QUOTATONS: Random Free Thoughts

• “An eye for an eye makes us all blind.” (Mohandas Gandhi)

• “In this tendency to accept what we find, to believe what we are told, is at once good and evil. It is this which makes social advance possible; it is this which makes it so slow and painful. It is thus tyranny is maintained and superstition perpetuated.” (Henry George, Social Problems)
• “No theory is too false, no fable too absurd, no superstition too degrading for acceptance when it has become imbedded 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.” (Henry George, Social Problems)

• “Is it really God that created man or is it the opposite?” (Kahlil Gibran)

• “There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

• “We are the most Christian nation on the planet, yet we have more guns. We live in a society where most folks would react more strongly to registering their guns than registering their children.” (Dick Gregory)
• “We got churches that have a Jew on the cross that wouldn’t permit a Jew in the church.” (Dick Gregory)

• “Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.” (Whitney Griswold, New York Times, February 14, 1959)

• "Faith is generally nothing more than the permission religious people give to one another to believe things strongly without evidence." (Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, 2006)

• “A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.” (Ellis Havelock)

• “The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people; I was saved, they were damned.... Our hymns were loaded with arrogance -- self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come Judgment Day.” (Robert Heinlein quoted by Laurence J Peter, in, Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief)

• “All thinking men are atheists.” (Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms)
• “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.” (Ernest Hemingway, An Interview with Ernest Hemingway by George Plimpton)

• “I am 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.” (Katharine Hepburn)
• “Our Constitution was not intended to be used by any group to foist its personal religious beliefs on the rest of us.” (Katharine Hepburn)

• “Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that thay are all wrong.” (Christopher Hitchens, The Atheist’s Bible, Joan Konner, ed. 2007)

• “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.” (Eric Hoffer)

• “The longing for certainty and repose is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)
• “We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the supersitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)

• “There is in every village a torch - the teacher; and an extinguisher - the clergyman.” (Victor Hugo)

• “Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.” (Aldous Huxley)
• “If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make believe.” (Aldous Huxley)
• “You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.” (Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, 1932)