Famous Quotes & Sayings

Bernard Berenson

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Bertrand Russell

Science tells us what we can know but what we can know is little and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive of many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

Bertrand Russell

Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.

Bertrand Russell

The dictum that human nature cannot be changed is one of those tiresome platitudes that conceal from the ignorant the depths of their own ignorance.

Robert Kiyosaki

The main cause of poverty is self-inflicted fear and ignorance.

Petrarch

How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the rocks of ignorance.

B. F. Skinner

...not everyone is willing to defend a position of 'not knowing.' There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.

Ken Cassar

Whether it's out of laziness or ignorance, consumers' starting point is very much search.

William Shakespeare

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.

Chuck Palahniuk

My goal is never to make fun of religion.

Gore Vidal

Some have deplored Lincoln's indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

C. S. Lewis

If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, 'I am.' To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him.

C. S. Lewis

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

Carl Sagan

A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry.

Carl Sagan

Where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question.

Carl Sagan

[S]cience has itself become a kind of religion.

Bernadette Devlin

... in Northern Ireland, if you don't have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness.

Bertrand Russell

My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.

Ray Comfort

Sadly, I have found that even evolution's most staunch believers are afraid to debate, because they know that their case for atheism and evolution is less than extremely weak.

Ray Comfort

Hawking has violated the unspoken rules of atheism. He isn't supposed to use words like 'create' or even 'made.' They necessitate a Creator and a Maker. Neither are you supposed to let out that the essence of atheism is to believe that nothing created everything, because it's unthinking.

Bertrand Russell

What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.

Bertrand Russell

It is permissible with certain precautions to speak in print of coitus, but it is not permissible to employ the monosyllabic synonym for this word.

Maurice Maeterlinck

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.

C. Wright Mills

As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.

Charles Caleb Colton

The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health and power.

Charles Spurgeon

Opposition to divine sovereignty is essentially atheism.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.