Quotes

"Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits."
- Dan Barker

"What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof."
- Christopher Hitchens

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer gods than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen Henry Roberts, Historian (1901-71)

"Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything." - Robert A. Heinlein

"The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious beliefin lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe." - Edgar Rice Burroughs

"Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things because to demystify supposedly 'holy text dictated by god' and show that they are man made and what you have to show [is] there internal inconsistencies and absurdities. One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority... it is an indispensable thing people can call it blasphemy if they like, but if they call it that they have to assume there is something to be blasphemed - some divine work, well I don't accept the premise." - Christopher Hitchens

"Christianity: The belief that some invisible cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree."
- Unknown author

"God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining." - Douglas Adams

"The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history." - Robert A. Heinlein

"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" - Thomas Jefferson

"Adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it." - author unknown

"Genius without education is like silver in the mine." - Benjamin Franklin

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform."
- Mark Twain, 1904 notebook

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." - Robert A. Heinlein

"Political correctness is tyranny with manners." - Charlton Heston

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
- Albert Einstein

During his defense when on trial for his life, Socrates, according to Plato's writings, pointed out that dissent, like the tiny (relative to the size of a horse) gadfly, was easy to swat, but the cost to society of silencing individuals who were irritating could be very high. "If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me," because his role was that of a gadfly, "to sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

"I believe." he thought. "I have faith."
"Faith in what?" he asked himself, adrift in limbo.
"Faith in faith." he answered himself. "It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief."
(Gully Foyle: The Stars My Destination) - Alfred Bester

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
– Herbert Spencer

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid." - Marcus Aurelius

"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe." - Carl Sagan

"It is easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission." - Grace Hopper

"For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice." - Joseph Dunninger, Mentalist

"Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." - Robert A. Heinlein

"No generalization is worth a damn, including this one."
- Author unknown

Just a reminder to play nice: "Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." - Thomas Jones

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is." - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

"Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it, you are lost." - Samuel Butler

"History does not record anywhere 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." — Robert A. Heinlein

"A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." - Adlai Stevenson

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives." - Robert Heinlein

"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more." - Christopher Hitchens

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here." - Richard Dawkins

"An armed society is a polite society." - Robert A. Heinlein

"Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." - Terry Pratchett.

'If a person offends you, do not resort to extremes, simply watch for your chance and hit him with a brick.' - Mark Twain

"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" - Thomas Jefferson

"Adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it." - author unknown

"Genius without education is like silver in the mine." - Benjamin Franklin

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." - Mark Twain, 1904 notebook

"Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Christianity: The belief that some invisible cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree." - Unknown author

"Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything." - Robert A. Heinlein

"Love is a temporary madness; it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two." - Louis de Bernieres

"Political correctness is tyranny with manners." - Charlton Heston

"Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for." -Bob Marley

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein

"The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history." - Robert A. Heinlein

During his defense when on trial for his life, Socrates, according to Plato's writings, pointed out that dissent, like the tiny (relative to the size of a horse) gadfly, was easy to swat, but the cost to society of silencing individuals who were irritating could be very high. "If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me," because his role was that of a gadfly, "to sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."


'If a person offends you, do not resort to extremes, simply watch for your chance and hit him with a brick.' - Mark Twain

"Absence of proof isn't proof of absence." - Robert Buettner

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?" - Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid." - Marcus Aurelius

"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe." - Carl Sagan

"It is easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission." - Grace Hopper

"I cannot help but notice that there is no problem between us that cannot be solved by your departure." - Mark Twain

"By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher." - Socrates

"For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice." - Joseph Dunninger, Mentalist

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Lao Tzu

"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty!" - Thomas Jefferson

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving." - Albert Einstein

"Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don't complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief, and jealousy. Don't bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!" - Bob Marley

"I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking." - Dorothy L. Sayers

"In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends."
— John Churton Collins

Many times opportunity is not recognized because it dresses up in work clothes - Henry Ford

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." - H. L. Mencken

"Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?"- Robert G. Ingersoll

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conductive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it." - Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha)

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." Friedrich Nietzsche

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives." - Robert Heinlein

"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more." - Christopher Hitchens

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here." - Richard Dawkins

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

Quotes from the mind of Rock Cowles

"If you close your eyes, shriek like a little girl, and slap it away anytime it comes near, the Truth will never get close enough to set you free." - Rock Cowles

"No good deed goes unpunished." - Rock Cowles

"If the Lottery is tax for people who are bad at math, is tithing tax for those who are bad at reasoning?" - Rock Cowles

"Do Atheists believe in Devils' Advocates?" - Rock Cowles

"If I ever get to meet C.S. Lewis "in person" I will either apologize to him or punch him in the head, depending on where we meet." - Rock Cowles

"I know enough to know that I don't know what I don't know."
- Rock Cowles

Why is it easier for some people to believe their ancestors were a clump of mud and a cannibalized body part, than apes? - Rock Cowles

I'm not really a Christian, I just play one at church.
(True Things Nobody Says: Rock Cowles)

"I am grateful for the friends in my life and the life in my friends."
- Rock Cowles

"Learning to live is learning to budget and our currency is time. Spend each precious minute wisely, you'll never know when it will be your last."
- Rock Cowles

"I have seen far too many decent and intelligent people who are neither decent nor intelligent when it comes to discussing their religion."
- Rock Cowles

"Its all about the ride. If I can enjoy myself, bring some degree of happiness to others, and leave things a little better than when I got here, it wasn't a wasted trip." - Rock Cowles

"Pick-and-choose Christians, who keep what they like and ignore the rest, haven't a leg to stand on in discussion or debate, if they want to call any part of the bible "The Word of God". Its like saying I am a Detroit Tiger, but I am not going to wear that silly uniform, you can't make me play baseball, and I live and work exclusively in Cleveland." - Rock Cowles

"We cease to exist every time we go to sleep. That break in awareness includes self-awareness. If you aren't there, you won't know what you are missing. Death is just the extended version." - Rock Cowles

"Don't swallow the blue suppository." - Rock Cowles

"Inside every fat person is a thin person struggling to get out. Sometimes as many as two or three." - Rock Cowles

"Religion is indeed the opiate of the masses. Except for Islam, its more like Crystal Meth." - Rock Cowles

"No good deed goes unpunished." - Rock Cowles

I don't understand half of what you say and the other half doesn't make sense. - Rock Cowles

"I didn't make you look fat, not pushing yourself away from the table made you look fat." - Rock Cowles, Caricaturist.

"If you can't afford to give something away, you don't own it, it owns you. If you can't afford to sell it, its probably an important organ." - Rock Cowles

"Moderate is eunuch for wishy washy. True moderates don't have opinions and shouldn't be taking polls." - Rock Cowles

"You can get more done with a brick than a prayer." - Rock Cowles

I have a gift for not knowing when to STFU. Self preservation has never been at the top of my to do list. - Rock Cowles

"If I ever get to meet C.S. Lewis "in person" I will either apologize to him or punch him in the head, depending on where we meet." - Rock Cowles

"Do Atheists believe in Devils' Advocates?" - Rock Cowles

"Friends don't let friends be Packers Fans... EVER! (I don't care how much paint your mother huffed during her pregnancy!)" - Rock Cowles

"No greater invention was ever devised for creating the delusion of productivity than the personal computer, except for the bible." - Rock Cowles

"Instant gratification isn't worth the wait." - Rock Cowles

Why is it easier for some people to believe their ancestors were a clump of mud and a cannibalized body part, than apes? - Rock Cowles

"If it looks too good to be true its usually me!" - Rock Cowles

I'm not really a Christian, I just play one at church. (True Things Nobody Says: Rock Cowles)

"Never, ever, ever call a lady cop "Fatboy"." - Rock Cowles

"I am grateful for the friends in my life and the life in my friends."
- Rock Cowles

"People treat you exactly the way you teach them to." -Rock Cowles

"I haven't killed anyone all day. Gimme a cookie. Now." - Rock Cowles

"I tried Viagra and all it did was make me taller." - Rock Cowles

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't push him in." - Rock Cowles

"Be still my throbbing pants!" - Rock Cowles

"You get your cards, place your bets, and play the best game you can. The House always wins." - Rock Cowles

"We cease to exist every time we go to sleep. That break in awareness includes self-awareness. If you aren't there, you won't know what you are missing."
- Rock Cowles

"Abstinence makes the hard grow fondlers" - Rock Cowles

"Mensa taught me that intelligence is a gift, not a promise. Its a tool, like natural athleticism, that can waste away or be lost in an instant. That having it was not as important as what is done with it." - Rock Cowles

"I have no clue what Plato was talking about when he said that the unexamined wife was not worth leaving. I don't even know whose wife he was talking about."
- Rock Cowles

"If you close your eyes, shriek like a little girl, and slap it away anytime it comes near, the Truth will never get close enough to set you free."
- Rock Cowles