Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dan Brown

Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate toward the practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us.

Ambrose Bierce

ORTHODOX, n. An ox wearing the popular religious joke.

Thomas Jefferson

What has been the effect of [religious] coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.

Thomas Jefferson

The fumes of the most disordered imaginations were recorded in their religious code, as special communications of the Deity; and as it could not but happen that, in the course of ages, events would now and then turn up to which some of these vague rhapsodies might be accommodated by the aid of allegories, figures, types, and other tricks upon words, they have not only preserved their credit with the Jews of all subsequent times, but are the foundation of much of the religions of those who have schismatised from them.

Thomas Jefferson

Of publishing a book on religion, my dear sir, I never had an idea. I should as soon think of writing for the reformation of Bedlam, as of the world of religious sects. Of these there must be, at least, ten thousand, every individual of every one of which believes all wrong but his own.

Thomas Jefferson

The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.

Thomas Jefferson

In reviewing the history of the times through which we have passed, no portion of it gives greater satisfaction or reflection, than that which represents the efforts of the friends of religious freedom and the success with which they are crowned.

Thomas Jefferson

Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state'... is absolutely essential in a free society.

Thomas Jefferson

The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom.

Ronald Reagan

I am not a scientist.

Paul Dirac

When [Erwin Schrödinger] went to the Solvay conferences in Brussels, he would walk from the station to the hotel where the delegates stayed, carrying all his luggage in a rucksack and looking so like a tramp that it needed a great deal of argument at the reception desk before he could claim a room.

Ovid

Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky Were made, in the whole world the countenance Of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, Naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds Of ill-joined elements compressed together.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Science can give us only the tools in the box, these mechanical miracles that it has already given us. But of what use to us are miraculous tools until we have mastered the humane, cultural use of them? We do not want to live in a world where the machine has mastered the man; we want to live in a world where man has mastered the machine.

Lord Kelvin

I can never satisfy myself until I can make a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model, I can understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way through I cannot understand.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.

Abraham Flexner

We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent or self-satisfied; they are, if sound, the spearhead of progress. If they are fundamentally wrong, free discussion will in time put an end to them.

Octavia E. Butler

Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.

Sydney Smith

Science is his forte, and omniscience his foible.

Ayn Rand

And man will go on. Man, not men.

Calvin Coolidge

That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, most of it bad.

Richard G. Scott

The seminary programs will help you as a young man or woman to lay a foundation for happiness and success in life.

Sydney Smith

A man who wishes to make his way in life could do no better than go through the world with a boiling tea-kettle in his hand.

Douglas Adams

And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.

Douglas Adams

I don't go to mythical places with strange men.

Douglas Adams

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying 'And another thing...' twenty minutes after admitting he'd lost the argument.

Douglas Adams

"I refuse to prove that I exist" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing." "Oh," says man, "but the Babel Fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't. Q.E.D." "Oh, I hadn't thought of that," says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

Dorothea Dix

A man usually values that most for which he has labored; he uses that most frugally which he has toiled hour by hour and day by day to acquire.