Hesiod (700s BCE):
"Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor."

Isaiah (700s BCE):
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are you ways my ways." [citing God] [from Isaiah 55:8]

Micah (700s BCE):
"He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" [from Micah 6:8]

Job [uncertain of author/date] (500s BCE):
"What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" [from Job 2:10]
"[God] Which doeth great things past finding out; yea, and wonders without number. Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not: he passeth on also, but I perceive him not. Behold, he taketh away, who can hinder him? Who will say unto him, What doest thou?" [from Job 9:10-12]
"I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause: Which doeth great things and unsearchable; marvellous things without number." [citing Eliphaz the Temanite] [from Job 5:8-9]
"Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? [citing Zophar the Naamathite] [from Job 11:7]
"I will fetch my knowledge from afar, and will ascribe righteousness to my Maker." [citing Elihu] [from Job 36:3]
"Behold, God is great, and we know him not, neither can the number of his years be searched out." [citing Elihu] [from Job 36:26]
"Hearken unto this, O Job: stand still, and consider the wondrous works of God." [citing Elihu] [from Job 37:14]

Aesop (620-560 BCE):
"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."
"He that serves God for money will serve the Devil for better wages."

Anaximander (611-547 BCE):
"The infinite ... is the divine, for it is immortal and indestructible."

Pythagoras (580-500 BCE):
"At its deepest level, reality is mathematical in nature, ... philosophy can be used for spiritual purification, [and] ... the soul can rise to union with the divine."

Buddha [Siddhartha Gautama] (563-483 BCE):
"Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely."
"Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love."
"You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."
"My mind shall not be disturbed; no angry word shall escape my lips; I will remain kind and friendly, with loving thoughts and no secret spite."
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it - even if I have said it - unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
"Believe not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your national belief, believe not because you have been made to believe from your childhood, but reason truth out, and after you have analyzed it, then if you find it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it and help others live up to it."

Confucius (551-479 BCE):
"What you do not like done to yourself, do not unto others."
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it."
"To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice."
"Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors."
"The firm, the enduring, the simple and the modest are near to virtue."
"The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home."
"The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort."

Euripides (484-404 BCE):
"Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish."

Socrates (469-399 BCE):
"Know thyself."
"Wisdom begins in wonder."
"There is only one evil - ignorance."

Thucydides (460-400 BCE):
"We secure our friends not by accepting favors, but by doing them."

Plato (426-347 BCE):
"The beginning is the most important part of the work."
"Trees and fields tell me nothing: men are my teachers."
"The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible, and partakes of reason and harmony, and being made by the best of intellectual and everlasting natures, is the best of things created."
"Was the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning? Or created, and had it a beginning? Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense and are in a process of creation and created. Now that which is created must, as we affirm, of necessity be created by a cause. But the father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible."

Aristotle (384-322 BCE):
"Happiness depends upon ourselves."
"In the arena of human life the honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action."
"There is something which always moves the things that are in motion, and the first mover is itself unmoved."
"One actuality always precedes another in time right back to the actuality of the eternal prime mover."
"The infinite has no beginning, ... but seems to be the beginning of other things, and to surround all things and guide all ... And this is the divine, for it is immortal and indestructible."

Epicurus (341-270 BCE):
"Justice's greatest reward is peace of mind."
"Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth."
"Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?"

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE):
"Of two evils, the least should be chosen."
"An acute, first-class brain is the finest asset anyone can have. And if we want to be happy, it is an asset we must exploit to the utmost."

Horace (65-8 BCE):
"Force without wisdom falls of its own weight."
"Remember when life's path is steep to keep your mind even."

Lucius Annaeus Seneca [the Younger] (4 BCE-65CE):
"It is difficult to change nature."
"Time heals what reason cannot."
"Life is too short to figure out what it's all about, all by ourselves."
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."

Matthew [the Apostle] (-):
"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." [citing Jesus] [from Matthew 7:12]

Mark [the Apostle] (-):
"And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength ... And ... Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." [citing Jesus] [from Mark 12:30-31]

Luke [the Apostle] (-):
"It is more blessed to give than receive." [citing Jesus] [from Acts 20:35]
"And herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men." [citing Paul] [from Acts 24:16]

John [the Apostle] (-):
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." [citing Jesus] [from John 8:32]
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." [citing Jesus] [from John 15:13]

Paul [the Apostle] (3-67):
"Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power." [from Romans 1:19-20]
"But to us there is but one God." [from I Corinthians 8:6]
"God is not the author of confusion, but of peace." [from I Corinthians 14:33]
"For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? For ye shall speak into the air. There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification." [from I Corinthians 14:8-10]
"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" [from I Corinthians 15:55]

Plutarch (46-120):
"The infinite is the universal cause of the generation and destruction of the universe. From it ... the heavens were separated off and all the infinite worlds."

Epictetus (60-117):
"Don't surrender your mind."
"Nothing truly stops you. Nothing truly holds you back. For your own will is always within your control."
"When we remember that our aim is spiritual progress, we return to striving to be our best selves. This is how happiness is won."

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180):
"We are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature."
"The nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things that are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be."
"Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, o Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, o nature; from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return."
"This you must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no-one who hinders you from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which you are a part."
"If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you might be bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with your present activity according to nature ... you will be happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this."
"Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web."
"Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end your journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew."
"Every part of me will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another part of the universe. and so on forever. And by consequence of such a change I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on forever in the other direction."

Plotinus (205-270):
"The One, perfect in seeking nothing, possessing nothing and needing nothing, overflows and creates a new reality by its superabundance."
"This All is universal power, of infinite extent and infinite in potency, a god so great that all his parts are infinite. Name any place, and he is already there."
"Our thought cannot grasp the One as long as any other image remains active in the soul. ... To this end, you must set free your soul from all outward things and turn wholly within yourself, with no more leaning to what lies outside, and lay your mind bare of ideal forms, as before of the objects of sense, and forget even yourself, and so come within sight of that One."
"A sympathy pervades this single universe, like a single living creature, and the distant is near. ... Like parts lie not in contact but separated, with other parts between, yet by their likeness they feel sympathy ... and in a living and unified being there is no part so remote as not to be near, through the very nature that binds the living unity in sympathy."

Saint [Aurelius] Augustine (354-430):
"Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil."

John Scotus Erigena (810-877):
"When we hear that God makes all things, we should understand nothing else but that God is in all things, i.e. is the essence of all things. For He alone truly is, and everything which is truly said to be in those things which are, is God alone."

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274):
"The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature and perfection the perfectible."

John Duns Scotus (1266-1308):
"[The will of God is] illumined by the divine intellect and that the primacy of the will of God does not negate this natural order, which is valid also in God."

William of Occam (1280-1349):
"One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything."

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543):
"Although I know that the meditations of a philosopher are far removed from the judgment of the laity, because his endeavor is to seek out the truth in all things, so far as this is permitted by God to the human reason, I still believe that one must avoid theories altogether foreign to orthodoxy."

John Heywood (1497-1580):
"One good turn desires another."
"Two heads are better than one."
"Strike when the iron is hot."
"This hits the nail on the head."
"Haste makes waste."
"Hold their noses to the grindstone."
"Nothing ventured, nothing gained."
"Many hands make light work."
"Rome was not built in one day."
"To rob Peter and pay Paul."
"Beggars should not be choosers."
"A penny for your thought."
"You stand in your own light."
"Leap out of the frying pan and into the fire."

Michael Servetus (1511-1553):
"Not one word is found in the whole Bible about the Trinity nor about its persons, nor about the essence nor the unity of substance nor of the one nature of the several beings."

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592):
"Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know."
"O senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm and yet will make Gods by the dozen!"

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600):
"All things are in the universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us: and in this way everything harmonizes in perfect unity."

Johannes Althusius (1557-1638):
"All power is limited by definite boundaries and laws. No power is absolute, infinite, unbridled, arbitrary, and lawless. Every power is bound to laws, right, and equity."

Francis Bacon (1561-1626):
"Knowledge is power."
"Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper. "
"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds."
"No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth."

William Shakespeare (1564-1616):
"The better part of valour is discretion." [from King Henry IV]
"A brave man dies but once, a coward dies many deaths." [from Julius Caesar]
"Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings." [from Julius Caesar]
"The course of true love never did run smooth." [from A Midsummer Night's Dream]
"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." [from The Merchant Of Venice]
"God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man." [from The Merchant Of Venice]
"In nature's infinite book of secrecy A little I can read." [from Antony and Cleopatra]
"O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!" [from Othello]
"How bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes!" [from As You Like It]
"Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow." [from Romeo And Juliet]
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." [from Romeo And Juliet]
"The rest is slience." [from Hamlet]
"Brevity is the soul of wit." [from Hamlet]
"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below." [from Hamlet]
"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will." [from Hamlet]
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." [from Hamlet]
"This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man." [from Hamlet]
"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them." [from Hamlet]

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642):
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."
"The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."

Jacob Boehme (1575-1624):
"For according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world. ... Since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages."
"But when this had given me many a hard blow, doubtless from the Spirit that had a desire for me, I finally fell into great sadness and melancholy, when I viewed the great depth of this world, the sun and the stars and the clouds, rain and snow, and contemplated in my mind the whole creation of this world."

Lord [Edward] Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648):
"Truth is a certain harmony between objects and their analogous faculties."
"[Five Articles of Deism are] (1) that there is a supreme Deity; (2) that this Deity ought to be worshipped; (3) that virtue combined with piety is the chief part of divine worship; (4) that men should repent of their sins and turn from them; (5) that reward and punishment follow from the goodness and justice of God, both in this life and after it."
"Our mind is the the highest image and type of the divinity, and hence whatever is true or good in us exists in supreme degree in God. Following out this opinion, we believe that the divine image has also communicated itself to the body. But, as in the propagation of light there is growing loss of distinctness as it gets farther from its source, so that divine image, which shines clearly in our living and free unity, first communicates itself to natural instinct or the common reason of its providence, then extends to the numberless internal and external faculties (analogous to particular objects), closes into shade and body, and sometimes seems as it were to retreat into matter itself."

William Drummond (1585-1649):
"He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave."

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679):
"For words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools."
"From the two principal parts of our nature, Reason and Passion, have proceeded two kinds of learning, mathematical and dogmatical."

Rene' Descartes (1596-1650):
"I think, therefore I am."
"It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well."

Roger Williams (1603-1683):
"All civil states, with their officers of justice, in their respective constitutions and administrations, are proved essentially civil, and therefore not judges, governors, or defenders of the spiritual, or Christian, state and worship."
"A Pagan or Antichristian Pilot may be as skillful to carry the Ship to its desired Port, as any Christian Mariner or Pilot in the World, and may perform that work with as much safety and speed. God requireth not an Uniformity of Religion to be inacted and enforced in any Civil State."

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):
"Do you wish people to speak well of you? Don't speak well of yourself."
"We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything."
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
"We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others."

John Ray (1627-1705):
"It is not how long, but how well we live."

Richard Cumberland (1631-1718):
"It is better to wear out than to rust out."
"[The Law of Nature] will chiefly promote the common Good, and by which only the entire Happiness of particular Persons can be obtained."

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677):
"That which constitutes the reality of a true thought must be sought in the thought itself, and deduced from the nature of the understanding."
"Observe that it is thereby manifest that we cannot understand anything of nature without at the same time increasing our knowledge of the first cause, or God."

John Locke (1632-1704):
"The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts."
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not common."
"The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."

Nicholas Malebranche (1638-1715):
"For it is not only consonant to Reason, but it also appears by the economy of Nature, that God never does by very difficult means, what may be done by a plain easy way: God does nothing in vain and without Reason: That which shows his Wisdom and his Power, is not to do little things by difficult Means; for that is repugnant to Reason, and shows a limited Knowledge: But on the contrary, it is to do great things by plain easy Means."

Isaac Newton (1642-1727):
"We are to admit no more causes of natural things, than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
"It is the temper of the hot and superstitious art of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they understand least."

Gottried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716):
"The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe."
"The existential value of the individual, who is not to be explained either by matter alone or by form alone but rather by his whole being."

Charles Blount (1654-1693):
"I my self am king of me."
"Faith is like a piece of blank paper whereon you may write as well one miracle as another."

Matthew Tindal (1657-1733):
"And if God designed all, Mankind should at all times know, what he wills them to know, believe, profess, and practice; and has given them no other Means for this, but the Use of Reason; Reason, human Reason must then be that Means: For as God has made us rational Creatures, and Reason tells us, that 'tis his Will, that we act up to the Dignity of our Natures; so 'tis Reason must tell when we do so."

Earl of Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper] (1671-1713):
"Life, and the sensations which accompany life, come when they will, are from mere nature and nothing else. Therefore, if you dislike the word innate, let us change it, if you will, for instinct, and call instinct that which nature teaches, exclusive of art, culture, or discipline."
"Some moral and philosophical truths there are withal so evident in themselves, that it would be easier to imagine half mankind too have run mad, and joined precisely in one and the same species of folly, than to admit any thing as truth which should be advanced against such natural knowledge, fundamental reason, and common sense."
"[In the universal design of things] nothing is supernumerary or unnecessary, the whole is harmony, the numbers entire, the music perfect."

Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729):
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."

Henry St. John Bolingbroke (1678-1751):
"Reason collects the will of God from the constitution of things, in this as in other cases; but in no case does the divine power impel us necessarily to conform ourselves to this will: and therefore from the misapplication of superior parts to the hurt, no argument can be drawn against this position, that they were given for the good of mankind. Reason deceive us not: we deceive ourselves, and suffer our wills to be determined by other motives."

George Berkeley (1685-1753):
"God seems to choose the convincing our reason of His attributes by the works of nature, which discover so much harmony and contrivance in their make, and are such plain indications of wisdom and beneficence in their Author, rather than to astonish us into a belief of His Being by anomalous and surprising events."

Alexander Pope (1688-1744):
"To err is human, to forgive divine."
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast."
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
"A little learning [knowledge] is a dangerous thing."
"On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale."
"'Tis education forms the common mind; Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined."
"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man."
"All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, whatever is, is right."

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1782):
"Civility costs nothing and buys everything."

Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746):
"This superior power of perception is justly called a sense, because of its affinity to the other senses in this, that the pleasure does not arise from any knowledge of principles, proportions, causes or of the usefulness of the object; but strikes us at first with the idea of beauty."

Voltaire [Francois Marie Arouet] (1694-1778):
"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him."
"No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
"Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror."
"Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense."
"Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world."

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758):
"The beauty of the world consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either within itself, or with the Supreme Being. As to the corporeal world, though there are many other sorts of consents, yet the sweetest and most charming beauty of it is its resemblance of spiritual beauties. The reason is that spiritual beauties are infinitely the greatest, and bodies being but the shadows of beings, they must be so much the more charming as they shadow forth spiritual beauties. This beauty is peculiar to natural things, it surpassing the art of man."

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790):
"Waste not, want not."
"A penny saved is a penny earned."
"Little strokes fell great oaks."
"One today is worth two tomorrows."
"The doors of wisdom are never shut."
"Diligence is the mother of good luck."
"There was never a good war or a bad peace."
"He is a fool that makes his doctor his heir."
"He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals."
"In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes."
"Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today."
"Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
"If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
"God helps them that help themselves."
"Original sin was as ridiculous as imputed righteousness."
"You can not legislate morality, but you must regulate behavior."
"Take courage mortal, death cannot banish you from the universe."
"I attribute the mentioned happiness of my past life to his divine providence, which led me to the means I used and gave the success."
"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."
"I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... I mean real good works ... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity."
"Having experienced the goodness of that Being in conducting me prosperously through a long life, I have no doubt of its continuance in the next, though with the smallest conceit of meriting such goodness."
"That there is one God, who made all things. That he governs the world by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped by adoration, prayer, and thanksgiving. But that the most acceptable service to God is doing good to man. That the soul is immortal. And that God will certainly reward virtue and punish vice, either here or hereafter."

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784):
"The great source of pleasure is variety."
"It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives."
"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind."

David Hume (1711-1776):
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless ... its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."
"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."

Frederick the Great (1712-1786):
"You will certainly grant me that neither antiquity nor whatever nation has devised a more repulsive and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating your God. This is the most disgusting dogma of Christian religion, the greatest insult to the Highest Being, the climax of madness and insanity."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788):
"Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well."
"I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of beings, in identifying myself with the whole of nature."

Denis Diderot (1713-1784):
"Distance is a great promoter of admiration!"
"In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go."
"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."

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804):
"Objects must conform to our cognition."
"So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world."

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
"Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting."
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
"Guilt is never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion."

George Washington (1732-1799):
"Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth."
"Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion."

John Dickinson (1732-1808):
"By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall."

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804):
"Absurdity supported by power will never be able to stand its ground against the efforts of reason."
"The doctrine of eternal torments is altogether indefensible on any principles of justice or equity; for all the crimes of finite creatures being, of finite, cannot in equity deserve infinite punishment."

John Adams (1735-1826):
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity."
"The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."
"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?"

Patrick Henry (1736-1799):
"I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death."
"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience."

Thomas Paine (1737-1809):
"These are the times that try men's souls."
"God is the power of first cause, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon."
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other and I trust I never shall."
"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law."
"I consider myself in the hands of my Creator, and that he will dispose of me after this life consistently with His justice and goodness."
"The creation is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator himself, the certainty of His existence and the immutability of His power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries."
"The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God."
"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 monopolize power and profit."

Ethan Allen (1738-1789):
"Ungrateful and foolish it must be for rational beings in the possession of existence, and surrounded with a kind and almighty Providence, to distrust the author thereof concerning their futurity, because they cannot comprehend the mode or manner of their succeeding and progressive existence."
"Those who invalidate reason, ought seriously to consider, whether they argue against reason, with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle, that they are laboring to dethrone; but if they argue without reason, (which, in order to be consistent with themselves, they must do,) they are out of the reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument."

Jacques Delille (1738-1813):
"Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends."

William Paley (1743-1805):
"The hinges in the wings of an earwig, and the joints of its antennae, are as highly wrought, as if the Creator had nothing else to finish. We see no signs of dimunition of care by multiplicity of objects, or of distraction of thought by variety. We have no reason to fear, therefore, our being forgotten, or overlooked, or neglected."

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826):
"A little rebellion now and then is a good thing."
"The government which governs best, governs least."
"No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity."
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."
"Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies."
"I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility to all forms of domination over the minds of man."
"All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution."
"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man."
"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."
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
"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."
"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression."
"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."
"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
"It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolt those who think for themselves."
"Religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions. I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise therof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832):
"Ethics at large may be defined, the art of directing men's actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832):
"One must be something in order to do something."
"We are all shaped and fashioned by what we love."

James Madison (1751-1836):
"Conscience is the most sacred of all property."
"In no instance have ... the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people."
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." [from The First Amendment to The United States Constitution]
"The civil government ... functions with complete success ... by the total separation of the Church from the State."
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."
"We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth that religion, or the duty which we owe our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man: and that it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate."

Joseph Joubert (1754-1824):
"Imagination is the eye of the soul."
"Children have more need of models than of critics."
"Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them."
"It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it."

Nathan Hale (1755-1776):
"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804):
"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything."

Johann Christoph von Schiller (1759-1805):
"Live and let live."
"[He] Who dares nothing, need hope for nothing."

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814):
"God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life."

Elihu Palmer (1764-1806):
"A religion mingled with persecution and malice cannot be of divine origin."
"There can be no human authority to which man ought to be amenable for his religious opinions."
"Reason, which is the glory of our nature, is destined eventually, in the progress of future ages, to overturn the empire of superstition ... then the empire of reason, of science, and of virtue, will extend over the whole earth."
"Deism declares, that the practice of a pure, natural, and uncorrupted virtue, is the essential duty, and constitutes the highest dignity of man; that the powers of man are competent to all the great purposes of human existence; that science, virtue, and happiness are the great objects which ought to awake the mental energies, and draw forth the moral affections of the human race."

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821):
"All religions have been made by men."
"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834):
"A sadder and wiser man, he rose the morrow morn."

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854):
"Reality cannot be derived from reason, and chaos, lack of order, impulse and desire partly dominate in reality; these are, in short, unreasoning or irrational powers."

Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832):
"When you have nothing to say, say nothing."
"True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost."

Daniel Webster (1782-1852):
"Repression is the seed of revolution."
"Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822):
"If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced?"
"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."

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881):
"All work is as seed sown, it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew."
"A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason."

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851):
"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye."
"It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized dust - ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream."

Auguste Comte (1798-1857):
"Live for others."
"I have naturally ceased believing in God."
"The object of all my labor has been to re-establish in society something spiritual that is capable of counter-balancing the influence of the ignoble materialism in which we are at present submerged."

Helmuth Karl von Moltke (1800-1891):
"First ponder, then dare."

Victor Hugo (1802-1885):
"The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness."
"It's wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?"
"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins; which of the two has a grander view?"
"There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched."

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869):
"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils."

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873):
"The pen is mightier than the sword."

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882):
"Hitch your wagon to a star."
"The only way to have a friend is to be one."
"The years teach much that the days do not know."
"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn."
"The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it."
"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."
"Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes."
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
"Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions."
"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."
"I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching."
"As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way. "
"All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation."
"The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God ... When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with [God's] presence. It is a doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust ... He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being."

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (1804-1872):
"Man first unconsciously and involuntarily creates God in his own image, and after this, God (Religion) consciously and voluntarily creates man in his own image."

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881):
"Their hearts are in the right place."
"Nurture your mind with great thoughts."
"What we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expected generally happens."
"The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own."

Elizur Wright (1804-1885):
"I don't believe in the God of books ... I don't believe in anything but facts appreciated by some degree of evidence."

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873):
"Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness."
"There is a circle around every individual human being, which no government, be it that of one, of a few, or of the many, ought to be permitted to overstep."
"The essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object, recognized as of the highest excellence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of desire."
"For, however offensive the proposition may appear to many religious persons, they should be willing to look in the face the undeniable fact that the order of nature, in so far as unmodified by man, is such as no being, whose attributes are justice and benevolence, would have made with the intention that his rational creatures should follow it as an example."

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865):
"Let the people know the truth and the country is safe."
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
"When I do good I feel good; when I do bad I feel bad; and that's my religion."
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right."
"You can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time."
"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."
"My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them."

Charles Darwin (1809-1882):
"I do not believe in any revelation. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities."
"It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science."

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892):
"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."
"'Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all."
"Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower - but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is."
"Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar When I put out to sea ... For thro' from out our borne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar."

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894):
"A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience."
"Speak clearly if you speak at all; Carve every word before you let it fall."
"Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like."
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

Horace Greeley (1811-1872):
"Go West, young man."
"Apathy is a sort of living oblivion."
"I exchanged the severe creed of my orthodox neighbors for a kinder one of my own devising."
"Isolation is at war with efficiency and progress. As iron sharpeneth iron, so are man's intellectual and inventive faculties stimulated by contact with his fellow men."

James McCosh (1811-1894):
"He who would obtain an adequate and comprehensive view of our complex mental nature must not be satisfied with occasional glances at the workings of his own soul: he must take a survey of the thoughts and feelings of others so far as he can gather them from their deeds and from their words; from the acts of mankind generally."

Charles Dickens (1812-1870):
"Such is life."
"A loving heart is the truest wisdom."

Robert Browning (1812-1889):
"Our aspirations are our possibilities."
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
"Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays."

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902):
"Rationalism took the place of religion, and reason triumphed over superstition."
"The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation."
"That disabused my mind of hell and the devil and of a cruel, avenging God, and I have never believed in them since."

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862):
"Be not simply good, be good for something."
"It is the greatest of advantages to enjoy no advantage at all."
"What other liberty is worth having if we have not freedom and peace in our minds."
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."
"Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe."
"If a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined then he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Karl Marx (1818-1883):
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people, which made this suffering bearable."

George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] (1819-1880):
"Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are."
"The old religion said 'Heaven help us!' Our new one, from its very lack of that faith in a heaven, will teach us all the more to help one another."

Herman Melville (1819-1891):
"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903):
"Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries or distinctions of race."

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906):
"I was born a heretic. I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows."

Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881):
"Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius."

Edward John Phelps (1822-1900):
"The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything."

Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885):
"The States shall be required to afford the opportunity of a good common-school education to every child within their limits. No sectarian tenets shall ever be taught in any school supported in whole or in part by the State, nation, or by the proceeds of any tax levied upon any community. Declare church and state forever separate and distinct, but each free within their proper spheres; and that all church property shall bear its own proportion of taxation."

William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889):
"Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind."

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895):
"The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom."
"The only question which a wise man can ask himself is whether a doctrine is true or false. Consequences will take care of themselves."
"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin."

Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899):
"The universe is all the God there is."
"With soap, baptism is a good thing."
"Anger blows out the lamp of the mind."
"Our ignorance is God; what we know is science."
"The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know."

Armin Vambery (1832-1913):
"One grain of common sense is worth a bushel of theories."
"Religion offers but little security against moral deterioration, and it is not seemly for the 20th Century to take example by the customs and doings of savages."

Lord [John Emerich Edward] Acton (1834-1902):
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Samuel Butler (1835-1902):
"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."
"If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him."

Charles Watts (1835-1906):
"It seems most unreasonable to expect that all mankind, with their different trainings and varied mental capacities, should be compelled to accept one particular faith under a threat of the infliction of a most cruel and agonizing penalty."
"Now, if it is unreasonable to believe that anything could come into existence without a cause, what about the alleged First Cause, which is held to be 'uncaused'? Is it not more reasonable to believe in the eternity of that of which we know something than in the uncaused existence of that of which we know nothing?"
"The mutability which has hitherto characterized the Christian religion will, in all probability, continue as knowledge increases and mental freedom expands. It must not be forgotten, moreover, that, if Christianity were perfect at its inception, every subsequent change must necessarily have deteriorated its value; while, if it were not perfect at its origin, and if the alterations which it has undergone have improved it, then its present condition is the result of man's ingenuity, and the faith of today is not the production of what is called Divinity."
"The defenders of the claims of Christianity seem to ignore the following logical conclusions from their preipises: If the Christian Deity be the creator of all things, then he must necessarily be the 'God of Nature,' and, in consequence, he is responsible for the pain and misery produced by such calamities as volcanoes, with their red-hot lava; the earthquakes and epidemics that destroy millions of human beings; ... and the storms at sea. Now, these calamities occur either with or without God's interference. If with his interference, he is not all-good; if without, he is not kind and benevolent; and if they happen in spite of him, he is not all-powerful."
"That cruel and unjust as nature is (which it ought not to be if it is the production of a good God), in it are contained the remedies for all the evils that can be removed. When this nature is modified and improved by man, it is found to be the only source from which the means are obtained that enable us to augment human happiness, and to promote the physical, intellectual, and ethical advancement of the human race."

Mark Twain [Samuel Clemens] (1835-1910):
"When in doubt, tell the truth."
"Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it."
"Always tell the truth; then you don't have to remember anything."
"A good lie will have traveled half way around the world while the truth is putting on her boots."
"A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval."
"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
"Faith is believing something you know ain't true."
"Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its one sure defense."
"'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true."
"[The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology."
"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."
"Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of."
"[I] do not fear death. [I] had been dead for billions and billions of years before [I] was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
"There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you."
"If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad."
"I am plenty safe enough in his hands; I am not in any danger from that kind of a Diety. The one that I want to keep out of the reach of, is the caricature of him which one finds in the Bible."
"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness. ... It is
perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of
light and leading by contrast."
"In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919):
"I don't believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life."

Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914):
"There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be."

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928):
"After two thousand years of mass, we've got as far as poison gas."

William James (1842-1910):
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
"The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."
"Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
"When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that in itself is a choice."
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
"The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power."

Sir James Dewar (1842-1923):
"Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open."

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900):
"God is dead."
"Christianity has been up till now mankind's greatest misfortune."
"A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute."
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

Anatole France (1844-1924):
"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
"Religion is all bunk."
"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
"If there's a way to do it better ... find it."
"Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
"We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything."
"If we all did the things we were capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves."
"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

Luther Burbank (1849-1926):
"The Bible is an incomplete history and the folklore of an ancient race, but no more inspired, I believe, than the works of Marcus Aurelius and other great men of the day."

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894):
"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy."

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):
"Truth is never pure, and rarely simple."
"I can believe anything, provided it is incredible."
"A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."
"Experience is the name that everyone gives to his mistakes."
"The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself."

Henri Poincare (1854-1912):
"It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent."
"The mind uses its faculty for creativity only when experience forces it to do so."

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915):
"Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one."
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."
"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939):
"In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable."
"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life."
"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be."

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950):
"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
"Assassination is the extreme form of censorship."
"When we know what God is, we shall be gods ourselves."
"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
"You see things and say 'Why?'; but I dream things that never were, and I say 'Why not?'"
"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature."
"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom."
"One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't."
"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
"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."

William Howard Taft (1857-1930):
"I do not believe in the divinity of Christ and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe."

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924):
"Skepticism ... is the agent of truth."
"Christianity has lent itself with amazing facility to cruel distortion ... and has brought an infinity of anguish to innumerable souls on this earth."

Clarence Darrow (1857-1938):
"As long as the world shall last, there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever."
"I believe that religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't believe in either. I don't believe in God as I don't believe in Mother Goose."
"I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means."

Henri Bergson (1859-1941):
"Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."
"Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself."

John Dewey (1859-1952):
"Were not our eyes and ears so accustomed to irresponsible statements that we cease to ask for either meaning or proof, they might well raise a question as to the complete intellectual responsibility and competency of the author."
"All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word will, they are will. They form our effective desires and they furnish us with our working capacities. They rule our thoughts, determining which shall appear and be strong and which shall pass from light into obscurity."

Charlotte P. Gilbert (1860-1935):
"To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind."

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947):
"The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul."
"When the Westen world accepted Christianity, ... the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar."
"I feel what many cells feel, integrating these feelings into a higher unity. I am somewhat as their deity, their fond heavenly companion. They gain their direction and sense of the goodness of life partly from intuiting my sense of that goodness, which takes theirs intuitively into account."

Henry Ford (1863-1947):
"Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again."
"An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous."

George Santayana (1863-1952):
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
"The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations."
"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."
"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds."
"It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true."
"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there."

H. G. [Herbert George] Wells (1866-1946):
"It runs through the entire Christian story, and our case against the Catholic Church is that, albeit
it originated in a passionate assertion of the conception of brotherly equality, it relapsed steadily
from the broad nobility of its beginnings and passed over at last almost completely to the side of
persecution and the pleasures of cruelty."

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952):
"Poetry is emotion, an expression of the soul at the moment of intuition."

Marie Curie (1867-1934):
"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."

Chapman Cohen (1868-1954):
"If there is a God, the evidence for his existence must be found in this world. We cannot start with another world and work back to this one. That is why the argument from design in nature is really
fundamental to the belief in deity."
"The belief in God is not therefore based on the perception of design in nature. Belief in design in nature is based upon the belief in God. Things are as they are whether there is a God or not. Logically, to believe in design one must start with God. He, or it, is not a conclusion but a datum. You may begin by assuming a creator, and then say he did this or that; but you cannot logically say that because certain things exist, therefore there is a God who made them. God is an assumption, not a conclusion. And it is an assumption that explains nothing."
"The longer it [God] is discussed the less it is believed. No wonder that the ideal attitude of the completely religious should be 'on the knees,' with eyes closed and mouths full of nothing but petitions and grossly fulsome praise. That is also the reason why every religious organization in the world is so keen upon capturing the child."

Stephen Leacock (1869-1944):
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."

Mohandas [Mahatma] Gandhi (1869-1948):
"Truth never damages a cause that is just."
"Be the change you want to see in this world."
"God is not a person. God is an eternal principle."
"If we will take care of today, God will take care of the morrow."
"God is that indefinable something which we all feel but which we do not know."
"When a man wants to make up with his Maker, he does not consult a third party."
"He who has a living faith in God will not do evil deeds with the name of God on his lips."
"God has so ordered this world that no one can keep his goodness or badness exclusively to himself."
"The Laws of Nature are changeless, unchangeable, and there are no miracles in the sense of infringement or interruption of Nature's laws."
"You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind."
"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."

Andre Gide (1869-1951):
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."

Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959):
"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."

Paul Valery (1871-1945):
"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970):
"I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out."
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
"Religion is based ... mainly on fear ... 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. ... 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."
"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."

George Edward Moore (1873-1958):
"Good is a simple, non-natural, indefinable quality of certain things, including especially personal friendship and aesthetic appreciation."

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960):
"I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty."

Winston Churchill (1874-1965):
"We shall never surrender."
"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
"The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
"I am ready to meet my maker, but whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
"Once in a while you will stumble upon the truth, but most of us manage to pick ourselves up and hurry along as if nothing had happened."

John Buchan (1875-1940):
"To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education."

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965):
"The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma."
"You don't live in a world all alone. Your brothers are here too."
"Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing."
"Because I have confidence in the power of truth and of the spirit, I believe in the future of mankind."
"Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it."
"Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf."
"The deeper we look into nature the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret, and we are all united to all this life."
"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."

Charles Franklin Kettering (1876-1958):
"We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there."
"There is a great difference between knowing and understanding; you can know a lot about something and not really understand it."

Sophia Lyon Fahs (1876-1978):
"Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done."

Will Rogers (1879-1935):
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
"If you want to be successful, it's just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing."

Albert Einstein (1879-1955):
"Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
"He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed."
"Whatever there is of God and goodness in the universe, it must work itself out and express itself through us. We cannot stand aside and let God do it."
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modelled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in Nature."

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958):
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."

E. M. [Edward Morgan] Forster (1879-1970):
"I do not believe in Belief [... but ...]) Tolerance, good temper and sympathy."

H. L. [Henry Louis] Mencken (1880-1956):
"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking."
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth."
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the same extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
"Since the early days, [the church] 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 an apologist for the divine right of kings."

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945):
"The truth is found when men are free to pursue it."
"We cannot live alone at peace, that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of nations far away."
"So let me assert my belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883-1931):
"Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'"
"You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give."
"Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too self-ful to seek other than itself."

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969):
"The only significant content of philosophizing, however, consists in the impulses, the inner constitution, the way of seeing and judging, the readiness to react by making choices, the immersion in historical presentness, which grow in us, recognize themselves, and feel confirmed on the way past all objective contents."

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962):
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do."

Harry Truman (1884-1972):
"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."

George S. Patton, Jr. (1885-1945):
"If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking."

Max Perkins (1885-1947):
"The most important obligation of friendship is to listen."

Paul Tillich (1886-1965):
"Boredom is rage spread thin."
"The first duty of love is to listen."
"Neurosis is a way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being."
"Protestantism is a continuous history of the breaking of images."
"Man is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become to fulfill his destiny."
"Loneliness is a word to express the pain of being alone ... solitude is a word to express the glory of being alone."
"A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing."

T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Elliot (1888-1965):
"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951):
"Man is the microcosm: I am my world."
"To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter."
"In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world - which is independent of our will. I can make myself independent of fate. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I."

Kurt Lewin (1890-1947):
"If you want truly to understand something, try to change it."

Christopher Morley (1890-1957):
"The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking."
"There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way."

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969):
"The eyes of the world are upon you."
"We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it."
"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
"What counts is not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog."
"I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it."

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974):
"The scene changes but the aspirations of men of good will persist."

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971):
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Pearl Buck (1892-1973):
"I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings."
"I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life."

F. S. C. Northrop (1893-1992):
"There is an all-embracing indeterminate continuum of feeling common to all creatures in their aesthetic immediacy."

James Thurber (1894-1961):
"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."

e. e. [Edward Estlin] cummings (1894-1962):
"The hardest battle is to be nobody but yourself in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everbody else."

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963):
"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you."

Susan Ertz (1894-1985):
"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."

Harold MacMillan (1894-1986):
"The man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts."

William Faulkner (1897-1962):
"No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors."

Amelia Earhart (1898-1937):
"Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace."

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976):
"If a clumsy man trips accidentally, we do not regard it proper to ascribe his actions to the workings of the mind, but if a clown trips on purpose, we do."

Margaret Mead (1901-1978):
"Never doubt, that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

Karl Popper (1902-1994):
"No society can predict, scientifically, its own future states of knowledge."

Anais Nin (1903-1977):
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987):
"No good deed goes unpunished."

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987):
"God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that."
"Too many of our best scholars, themselves indoctrinated from infancy in a religion of one kind or another based upon the Bible, are so locked into the idea of their own god as a supernatural fact - something final, not symbolic of transcendence, but a personage with a character and will of his own - that they are unable to grasp the idea of a worship that is not of the symbol but of its reference, which is of a mystery of much greater age and of more immediate inward reality than the name-and-form of any historical ethnic idea of a deity, whatsoever ... and is of a sophistication that makes the sentimentalism of our popular Bible-story theology seem undeveloped."

Graham Greene (1904-1991):
"Heresy is another word for freedom of thought."

Dr. Seuss [Theodor Seuss Geisel] (1904-1991):
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."

Jean-Paul Satre (1905-1980):
"Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone."
"The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it."
"I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others."

Ayn Rand (1905-1982):
"Words are a lens to focus one's mind."
"Honor is self-esteem made visible in action."
"Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
"Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values."
"We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something - and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being."
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
"It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary."

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983):
"The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards."

Robert Heinlein (1907-1988):
"Beauty is not diminished by being shared."
"The supreme irony of life is that no one gets out of it alive."
"Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other 'sins' are invented nonsense."
"To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods."
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have
the manners and morals of a spoiled child."
"The great trouble with religion - ANY religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence."
"History does not record anywhere or at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."

A. J. [Alfred Jules] Ayer (1910-1989):
"I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable."
"If the assertation that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be contradicted."
"Theism is so confused and the sentences in which 'God' appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible."

John Cage (1912-1992):
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."

Albert Camus (1913-1960):
"People should reject God defiantly in order to pour out all their loving solicitude upon mankind."

Alan Watts (1915-1973):
"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."
"The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible. When we look through our telescopes and microscopes, or when we just look at nature, we have a problem. Somehow the idea of God we get from the holy scriptures doesn't seem to fit the world around us, just as you wouldn't ascribe a composition by Stravinsky to Bach. The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe. It's hard to conceive of the author of the other."

Sir Peter Brian Medawar (1915-1987):
"I regret my disbelief in God."
"To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities."
"It goes with the passionate intensity and deep conviction of the truth of a religious belief, and of course of the importance of the superstitious observances that go with it, that we should want others to share it - and the only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate nonbelievers. The price in blood and tears that mankind generally has had to pay for the comfort and spiritual refreshment that religion has brought to a few has been too great to justify our entrusting moral accountancy to religious belief."

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963):
"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
"Leadership and learning are indispensible to each other."
"Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth."
"Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction."
"We should not let our fears hold us back from pursuing our hopes."
"Too often we ... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
"Courage - not complacency - is our need today. Leadership, not salesmanship."
"Those who make peaceful resolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Indira Gandhi (1917-1984):
"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there."

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-):
"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him."

Laurence Peter (1919-1990):
"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
"There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought."

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992):
"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived."
"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."
"There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state."

Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991):
"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."

Freeman Dyson (1923-):
"I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe, in some sense, must have know we were coming."

Michel Foucault (1926-1984):
"Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise to dogmatism and heteronomy, along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the legitimate use of reason has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy can be assured."

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968):
"The time is always right to do what is right."
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
"In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred."

John Shelby Spong (1931-):
"What the mind cannot believe, the heart can finally never adore."
"The experience is true. The explanation [in the Bible] isn't always true."
"Adam, Eve, and Noah don't cut it anymore, we need something in between atheism and fundamentalism."
"The biblical stories about the resurrection aren't true, but I think there was a real experience."
"I think of the Gospels as a portrait and not photos of the types of things Jesus actually said and did. You study a portait and interpret what it says to you."
"They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called Let's Pretend. Let's pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our unbroken apostolic traditions."
"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?"
"The primary assumption in the biblical story of the virgin birth - namely, that Jesus' divine nature came to him directly from God through his mother's impregnation by the Holy Spirit - is a hopelessly sexist idea born in a totally patriarchal world that denied the woman's contributions to every new life. The story of Jesus' birth, when literalized, is now seen to be filled with the stuff of legends."
"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 relativized, the resulting anger proves the point categorically."
"Biblical higher criticism is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer. So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand. In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance."
"The best way to lose all is to cling with desperation to that which cannot possibly be sustained literally. Literalistic Christians will learn that a God or a faith system that has to be defended daily is finally no God or faith system at all. They will learn that any god who can be killed ought to be killed. Ultimately they will discover that all their claims to represent the historical, traditional, or biblical truth of Christianity cannot stop the advance of knowledge that will render every historic claim for a literal religious system questionable at best, null and void at worst."
"I would like the church to be a place where the questions of people are honored rather than a place where we have all the answers. The church has to get out of propaganda. The future will involve us in more interfaith dialogue. ... We cannot say we have the only truth."

Carl Sagan (1934-1996):
"My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it."
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers".
"There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right."
"A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."
"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us - and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along."

Eldridge Cleaver (1935-1998):
"You're either part of the solution or part of the problem."

H.H. the Dalai Lama [Tenzin Gyatso] (1935-):
"We live very close together. So, our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them."
"This is my simple religion: there is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."

Alan Alda (1936-):
"You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself."

Frank Zappa (1940-1993):
"Who you jivin' with that cosmic debris?"
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be."
"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice - there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
"If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working."

Richard Dawkins (1941-):
"Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent 'mutation.' In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that 'survival value' here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god which gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies, which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.''

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-):
"Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again."
"As a moral position (and therefore not as a deduction from my knowledge of nature's factuality), I prefer the 'cold bath' theory that nature can be truly 'cruel' and 'indifferent' - in the utterly inappropriate terms of our ethical discourse - because nature was not constructed as our eventual abode, didn't know we were coming (we are, after all, interlopers of the latest geological microsecond), and doesn't give a damn about us (speaking metaphorically). I regard such a position as liberating, not depressing, because we then become free to conduct moral discourse - and nothing could be more important - in our own terms, spared from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature's factuality."

Stephen Hawking (1942-):
"The actual point of creation lies outside the scope of presently known laws of physics."

Paul Davies (1946-):
"Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here."

Douglas Adams (1952-2001):
"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?"
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

Bill Maher (1956-):
"The Bible is a book written by humans, and God gave us the universe; I can go outside and see a tree."
"I'm tired of Christians thinking of God as a single parent sitting up in the sky, writing books and keeping records."

John Allston (-):
"If you don't control your mind, someone else will."
"The only thing you take with you when you're gone is what you leave behind."

Glen Beaman (-):
"Stubbornness does have its helpful features. You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow."

G. Behn (-):
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar territory."

Derek Bok (-):
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

E. Joseph Cossman (-):
"The greatest power is often simple patience."
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

Thomas Crum (-):
"Our quality of life depends not on what happens to us, but on what we do with what happens to us."
"What would it be like if you lived each day, each breath, as a work of art in progress? Imagine that you are a masterpiece unfolding, every second of every day, a work of art taking form with every breath."

Mary Daly (-):
"If God is male, then the male is God."

Alan Dershowitz (-):
"Because good religion is generally the antithesis of good government - the former regulating private life and beliefs, while the later governs public actions - the merger of church and state poses considerable danger to personal liberty."

Will Durant (-):
"The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds."

Timothy Dwight (-):
"The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts."

Walter Elliott (-):
"Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another."

J. K. [John Kenneth] Galbraith (-):
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

Kenneth Hildebrand (-):
"Strong lives are motivated by dynamic purposes; lesser ones exist on wishes and inclinations."

Elizabeth Kubla-Ross (-):
"Our concern must be to live while we're alive ... to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are."

Hans Margolius (-):
"Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world."

Bethania McKenstry (-):
"I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side - I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts."

Ellen Par (-):
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

Lonny Starr (-):
"No matter what happens, there's always somebody who knew it would."

Bern Williams (-):
"Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit."

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Links for Deists.

• Deism and Reason Main Page
• John Locke on Reason and Faith
• About Thomas Paine
• Thomas Paine on Deism
• Thomas Paine Age Of Reason: Editor's Introduction
• Age of Reason Part I
• Age of Reason Part II
• Letters Concerning the "Age of Reason"
• Reason and Religion by Ethan Allen
• John Locke and a Letter Concerning Toleration
• THE CRUCI-FICTION: NAILING DOWN THE STORY
• Epictetus
• Thoughts On It All
• Bill of Rights
• ON LIBERTY By JOHN STUART MILL

• Who is Nature's God?
• Who is Nature's God 2?
• The Founding Fathers Were NOT Christians or Secular Humanists
• Why Fundamentalist Churches are often Cults
• Saul of Tarsus, Mithraic Cults, and Christ's Blood
• In 1796, U.S. Vowed Friendliness With Islam
• Deists of VA/TN

Overview of Religion

Deism	Christianity	Judaism	Islam	Gnosticism	Unitarianism
Zoroastrianism	Pantheism	Fundamentalism	Evolution	Original Sin	Trinity
End Times	Apostle Paul	Apostle John	John Calvin	St. Augustine	Pelagius
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Also see New Age Religion and What is paganism?

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