Marquis de Sade
"And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?"
William Shakespeare
"Few love to hear the sins they love to act."
"How far the little candle throuw its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world." -The Merchant of Venice
Mark Twain
"Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; The opposition employs a million. "
James Baldwin
”If the concept of God has any validity or use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
”Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”
”A devotion to humanity is...too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.”
Albert Camus
"All we have to lose is everything."
"O Fetish, my god over yonder, may your power be preserved, may the offense be multiplied, may hate rule pitilessly over a world of the damned, may the wicked forever be masters, may the kingdom come, where in a single city of salt and iron black tyrants will enslave and possess without pity! And now, gra gra, fire on pity, fire on impotence and its charity, fire on all that postpones the coming of evil, fire twice, and there they are toppling over, falling, and the camels fell toward the horizon, where a geyser of black birds has just risen in the unchanged shky. I laugh, I laugh, the fellow is writhing in his detested habit, he is raising his head a litte, he sees me - me his all-powerful shacked master, why does he smile at me, I'll crust that smile! How pleasant is the sound of a rifle butt on the face of goodness, today, today at last, all is consummated and everwhere in the desert, even hours away fro here, jackals sniff the nonexistent wind, then set out in a patient trot toward the feast of carrion awaiting them. Victory! I raise my arms to a heaven moved to a pity, a lavender shadow is just barely suggested on the opposite side, O nights of Europe, home, childhood, why must I weep in the moment of triumph?" -Exile and the Kingdom
Friedrich Nietzsche
"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad, has made the world ugly and bad."
"The anarchist and the Christian are offspring of the same womb."
"There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated." -Beyond Good and Evil
"God-intoxicated divine alcholics"
"Difference engenders hatred."
Arthur Rimbaud
"Life's the joke each of us keeps on playing." --A Season in Hell
"Morality's the blind spot of the brain." -A Season in Hell
"Mr. Play-It-Safe was born the same day as Christ." -A Season in Hell
"How queer it'll all seem, when I'm no longer here, what you're going through. When you don't have my arms around your neck any more, or my heart to lie down on, or this mouth on your eyes. Because someday I'll have to go, very far." -A Season in Hell
Oscar Wilde
"Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived."
Isaac Asimov
"Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."
"Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly."
"One would suppose that the battle for religious liberty was won in the United States two hundred years ago. However, in the time since, and right now, powerful voices are always raised in favor of bigotry and thought control. It is useful, then, to have a compendium of the thoughts of great men and women of all faiths (and of none) on the subject, to convince us that we men and woman of freedom are not and never have been alone."
"If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."
"To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the "scientific" establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it."
"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."
"Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition."
Joseph Heller
"He walked through life self-consciously with downcast eyes and burning cheeks, the object of contempt, envy, suspicion, deplored resentment and malicious innuendo everywhere he went." -description of Major Major from Catch-22
Ray Bradbury
"A numbness in a numbness hollowed into a numbness..." -Fahrenheit 451
"I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this. Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of bastketball or baseball or running, another hour or transcription history or painting pictures, or more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers to you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps'. I guess I'm everything they say I am all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting and dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?" "You sound so very old." [Montag] "Somtimes I'm ancient. I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use to be that way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone. Ten of them died in car wrecks. I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid. My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different. They believed in responsibility. I was spanked when I needed it, years ago. And I do all the shopping and housecleaning by hand. But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going. Sometimes I even go to the Fun Parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don't care as long as they're insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone's happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in the subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what?" "What?"[Montag] "People don't talk about anything." "Oh, they must!"[Montag] "No not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the caves they have the joke boxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the colored patterns running up and down, but it's only color and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That's all there is now. My uncle says it was different once. A long time back sometimes pictures said things or even showed people." -Fahrenheit 451
"The other men lay awhile, on the dawn edge of sleep, not yet ready to rise up and begin the day's obligations, its fires and floods, its thousand details of putting foot after foot and hand after hand. They lay blinking their dusty eyelids. You could hear them breathing fast, then slowerer, then slow..." -Fahrenheit 451
U.S. Presidents
"The frightful engines of ecclesiastical councils, of diabolical malice, and Calvinistical good-nature never failed to terrify me exceedingly whenever I thought of preaching." --John Adams, letter to his brother-in-law, Richard Cranch, October 18, 1756, explaining why he rejected the ministry
"There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel.... Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating the divine authority of those books?" -John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, January 23
"I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it." -Abraham Lincoln
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of a blind faith." - -Thomas Jefferson
"There never would have been an infidel, if there had not been a priest." -Thomas Jefferson