Here it goes....BWAHAHAHA!
"I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never
again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering.
Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not
hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because
they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not
obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is
contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and
admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid
human being."
Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every
opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if
there be one, he must approve the homage of reason rather than of
blind-folded fear.
-- Thomas Jefferson, to Peter Carr, 10 Aug. 1787.
"Blind faith had 1500 years to make the world a better place...and we call it
the Dark Ages." - Reusable Phoenix
"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." -Buddha [Siddhartha Gautama] (563-483
BCE):
Aesop (620-560 BCE):
"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."
"He that serves God for rewards will serve the Devil for better wages."
Epicurus (341-270 BCE):
"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?"
Lucius Annaeus Seneca [the Younger] (4 BCE-65CE):
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false,
and by rulers as useful."
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."
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."
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."
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."
"A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many
regrets."
-Arthur C. Clark
Voltaire [Francois Marie Arouet] (1694-1778):
"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."
"Even 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."
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make
my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."
"Last night, I was meditating, absorbed in the contemplation of nature. I
was filled with wonder at its immensity, at the stars in their courses, at the
mutual interaction of those countess orbs, one upon another, which people
look upon unmoved. And I marveled still more at the Mind which governs
the whole mighty scheme. A man must be blind I said to myself, not to be
dazzled by such a spectacle, a fool not to acknowledge its Author, a
madman not to adore him."
- Voltaire
" Deism declares to intelligent man the existence of one perfect God,
Creator and Preserver of the Universe; that the laws by which he governs
the world, are like himself immutable, and, of course, that violations of
these laws, or miraculous interference in the movements of nature, must be
necessarily excluded from the grand system of universal existence; that the
Creator is justly entitled to the adoration of every intellectual agent
throughout the regions of infinite space; and that he alone is entitled to it,
having no co-partners who have a right to share with him the homage of
the intelligent world. Deism also 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."
-- Elihu Palmer
"Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be
unaffected by outside circumstances."-Mahatma Gandhi
"Be who you are and say what you feel because people who mind don't
matter, and people who matter don't mind."
-Dr. Suess
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman
church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant
church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own
church." Thomas Paine
"...when I see throughout the greater part of this book (the Bible) scarcely
anything but a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most
paltry and contemptible tales, I cannot dishonor my Creator by calling it by
His name." Thomas Paine
Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more
derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to
reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity
Thomas Paine
"The Word of God is in the Creation we behold: And it is in this word,
which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh
universally to man." Thomas Paine
"No falsehood is so fatal as that which is made an article of faith." -- Thomas
Paine
"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are
convinced beyond doubt that they are right."
-Laurens van der Post
"To see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." --Benjamin Franklin
"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." --Frederich Nietzche`
"Faith is believing what you know ain't so." --Mark Twain
A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out
for what he knows." -- Mark Twain
"Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding,"
--Reverend Martin Luther
"The United States of America should have a foundation free from the
influence of clergy."
-George Washington
The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the
Christian religion.
-George Washington, The Treaty of Tripoli
"Iron rusts from disuse; water that does not flow becomes stagnant; so it is
with the human mind." -- Leonardo Da Vinci
"The individual human mind (is holy to me). In a child's power to master
the multiplication table there is more sanctity than in all your shouted
amens and holy-holies and hosannas. An idea is a greater monument than a
cathedral and the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all
the sticks turned to snakes and the parting of the waters." -Henry
Drummond, Inherit the Wind.
"The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for
enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a
contrivance to filch wealth and power themselves...these clergy, in fact,
constitute the real Anti-Christ."
Thomas Jefferson
You did say quoteS!
