Famous Quotes & Sayings

B. F. Skinner

...not everyone is willing to defend a position of 'not knowing.' There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.

Bernie Taupin

I am a simple vessel with complex overtones, opinionated on occasions but willing to listen. Comfortable with reclusiveness and devoted to privacy and family. Patriotic to a fault and allergic to cruelty, ignorance and bad music.

Bernard Berenson

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Bertrand Russell

Science tells us what we can know but what we can know is little and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive of many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

Bertrand Russell

Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.

Bertrand Russell

The dictum that human nature cannot be changed is one of those tiresome platitudes that conceal from the ignorant the depths of their own ignorance.

Benjamin Franklin

...It is in the religion of ignorance that tyranny begins...

Confucius

Ignorance is the night of the mind, a night without moon or star

Confucius

Ignorance is the night of mind, a night without moon or star.

Mario Cuomo

Organized belief in spirituality - that's what a religion is.

R. Inge

Religion is a way of walking, not a way of talking.

Marianne Williamson

Religion is like a map. The route isn't important. It's the destination that matters.

C. S. Lewis

If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, 'I am.' To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him.

C. S. Lewis

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

Carl Sagan

A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry.

Carl Sagan

Where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question.

Carl Sagan

[S]cience has itself become a kind of religion.

Bernadette Devlin

... in Northern Ireland, if you don't have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness.

Bertrand Russell

What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.

Bertrand Russell

It is permissible with certain precautions to speak in print of coitus, but it is not permissible to employ the monosyllabic synonym for this word.

Charles Darwin

Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last it was complete.

Charles Darwin

It is like confessing to a murder.

Charles Darwin

The question of whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.

Charles Spurgeon

Atheism is a strange thing. Even the devils never fell into that vice.

Ayn Rand

... reason accepts no commandments.

Bertrand Russell

Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself.

C. S. Lewis

God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous