the local church is an island of community, the vicar the only professional still living there. But even there the religion tends to act as a barrier not as an asset in drawing local people together: enthusiastic non-religious organisations earn general trust more easily. Everywhere reason is under threat as a sponginess of thought blurs the line between the real and the fantastical. Psychic stuff, alternative therapies, auras, telepathies, crystals, self-obsessed mysticism is gaining ground, often passing uncriticised by those who know the difference between the proven and nonsense, but fear giving offence. It matters because once people lose sight of how to separate hard fact from wild hypothesis, they get worse at navigating a noisy world of junk information. It matters that people know how to estimate risk, how to strip away panic and calculate odds in the latest scare. They need to know that coincidence is not magic and how to tell probability from extreme improbability. People who put electronic tags in their children need to know the statistical chance of being murdered by a stranger (six a year) versus being killed on the road (3,500 a year). To understand the world, people need built-in lie detectors. That means the most important purveyors of authoritative information must be secular and as rational as they can manage. Schools, the BBC, the NHS, every state function, should avoid ever knowingly fudging the line between science and belief, between faith and fact. Religion belongs in the personal, never in the public sphere. Writing on this page recently, Giles Fraser, Oxford lecturer and Vicar of Putney, took a swing at the secularists and humanists, and in his first sentence tumbled straight into religion's biggest black hole. What would soulless atheists say about the death of the little Soham girls? Moving answers flowed in from atheists: evil, like good, is terrifyingly human. How could it help to call upon some cruel, all-powerful overseer of such horror? But leave such things to minds that enjoy inventing and then explaining impossibilist conundrums. Consider instead his accusation that secularists live parasitically on religion, defining ourselves negatively by what they are against. The Godless rationalists are spiritually shrivelled, prune-like souls, dead to wonder, awe or marvel. True, some evolutionary psychologists can be dismally over-determinist. But there is nothing lacking in the scope of human consciousness and imagination, in the human capacity for genius, good or evil with its infinite ability to surprise, invent and renew a fate entirely in human hands. Most insulting is the idea that morality comes only from the rulebook of an external God: the Godless are without moral compass. Yet morality is plainly inborn in every child as soon it cries, "Unfair!" It is this presumptuous arrogance that underpins religion's claim to a monopoly on ethics. [The Guardian, 06 September 2002]

'Trivet1'

• Why single out Islam? Are you for real? Are you really this deluded? The answer is that your co-religionists are explicitly making war all over the world on other societies. This is being done in the name of your religion and with the express intention of imposing your religion on the rest of the world by force. That does not apply to any other religion in this country. As to why single out Islam in this country, the simple (and one would have thought obvious) answer is that - unlike any other religious community in this country - people from your communities have committed terrorist atrocities in this country in the name of Islam and are continually trying to commit more. The idea that these people are nothing to do with the rest of the Islamic community is laughable. They are your friends, brothers, fathers, uncles, nephews and sons. You see them being radicalised, you see them espousing hatred, you see them 'mysteriously' going off to Syria or Pakistan and you have the opportunity to talk to them and - failing that - report them to the authorities before they do any damage. This sort of 'why us?' article just tells me that you prefer to keep your head in the sand and feel sorry for yourself rather than take some responsibility for the society in which you live and the threats posed to it by Islamic terrorism. Until your community does shoulder that responsibility, you will continue to be regarded with suspicion. [Dear Eric Pickles - Why Single Out Islam For This Patronising Treatment?, The Guardian, 20 January 2015]

Desmond Tutu

• I am deeply, deeply distressed that in the face of the most horrendous problems – we've got poverty, we've got conflict and war, we've got HIV/AIDS – and what do we concentrate on? We concentrate on what you are doing in bed. [World Social Forum, Janaury 2007]
• God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another. In the face of all of that, our Church, especially the Anglican Church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality. … If we are going to not welcome or invite people because of sexual orientation, yes [I am ashamed of the Anglican Chrurch's dealings with Rev. Gene Robinson]. If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God. [Radio 4, 27 November 2007]

Lao Tse

• If lightning is the anger of the gods, the gods are concerned mostly with trees.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

• If there is a God, he is a malign thug.
• The altar cloth of one aeon is the doormat of the next. [Notebook, 1898]
• The Bible is a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.
• Look at you in war – what mutton you are, and how ridiculous! [The Mysterious Stranger]
• There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par. [Notebook, 1904]
• A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. [
• One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it – they also believed the world was flat. [Notebook, 1900]
• Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if he is as little as that, he is beneath it.
• Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it. [Incorrect attribution: actually from The Peter Principle, 1969, by Laurence F. Peter & Raymond Hull.]
• Who are we to create a heaven and hell for ourselves, excluding animals and plants in the bargain, just because we have the power to rationalise? The Mysterious Stranger]
• I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.
• You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, 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?
• When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself. [Is Shakespeare Dead?]
• The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anaesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.
• Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race – the individual's distrust of his neighbour, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbour's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions. [The Mysterious Stranger]
• During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. [Europe And Elsewhere, 1923]
• O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved fire sides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. [The War Prayer]
• There has never been a just one, never an honourable one – on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful – as usual – will shout for the war. The pulpit will – warily and cautiously – object – at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonourable, and there is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers – as earlier – but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation – pulpit and all – will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception. [The Mysterious Stranger]

John Tyndall

• We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory. [The Belfast Address]

Cenk Uygur

• How long are we going to dance around the 800-pound gorilla in the room? The world is run by madmen. It's not just Bush and bin Laden. It is the leader of all of the countries in the Middle East, almost all of the Americas and most of the rest of the world. Have I offended you? That's too bad. Stop killing each other in the name of false and ridiculous Gods and I will stop ridiculing you. Trust me, your offence is much worse than mine. Right now as you read this, there are ignorant, hateful Muslims teaching other ignorant Muslims how to put on a suicide belt. There are orthodox Jews telling other Jews how they must never leave their "holy land" no matter what the consequences are to other human beings. They assure their followers – remember, they are not the chosen ones, we are. If we crush and oppress them, don't worry, God will excuse it, and even desires it, because He is on our side. There are maniacal Christians who are praying for the end of time. Who are hoping that most of the world's population is wiped off the face of the Earth by their vengeful and murderous God. Whom they believe is, ironically, a loving God. Unless, of course, you make the fatal mistake of not kissing his ass and appeasing him, in which case he will slaughter you and condemn you to eternal torture. What kind of sick people believe this? The kind who live next to you. The kind who voted for George Bush. The kind who send their religious leaders to the White House to argue against even-handedness in the Middle East because it would prevent their sick prophecy. The kind who have undue influence over how we use the greatest and most lethal army ever built by man. If you don't want to be called ignorant or misinformed, then get informed. Learn the real nature of our universe and put aside old wives tales about resurrected Gods, omniscient prophets and a guy who could split the Red Sea but couldn't find where he's going in the desert for forty years. It's the year 2005. Let's start acting like it. [Huffington Post, 23 October 2005]

Andy V

• Why should we, in a democratic nation, have to seek permission from an instrument of the State, in order to protest against the activities of the State? [Comment Is Free, The Guardian, 09 June 2007]

Mordechai Vanunu

• You have to know that no matter what happens, I am proud of my actions, for my revelations [of Israel's nuclear capability], for not cooperating with their lies, for not keeping silent. That is all that a man can do, to not be afraid of the power of the state; to show to all that in the nuclear age a man is obliged to all the human race. [1991]

Jesse Ventura

• Organised religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you'd want them to treat you. The religious right wants to tell people how to live. [Playboy, November 1999]
• See, we call our country home of the brave and land of the free, but it's not. We give a false portrayal of freedom. We're not free – if we were, we'd allow people their freedom. Prohibiting something doesn't make it go away. Prostitution is criminal, and bad things happen because it's run illegally by dirtbags who are criminals. If it's legal, then the girls could have health checks, unions, benefits, anything any other worker gets, and it would be far better. [Playboy, November 1999]

Michael Ventura

• The government doesn't want the people to see the real war, and the people are demanding not to know. This is the death of the republic. When the people clamour to be shielded from reality, when they praise their government for keeping things from them, when they choose to conduct their lives within the limits of whatever fantasy the government supplies, then they are no longer consenting to be governed, they are begging to be ruled.

Thomas Vernon

• Today we are witnessing such a resurgence of religious bigotry that one cannot help wondering how long it will be before "equal time" in our schools is demanded for geocentrism and flat-earthism as well as for creationism. [Great Infidels, 1989]

Veyanne

• Blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, for he has been absolved of his sin, and has no need of a conscience. [Psalms, 6:2-3]
• For I have done your bidding, I have slain mine enemies in your name. I have put women and children to death in your honour, I have caused great pain among them, for your glory, and for this they seek my death. Crush them with your might O Lord. Beat them fine as dust before the wind. Deliver me for I have done no wrong, and I do not deserve to die. [Psalms, 5:4-10]

'Uncle Vic'

• Finally, I dare to conjecture not a single Christian has pondered the meaning of eternal life. I like to ask them what they will be doing for the first 45,387,211,490,038 years of their eternal afterlives. Also, considering eternity is infinite, and there is definitely a finite number of things a human can do, adding the fact that there is a finite number of times each of these things can be done before one becomes downright suicidally bored with them, there will come a time when you will become painfully, suicidally bored with your afterlife. It will happen, mark my words, because it is a product of finite numbers of years. Let's assign a very large number to be on the safe side, 600 billion years. That's a very long time, but it is only a minute fraction of eternity. So it's not just a possibility, or even a probability, but a matter of time before you become painfully, suicidally bored with your life – to the point where you just can't face another day. How do you get out? You can't, you are immortal. It reminds me of the movie Death Becomes Her, where in the end the girls must endure their eternal lives with smelly rotting flesh dripping off their bones, limbs falling off, etc. I just can't imagine why anyone would want to live forever. [alt.atheism, 18 April 2006]

Gore Vidal

• In the name of tribal loyalty, sometimes called patriotism, the human race has committed incredible atrocities against itself.
• The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.
• Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world. [Secular Humanist Bulletin, Summer 1995]
• The great unmentionable evil at the centre of our culture is Monotheism. From a barbaric bronze age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are patriarchal – God is the omnipotent father – hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his male delegates. The sky-god is jealous. He requires total obedience. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed. Totalitarianism is the only politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family. [New Statesman Society, 26 June 1992]

John Vidal

• What happened next was the whole point of the evening. The circle believers – paranormalists, esoterics, sceptics, mystics, spiritualists, ufologists, researchers, scientists and others who plot, interpret and appreciate them – were ecstatic. They raved about a "truly significant" formation; but when I told them that I had seen it being made they threatened me with legal action, denounced me as a liar. [having spent the night watching Rod Dickinson and John Lundberg create some crop circles in 1998, The Guardian, 21 August 2001]

Volney

• To believe without evidence and demonstration is an act of ignorance and folly.

Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

• There are no sects in geometry. [Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
• Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.
• The first priest was the first rogue who met the first fool.
• It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions. [letter to François-Louis-Henri Leriche, 06 February 1770]
• God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
• Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one. [letter to Frederick II of Prussia, 06 April 1767]
• Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too. [Essay On Tolerance]
• It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong. (better known as : It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. [Le Siècle de Louis XIV, 1752]
• If God made us in his image we have certainly returned the compliment. [Notebooks]
• To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature. [Notebooks]
• Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.
• It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. [Notebooks]
• I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write. [letter to M. le Riche, 06 February 1770] According to They Never Said It, 1989, it was not Voltaire but his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall (writing as S.G. Tallentyre) who paraphrased Voltaire's attitude a regarding book censorship case in 1798. The phrase "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", is from The Friends Of Voltaire, 1906.
• The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost their power of reasoning. [Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
• Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
• A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.
• It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. [Rights, Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, 1771]
• I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous!" And God granted it. [letter to Étienne-Noel Damilaville, 16 May 1767]
• The man who says to me, "Believe as I do, or God will damn you," will presently say, "Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you."
• In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. [Money, Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, 1770-1774]
• All good Christians glory in the folly of the Cross. Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense. [Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
• Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden pathway always throw stones on those who are showing a new road.
• You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of the Church, Rome has always favoured the doctrine which most completely subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason.
• 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.
• Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. But what shall we substitute in its place? you say. What? A ferocious animal has sucked the blood of my relatives. I tell you to rid yourselves of this beast, and you ask me what you shall put in its place?
• The son of God is the same as the son of man; the son of man is the same as the son of God. God, the father, is the same as Christ, the son; Christ, the son, is the same as God, the father. This language may appear confused to unbelievers, but Christians will readily understand it.
• What can we say to a man who tells you that he would rather obey God than men, and that therefore he is sure to go to heaven for butchering you? Even the law is impotent against these attacks of rage; it is like reading a court decree to a raving maniac. These fellows are certain that the holy spirit with which they are filled is above the law, that their enthusiasm is the only law that they must obey.
• Superstition, born of paganism and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil. [Philosophical Dictionary, 1764]
• Let us therefore reject all superstition in order to become more human; but in speaking against fanaticism, let us not imitate the fanatics: they are sick men in delirium who want to chastise their doctors. Let us assuage their ills, and never embitter them, and let us pour drop by drop into their souls the divine balm of toleration, which they would reject with horror if it were offered to them all at once. [Homélies Prononcées À Londres]
• Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is unjust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust. If the God-given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world. [Questions Sur Les Miracles, 1765]

Kurt Vonnegut

• Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Frans de Waal

• Religions have a strong binding function and a cohesive element. They emphasise the primacy of the community as opposed to the individual, and they also help set one community apart from another that doesn't share their beliefs.

Frayba Wakili, Taliban refugee, University of Maryland

• Imagine being a teacher in a country where it is a crime to teach girls to count. Imagine living in a country where a child could be killed for learning the alphabet and opening a book. Imagine being beaten for organizing an underground library that distributes books to girls. This is happening in Afghanistan every day. [The Boston Globe, 01 September 2000]

Peter Walker

• This ultimately comes down to the insanely supreme arrogance of religious thinking: that a carbon-based bag of mostly water on a speck of iron-silicate dust around a boring dwarf star in a minor galaxy in an underpopulated local group of galaxies in an unfashionable suburb of a supercluster would look up at the sky and declare "It was all made so that I could exist!" [alt.atheism, November 1999]

Jill Paton Walsh

• The distinction between stirring up hatred against a person because of their religious beliefs, and expressing hatred of those beliefs in the abstract is a subtle one, and one which will certainly be lost on some of the religious leaders amongst us, and will be easily blurred in the heat of conflict. I am afraid it will become very dangerous to write about religion, or even to raise one's voice against cultural practices which are associated with a particular religious allegiance. Writers of fiction of whom I am one, are particularly vulnerable to attack, because of a widespread inability to read fictional works fictionally, so that every word in a work of fiction, and every word in the mouth of a fictional character is read as a statement of the author's view. We have been here before, In the 1970's a vociferous campaign against the alleged racism in British children's books was organised, in which people began trawling through books for objectionable words, phrases and cast lists. It became impossible to write a novel against racism, because it was dangerous to depict racism. Let a racist expression be put in the mouth of a villain in the story, let his victim be admirable and ultimately triumphant, nothing made any difference – the mere occurrence in print of the sort of language which many children were exposed to in the playground became an act of racism. Depicting black or Asian characters with any faults whatever was racist. Depicting such characters as perfectly good and likeable was racist because it offered a standard not applied to whites. Writing about black characters while not being black was cultural appropriation, not writing about them at all was racism by omission. … But it shared while it lasted the nasty witch-hunting urge to censor and suppress which is rampant again, this time applied to the adult world. The defence of tolerance against intolerance is always very difficult. In the present situation it would entail inviting the adherents of exogenic religions who live among us to accept that they must tolerate the customs and legal systems that have made our society attractive to them, as the price of being tolerated themselves. It is a profound moral duty not to claim for oneself what one will not concede to others. And the major difficulty here is the survival of the Blasphemy Act into an age which can hardly tell what blasphemy is. Our problems are not confined to exogenic religions, we have a resurgence of Christian intolerance of an aggressive and unpleasant kind. … Does heresy sound to you like a quaint old-fashioned and fusty sort of thing? But the Church of England that has struggled through blood-bolstered centuries of murderous faction to arrive at a mild inclusiveness, a brotherly tolerance, is discussing re-introducing heresy trials! … The Government should repeal the Blasphemy Act, pass no new legislation that limits freedom of speech, and energetically enforce the laws of criminal libel, which already protect us all from inflammatory rhetoric inciting violence. [Index On Censorship, 01/2005]

'Warchild'

• Why is it the modern 'conservative' thinks that any anti-fascist sentiment is an attack on them? Is that what they see when they look in the mirror? [replying to someone critical of the film V For Vendetta, alt.atheism, 17 March 2006]

Ibn Warraq (A pseudonym used by various authors to avoid fatwas and angry mobs calling for their death for the victimless 'crime' of blasphemy, or mere criticism of outdated / irrational dogma.)

• All religions are sick men's dreams, false – demonstrably false – and pernicious.
• We denounce the violence that is eulogised in the Qur'an as holy war (Jihad). We condemn killing in the name of God. We believe in the sanctity of human life, not in the inviolability of beliefs and religions. We invite you to join us and the rest of humanity and become part of the family of humankind – in love, camaraderie and peace.
• Islam is not a religion of peace, of tolerance, of equality or of unity of humankind. Let us read the Qur'an. Let us face the truth even if it is painful. As long as we keep this lie alive, as long as we hide our head in the sands of Arabia we are feeding terrorism. As long as you and I keep calling Qur'an the unchangeable book of God, we cannot blame those who follow the teachings therein. As long as we pay our Khums and Zakat our money goes to promote Islamic expansionism and that means terrorism, Jihad and war. Islam divides the world in two. Darul Harb (land of war) and Darul Islam (land of Islam). Darul Harb is the land of the infidels, Muslims are required to infiltrate those lands, proselytise and procreate until their numbers increase and then start the war and fight and kill the people and impose the religion of Islam on them and convert that land into Darul Islam. In all fairness we denounce this betrayal. This is abuse of the trust. How can we make war in the countries that have sheltered us? How can we kill those who have befriended us? Yet willingly or unwillingly we have become pawns in this Islamic Imperialism.
• Yes we have contributed to the rise of fundamentalism by merely claiming Islam is a religion of peace, by simply being a Muslim and by saying our shahada (testimony that Allah is the only God and Muhammad is his messenger). By our shahada we have recognised Muhammad as a true messenger of God and his book as the words of God. But as you saw above those words are anything but from God. They call for killing, they are prescriptions for hate and they foment intolerance. And when the ignorant among us read those hate-laden verses, they act on them and the result is the infamous September 11, human bombs in Israel, massacres in East Timor and Bangladesh, kidnappings and killings in the Philippines, slavery in the Sudan, honour killings in Pakistan and Jordan, torture in Iran, stoning and maiming in Afghanistan and Iran, violence in Algeria, terrorism in Palestine and misery and death in every Islamic country. We are responsible because we endorse Islam and hail it as a religion of God. And we are as guilty as those who put into practice what the Qur'an preaches – and ironically we are the main victims too. If we are not terrorists, if we love peace, if we cried with the rest of the word for what happened in New York, then why are we supporting the Qur'an that preaches killing, that advocates holy war, that calls for the murder of non-Muslims? It is not the extremists who have misunderstood Islam. They do literally what the Qur'an asks them to do. It is we who misunderstand Islam. We are the ones who are confused. We are the ones who wrongly assume that Islam is the religion of peace. Islam is not a religion of peace. In its so-called "pure" form it can very well be interpreted as a doctrine of hate. Terrorists are doing just that and we the intellectual apologists of Islam are justifying it. We can stop this madness. Yes, we can avert the disaster that is hovering over our heads. Yes, we can denounce the doctrines that promote hate. Yes, we can embrace the rest of humanity with love. Yes, we can become part of a united world, members of one human family, flowers of one garden. We can dump the claim of infallibility of our Book, and the questionable legacy of our Prophet.

Michael Wasdin

• When will people learn that it does not matter who you vote for, government still gets elected? I have not participated in the sham known as voting for 12 years now, and I am ashamed that I ever did. There is nothing more brain dead than the people who walk around with their "I voted" pins stuck to their clothes on Election Day. To me it resembles a large beacon flashing the word "moron" over and over again. I must confess that I take pleasure in watching the mindless in action, and I have been known to watch the circus known as the Republican and Democratic conventions (for entertainment value only). I truly enjoy watching the glazed over look the sheep get in their eyes as they wave their campaign sign for their candidate, and think to themselves, "If we could only get our man in office, then all would be right again." With every election cycle, I know that the sheep will be too stupid to realize that if voting worked, it would be illegal, and they always manage to live up to my expectations of them as they stumble into the voting booths for another round. The problem seems to be that we just have not found the right man yet. Looking back, I really envy the little boy in the movie The Sixth Sense because his only fear was that of dead people, and dead people don't vote. I, on the other hand, have to live the rest of my life in fear of Brain Dead People. [Prisonplanet.com,16 September 2004]

Lemuel K. Washburn

• Do not thank God for what man does. [Is the Bible Worth Reading?]
• The feet of progress have always been shod by doubt. [Is the Bible Worth Reading?]
• The cross everywhere is a dagger in the heart of liberty. [Is The Bible Worth Reading?]
• Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion. [Is the Bible Worth Reading?]
• A miracle is not an explanation of what we cannot comprehend. [Is the Bible Worth Reading?]
• Where are the sons of gods that loved the daughters of men? Where are the nymphs, the goddesses of the winds and waters? Where are the gnomes that lived inside the earth? Where are the goblins that used to play tricks on mortals? Where are the fairies that could blight or bless the human heart? Where are the ghosts that haunted this globe? Where are the witches that flew in and out of the homes of men? Where is the devil that once roamed over the earth? Where are they? Gone with the ignorance that believed in them. [Is the Bible Worth Reading?]

Anne Marie Waters

• …the problem with multiculturalism and cultural relativism - when you can't bring yourself to say you are morally superior to a group that denies women medical treatment, imprisons them in their homes, allows domestic violence, and executes people by stoning for having a private life or the audacity to not believe in God… [Are You Morally Superior To The Taliban?], 28 March 2012
• If a white family took a blade to their young daughter's genitals, they would be in jail and the child in care. So what's the difference? Are we saying that it is less of an evil to harm a young black or Asian girl or that her body is worth less? This is what multiculturalism has brought. It dehumanises young girls and makes them less important than their white counterparts. What constitutes rape and abuse for a white girl dramatically becomes "culture" (a wholly positive thing that does not change and cannot be challenged) for a black or Asian girl. It is a national disgrace. [Are You Morally Superior To The Taliban?], 28 March 2012
• We can have a thriving multi-faith, multi-race, multi-ethnic society while enforcing the law and ensuring that all people, regardless of their colour or religion or ethnic background, receive the same treatment and protection. That's all it takes - equal and fair application of the law. It is not rocket science. All people should be equal citizens - this is the only response. Let's continue to enjoy the mixture of food, music, festivals, philosophies, and viewpoints that a mixed and vibrant society brings. But let's not pretend that allowing black and Asian girls to be treated with cruelty that we would never allow for a white girl, makes this multiculturalism anything other than the vile filth of racism. [Are You Morally Superior To The Taliban?], 28 March 2012
• We need to get this clear - race is not culture. Race is a skin colour or national or ethnic grouping and it gives no indication whatsoever of who a person is or what they stand for. Culture, on the other hand, is a series of actions which are routinely carried out within any defined community and are usually based on tradition or religion or both. If we define culture as a set of actions, and some of those actions amount to the forced enslavement and rape of young girls, then that can and should be condemned - culture or not. Cultural practices have always been condemned, fought against, and changed. It has happened all across history; it is called progress. Wasn't it the culture of apartheid South Africa to treat black people as second class citizens? Wasn't it the culture of the Deep South to keep slaves or segregate black from white? Yes it was, but we fought it anyway and we changed the culture for the better. This is what needs to happen now. We've got to start holding criminals to account and prosecuting and punishing people when they commit crimes - no matter what 'culture' they profess. We must do this because it is the only way to provide equal protect