Famous Quotes & Sayings

Stephen Jay Gould

... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.

William Shakespeare

I always thought it was both impious and unnatural that such immanity and bloody strife should reign among professors of one faith.

Maurice Maeterlinck

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.

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.

Mahatma Gandhi

Duly Enlightened Gandhi's head by Mall of the 'Free Press Journal,' Bombay, in 1932Watches may disagree, but let us not.

James Madison

Are not the daily devotions conducted by these legal ecclesiastics already degenerating into a scanty attendance, and a tiresome formality?

John Dewey

It has been petrified into a slavery of thought and sentiment, as intolerant superiority on the part of the few and an intolerable burden on the part of the many.

Garrett Hardin

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.

Henry Steele Commager

The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted.

Joseph Addison

Supposing all the great points of atheism were formed into a kind of creed, I would fain ask whether it would not require an infinite greater measure of faith than any set of articles which they so violently oppose.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Faith is essentially intolerant ... essentially because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one's cause is also God's cause.

Ludwig Feuerbach

It is as clear as the sun and as evident as the day that there is no God and that there can be none.

Lord Byron

I am surrounded here by parsons and methodists, but as you will see, not infested with the mania.

Mahatma Gandhi

The concepts of truth may differ. But all admit and respect truth. That truth I call God. For sometime I was saying, "God is Truth," but that did not satisfy me. So now I say, "Truth is God."

Mahatma Gandhi

I am a poor mendicant. My earthly possessions consist of six spinning wheels, prison dishes, a can of goat's milk, six homespun loincloths and towels and my reputation, which cannot be worth much.

Mahatma Gandhi

Watches may disagree, but let us not.

Mahatma Gandhi

It is the reformer who is anxious for the reform, and not society, from which he should expect nothing better than opposition, abhorrence and even mortal persecution.

Mahatma Gandhi

The story of the creation and similar things in it did not impress me very much, but on the contrary made me incline somewhat towards atheism.

Os Guinness

Atheism thrives on bad religion.

Orlando Bloom

Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.

Omar Khayyam

Fools, your reward is neither here nor there.

Oliver Tambo

We seek to create a united Democratic and non-racial society.

Emile Zola

Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.

Emile M. Cioran

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.

Emile M. Cioran

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

Emily Dickinson

The Crime, from us, is hidden, [though] he is presumed to know.

Emily Dickinson

Assent - and you are sane - Demur - and you're straightaway dangerous - and handled with a chain.

Emily Dickinson

The Truth never flaunted a sign.

Emily Dickinson

If Aims impel these Astral Ones The ones allowed to know Know that which makes them as forgot As Dawn forgets them now

Emily Dickinson

Those who lift their hats shall see Nature as devout do God.

Emily Dickinson

Why should we censure Othello when the Criterion Lover says, "Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me"?

Henrik Ibsen

It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I wanted only to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone, the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn.