. . . a few of our favourite quotations
. . . on quotations
It is a good thing for the uneducated man to read books of quotations . . . - Winston Churchill
These curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellows as I am put them down.
-John Aubrey
Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of filial reverence on the part of the quoter and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external.
-Louise Imogen Guiney
. . . on lifestyle
I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth. -Steve McQueen
Unvex'd with quarrels, undisturb'd with noise,
The country king his peaceful realm enjoys.
-Virgil
Do not expect an infinite cure-all in country air and quiet, nor the solution for all Life's problems in hoeing the soil, but learn, by gradual contact with things of the country, that here are benefits no city can give, comforts no
modern conveniences can altogether supply.
-Richardson Wright
Use it up . . . Wear it out.
Make it do . . . or do without.
-U. S. government slogan, World War II
Now learn what and how great are the blessings that simple living brings in its train.
-Horace
The Acquest of Needless Things tends to the Ruin of the Soul and Body. And, when all's done, the enjoyment of them gives neither Satisfaction to the one nor Health to the other, but makes our Wants the greater.
-Thomas Tryon
Nothing should be thrown away as long as it is possible to make any use of it, however trifling that use may be.
-Lydia Maria Child
Riches consists not in the extent of possessions but in the fewness of wants.
-Anonymous (quoted by Helen Nearing)
There are two ways to be rich: one is to have a lot of money; the other is to have few needs.
-William Sloan Coffin
What is the good life if its chief element, and that which must always be its chief element, is odious? No, the only true economy is to arrange so that your daily labour shall be itself a joy.
-Edward Carpenter
. . . on religion
Man is a greater miracle than any god he ever invented.
-Rod Steiger
When a man is drowning, it may be better for him to try to swim than to thrash around waiting for divine intervention.
-Rev. William Sloane Coffin
I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground and too petty--I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.
-Alfred North Whitehead
Christian theology is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is opposed to every other form of rational thinking.
-H. L. Mencken
The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.
-Thomas Paine
The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton
What I got in Sunday-School . . . was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous.
-H. L. Mencken
It can do truth no service to blink the fact . . . that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable teaching has been the work, not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected, the Christian faith.
-John Stuart Mill
By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.
-Gloria Steinem
For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law, it is administered with subhuman efficiency.
-Eric Ambler
Christian Science is a contradiction in terms. -Rev. Robert Jones
My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the Scriptures have become clearer and stronger.
-Abraham Lincoln
In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot.
-Thomas Jefferson
The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of woman's emancipation.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Turn your churches into halls of science and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your minds, and the examination of the fair world which extends around you.
-Frances Wright
I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. -Emma Goldman
There is nothing but this earthly life. -Barbara Ehrenreich
[T]he Bible is an atrocious book, false, obscene and misleading, tending to insanity, disease and death. . . . [T]he Bible is the garbled literature of a barbaric and superstitious past . . .
-Elbert Hubbard
Christianity: A disease of the mind caused by eating underdone philosophy mixed with overdone myth. -Rev. Robert Jones
Christianity . . . endorsed and advocated the rape of the North American continent, and her representatives have done their utmost to contribute to this process ever since.
-Vine Deloria
[The Bible's] descriptions of the origin of life and morals are obviously fairy tales; its astronomy is terracentric; its notions of the starry universe are childish; its history is epical and legendary: in short, people whose education in these departments is derived from the Bible are so absurdly misinformed as to be unfit for public employment, parental responsibility, or the franchise. As an encyclopedia, therefore, the Bible must be shelved with the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as a record of what men once believed, and a measure of how far they have left their obsolete beliefs behind.
-George Bernard Shaw
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
-William James
Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm . . . What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define faith as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of faith . We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence
. . . We are told that faith could remove mountains, but no one believed it; we are now told that the atomic bomb can remove mountains, and everyone believes it.
-Bertrand Russell
The church say the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.
-Ferdinand Magellan
Science reveals where religion conceals.
-Peter Atkins
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!
-Kurt Vonnegut
It's your day--don't share it with a Christian.
-radio announcer on 3JJJ, Melbourne, Australia
There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and never have.
-Richard Dawkins
. . . on morality and sexuality
If you believe there is a God, a God that made your body, and yet you think that you can do anything with that body that's dirty, then the fault lies with the manufacturer.
-Lenny Bruce
It would be nice to live in a society where the genitals were really considered beauty. It seems to me any other way of seeing is obscene. After all, there they are. Why not like them?
-Carol Emshwiller
Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
-Aldous Huxley
Celibates have committed a sin against themselves.
-Paul Kurtz
If we were able to hold onto sex and were gratified by sex and the physical pleasure of sex, and we were free in our sexual joy, we would not have to hold onto things like money in order to give our bodies a sense of security or a sense of order or a sense of perpetuation.
-Julian Beck
It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
-Moliere
. . . on society and politics
When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint; when I ask why are they hungry, they call me a communist.
-Dom Helda Camara
In the West, our desire to conquer nature often means simply that we diminish the probability of small inconveniences at the cost of increasing the probability of very large disasters.
-Kenneth E. Boulding
Treat this world as if there is none other.
-E. O. Wilson
Don't let your mouth write no check that your tail can't cash.
-Bo Diddley
When a small man casts a long shadow, the sundown is near.
-Vietnamese saying
don't make
someTHING
of yourself. -Bernard Gunther
Listen . . . remember America . . . It's a good country . . . Beautiful .
. . Fertile . . . and terribly SICK! There are children dying . . . honest
people cowering in fear . . . Something is WRONG!
-character in Green
Lantern Comics
Although it is not yet clearly in focus, the shadow of the swastika is visible
in America today.
-William Kunstler
The mutual and universal dependence of individuals who remain indifferent to one another constitutes the social network that binds them together.
-Karl Marx
What's wrong with dropping out? To me, this is the whole point: one's right to withdraw from a social environment that offers no spiritual sustenance, and to mind one's own business .
-William S. Burroughs
And if you are sane and healthy you are an anarchist and you throw bombs. -Henry Miller
Let me say, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.
-Che Guevara
Agitators are a set of interfering meddling people who come down to some perferctly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent among them. That is the reason agitators are so absolutely necessary.
-Oscar Wilde
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