Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Caleb Colton

Public charities and benevolent associations for the gratuitous relief of every species of distress, are peculiar to Christianity; no other system of civil or religious policy has originated them; they form its highest praise and characteristic feature.

Charles Caleb Colton

All wars of interference, arising from an officious intrusion into the concerns of other states; all wars of ambition, carried on for the purposes of aggrandizement; and all wars of aggression, undertaken for the purpose of forcing an assent to this or that set of religious opinions; all such wars are criminal in their very outset, and have hypocrisy for their common base.

Charles Dickens

How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilized nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy!

Charles Stross

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.

Charles Stross

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

Charles Stross

A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?

Charles Stanley

The best way in the world to deceive believers is to cloak a message in religious language and declare that it conveys some new insight from God.

Charles Spurgeon

Oh, Brethren, it is sickening work to think of your cushioned seats, your chants, your anthems, your choirs, your organs, your gowns, and your bands, and I know not what besides, all made to be instruments of religious luxury, if not of pious dissipation, while ye need far more to be stirred up and incited to holy ardor for the propagation of the truth as it is in Jesus.

Charles Spurgeon

We would labor earnestly to raise a believer in salvation by free will into a believer in salvation by grace, for we long to see all religious teaching built upon the solid rock of truth and not upon the sand of imagination. At the same time, our grand object is not the revision of opinions, but the regeneration of natures. We should bring men to Christ, not to our own particular views of Christianity.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.

Scott Simon

Everyone understood [Charlie Hebdo], as people had understood for hundreds of years, knowing that Rabelaisian tradition of French satire, they knew how to read it. And they understood the kind of release from piety that it represented every week.

Scott Simon

I take Charb's point, but at some point has Charlie Hebdo been trying to have it both ways because some of what they do is not funny.

Scott Simon

Charlie Hebdo was and is not The Onion or "The Daily Show." This is a different kind of satire. Might I put it this way - less politically correct.

Scott Simon

Charlie Hebdo were the licensed anarchist clowns of the society.

Scott Simon

Charlie Hebdo mocked everyone. They mocked the left. They mocked the right. They mocked, above all, the extreme right, the extreme right of Le Pen's. If anything could identify their politics, they were kinds of anarchists.

Charles Dickens

I'm awful dull, but I hope I've beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!

David Shapiro

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to assume that their president, hostile to the principles that formed the nation and determined to act with malice toward its inhabitants by suppressing their rights and enabling its enemies to prosper in their attempts to destroy it, must be confronted, a rational response for the nation is to encumber itself no more with such a president and reject his authority and the acolytes who carry out his wishes.

David McCullough

You have to have wisdom and knowledge as well as virtue to preserve your rights and liberties.

David Korten

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

Catherine Ashton

In the EU you have half a billion people who share a common belief in democracy, in rights, in the kind of economic life we want.

Madeleine Albright

Our strategic dialogue with China can both protect American interests and uphold our principles, provided we are honest about our differences on human rights and other issues and provided we use a mix of targeted incentives and sanctions to narrow these differences.

Ai Weiwei

For all the tough talk about China during the presidential debates, Romney and Obama evaded any mention of China's suspect human rights record, corruption, and rule of law. By not tackling these controversial topics, the candidates are protecting a strategic partnership with China at the expense of essential human values and beliefs.

Ai Weiwei

Liberty is about our rights to question everything.

Bob Menendez

We should seek international support for our mutual objectives abroad, in promoting freedom, democracy, respect for human rights, and also the elimination of weapons of mass destruction.