Quotations
“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”
- Lenny Bruce
“A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.”
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.”
- Aldous Huxley
“Force, violence, pressure, or compulsion with a view to conformity, are both uncivilized and undemocratic.”
- Mohandas Ghandi
“You won't skid if you stay in a rut.”
- Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard
“I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.”
- Albert Einstein
“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre
“People were rendered mute by fools who spoke many words but said nothing... for whom oppression and cowardice were virtues... and freedom, an obscenity.”
- "Carnivàle"
“We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.”
- Anatole France
“Experience: a comb life gives you after you lose your hair.”
- Judith Stern
“It's a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers--you are the Indian.”
- James Baldwin
“When you think about it from a native plant perspective, Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.”
- Chuck Palahniuk, "Lullaby"
“We're all on Death's door, repeatedly ringing the doorbell like maniacal Girl Scouts trying to make quota.”
- Anya Christina Emanuella Jenkins
“It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those that have a right to them.”
- Tom Stoppard, "Arcadia"
“I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure—that is all that agnosticism means.”
- Clarence Darrow
“Faith: Belief without evidence to what is told by he who speaks without knowledge of things without parallel.”
- Ambrose Bierce
“A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.”
- Mark Twain
“When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land, and the missionaries had the Bible; they taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
- Jomo Kenyatta
“One thing is pretty obvious in these days. If the clergy went on strike, society would soon learn to live without them.”
- Jules Jacques
“I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A man goes to the cliffs of hope and faith and kicks the toll booth off.”
- Henry Rollins, "Pissing In The Gene Pool"
“There is no wealth but life.”
- John Ruskin
“For every credibility gap there is a gullibility fill”
- Richard Clopton
“The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
- George Carlin, "Brain Droppings"
“The whole world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”
- Horace Walpole
“Infinity converts that which is possible into the inevitable.”
- Norman Cousins
“Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal; / Dust thou art, to dust returneth, / Was not spoken of the soul.”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.”
- Oscar Wilde
“It's not love's going hurts my days / But that it went in little ways.”
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
“To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”
- Sir James Jeans
“He who cannot lie does not know what the truth is.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. / Hope is the dream of the waking man.”
- Pliny the Elder
“Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.”
- Samuel Pepys
“It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.”
- Arthur C. Clarke
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
- Aldous Huxley
“In the battle of existence, Talent is the punch; Tact is the clever footwork.”
- Wilson Mizner
“I would rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.”
- Marcus Porcius Cato
“Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth”
- Horace Walpole
“Passions are vices or virtues in their highest powers.”
- Johann W. von Goethe
“Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.”
- Horace
“True patriotism doesn't exclude an understanding of the patriotism of others.”
- Queen Elizabeth II
“A fanatic is one who sticks to his guns whether they're loaded or not.”
- Franklin P. Jones
“Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?”
- Stanislaw J. Lec
“Faith is one of those words that connotes, however irrationally, some kind of virtue in itself.”
- Louis J. Hale
“He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.”
- Sir William Drummond
“We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”
- Mark Twain
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.”
- Galileo Galilie
“I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake - which I also keep handy.”
- W.C. Fields
“Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.”
- Anatole France
“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.”
- Alfred Korzybski
“In reality, killing time / Is only the name for another of the multifarious ways / By which time kills us.”
- Sir Osbert Sitwell
“Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Virtue has always been conceived of as victorious resistance to one's vital desire.”
- James Branch Cabell
“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”
- Aldous Huxley
“They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been, and breathing a sigh of relief when the children passed the point of asking questions about what life was for.”
- Clive Barker, "The Great and Secret Show"
“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”
- Bertrand Russell
“Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.”
- Jean de La Bruyére
“Thus men scurrying [...], in search of this or that, tend to establish this and that, which is exactly the method of mathematicians, logicians, physicists, astronomers and such like. The proof is the fact and the fact has no meaning except what is given to it by those who establish the facts.”
- Henry Miller, "Tropic of Capricorn"
“Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.”
- Hippocrates