Excellent Quotes from various sources--mostly freethought http://2think.org/quotes.

html

Thinking Quotes
Additional quotes can be found off of the Richard Dawkins' list of quotes and excerpts

Alphabetical index

"Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because they
have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work
they are responsible for doing."
"The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the way of
discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry are
synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the
immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized than discoveries that
quantitatively increase the store on hand." (from Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. xvii)
"Reason is experimental intelligence, conceived after the pattern of science, and used
in the creation of social arts; it has something to do. It liberates man from the bondage
of the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into custom. It projects a better
future and assists man in its realization. And its operation is always subject to test in
experience... The principles which man projects as guides... are not dogmas. They are
hypotheses to be worked out in practice, and to be rejected, corrected and expanded as
they fail or succeed in giving our present experience the guidance it requires. We may
call them programmes of action, but since they are to be used in making our future
acts less blind, more directed, they are flexible. Intelligence is not something possessed
once for all. It is in constant process of forming, and its retention requires constant
alertness in observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn and courage in
re-adjustment." (ibid., p. 96)
"Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire."
(ibid., p. 104)

"In the degree in which life is uneasy and troubled, fancy is stirred to frame pictures
of a contrary state of things. By reading the characteristic features of any man's castles
in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are
frustrated." (ibid., p. 104)
"It is not truly realistic or scientific to take short views, to sacrifice the future to
immediate pressure, to ignore facts and forces that are disagreeable and to magnify the
enduring quality of whatever falls in with immediate desire. It is false that the evils of
the situation arise from absence of ideals; they spring from wrong ideals." (ibid., p. 130)
"Intelligent thinking means an increment of freedom in action--an emancipation from
chance and fatality. 'Thought' represents the suggestion of a way of response that is
different from that which would have been followed if intelligent observation had not
effected an inference as to the future." (ibid., p. 144)

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-- John Dewey

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy,

education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would
indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment
and hope of reward after death."
"[My] deep religiosity... found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve,
through the reading of popular scientific books." (as quoted in Einstein, History, and
Other Passions, p. 172)

"It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which [I] lost, was a first
attempt to free myself from the chains of the 'merely personal,' from an existence
which is dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings." (as quoted in Einstein, History,
and Other Passions, p. 172)

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time
and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated
from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind
of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons
nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle
of compasion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.
Nobody is able to achieve this completely but striving for such achievement is, in
itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security." (as quoted in Quantum
Reality, Beyond the New Physics, p. 250)

-- Albert Einstein

"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains
premature today."
-- Isaac Asimov

"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and
hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
-- Thomas Edison

"Accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of

general laws, in circumstances where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives
neither novelty nor beauty, [the scientist and natural philosopher] walks in the midst
of wonders."
-- John Herschel (as quoted on page 124 of Emerson: The Mind on Fire)

"In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case
gotten at second-hand, and without examination."
"[The Bible] has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity,

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Excellent Quotes from various sources--mostly freethought http://2think.org/quotes.html

and upwards of a thousand lies."

"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know."
"A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he
knows."
"I have seen several entirely sincere people who thought they were (permanent)
Seekers after Truth. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously,
profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted judgment--until they believed
that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. That was the end of the
search. The man spent the rest of his life hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his
Truth from the weather. If he was seeking after political Truth he found it in one or
another of the hundred political gospels which govern men in the earth; if he was
seeking after the Only True Religion he found it in one or another of the three
thousand that are on the market. In any case, when he found the Truth he sought no
further; but from that day forth, with his soldering-iron in one hand and his bludgeon
in the other he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors." (from What is Man?)
-- Mark Twain

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the
world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
-- Margaret Mead

"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of
common sense."
-- Chapman Cohen

"Part of the power of Emerson's individualism is his insistence, at crucial

moments, that individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency.
This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly
concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence." (Emerson:
The Mind on Fire p. 88)

"Just as science is more immediate and exciting than the history of

science, so is insight more compelling than a history of insight." (p. 227)
"[Emerson] was interested not in the bookworm, not even in the thinker, only in Man
Thinking." (p. 264)
"If death is the end of everything, then living is everything." (p. 375)
-- Robert D. Richardson

"Teaching and imparting of knowledge make sense in an unchanging environment...

But if there is one truth about modern man it is that he lives in an environment that is

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continually changing. The only man who is educated is the man who has learned how
to learn ... how to adapt and change ... who has learned that no knowledge is secure,
that only the process of seeking knowledge gives a basis for security"
-- Carl Rogers

"The great end in religious instruction, is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but
to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and
steadily with their own; not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to
inspire a fervent love of truth; not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward
springs; not to bind them by ineradicable prejudices to our particular sect or peculiar
notions, but to prepare them for impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects
may be offered to their decision; not to burden memory, but to quicken and strengthen
the power of thought;" (as quoted on page 30 of A Chosen Faith)
"It is an important truth that the ultimate reliance of a human being must be on his
own mind." (as quoted on page 47 of Emerson: The Mind on Fire)
-- William Channing

"I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I doubt."
-- Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)

"I've come to the conclusion that there can be little or no dialogue between
'proclaimers of truth' (religious and secular ideologues) and 'discoverers of truth'
(empiricists). The former tend to debate, the latter tend to discuss."
-- Edward H. Ashment

"Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was
that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could
flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology." (from Huxley, p. 79)
On Huxley encountering natives on a remote island... "Untouched people;
not necessarily noble savages, but apparently happy ones. They lived in a
land of plenty, ready to share their bananas and guavas and coconuts.
They were to be envied for their 'primitive simplicity and
kind-heartedness'. Where was that 'malady of thought' afflicting industrial England?
[Huxley] realized that 'civilization as we call it would be rather a curse than a blessing
to them'. Huxley knew the fate in store for them, slamming the 'mistaken goodness of
the "Stigginses" of Exeter Hall, who would send missionaries to these men to tell them
that they will all infallibly be damned'." (p. 120)
"[William Henry] Flower [the Anglican] too praised evolution as a cleansing solvent,
dissolving the dross which had 'encrusted' Christianity 'in the days of ignorance and
superstition'." (p. 305)
"Science was tearing through the 'fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs' to behold a new

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cosmos, in which our Earth is merely an 'eccentric speck' -- a world of evolution 'and
unchanging causation'. It invited new ways of thinking. It demanded a new rationale
for belief. With science's truths the only accessible ones, 'blind faith' was no longer
admirable but 'the one unpardonable sin'." (p. 345)
"A man got up [after one of Huxley's 'sermons'] and said 'they had never heard
anything like that in Norwich before'. Never 'did Science seem so vast and mere
creeds so little'." (p. 366)
-- Adrian Desmond

...it may be that there is no God, that "the existence of all that is beautiful and in any
sense good is but the accidental and ineffective byproduct of blindly swirling atoms,"
that we are alone in a world that cares nothing for us or for the values that we create
and sustain - that we and they are here for a moment only, and gone, and that
eventually there will be left no trace of us in the universe. "A man may well believe
that this dredful thing is true. But only the fool will say in his heart that he is glad that
it is true."
-- Sterling M. McMurrin

"Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel."
-- Horace Walpole

"Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human

race spends centuries deciphering the message."
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
though it had an underlying truth."
"If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that
somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's
credulity."
"I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between
developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing."
"When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they
believe in everything."
"When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us--and rightly--that we had
proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone
had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed."
"All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the
similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real."
-- Umberto Eco

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Excellent Quotes from various sources--mostly freethought http://2think.org/quotes.html

"Philosophy itself cannot but benefit from our disputes, for if our conceptions prove
true, new achievements will be made; if false, their refutation will further confirm the
original doctrines." (as quoted in Galileo at Work : His Scientific Biography, p. 108)
"I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our
senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some
other means the information that we could gain through them." (ibid., p. 226)
"I truly believe the book of philosophy to be that which stands perpetually open before
our eyes, though since it is written in characters different from those of our alphabet it
cannot be read by everyone." (ibid., p. 412)
"The hypothesis is pretty; its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor
demonstrable. Who does not see that this is purely arbitrary fiction that puts
nothingness as existing and proposes nothing more than simple noncontradiciton?"
(ibid., p. 169)
(Galileo was here referring to the philosophers of the time who refused to give up the idea that the
moon's surface was smooth so they said that although it appeared to have mountains and craters, it was
really encased in smooth transparent crystal--obviously his statement can apply to a whole host of ideas
that people create in order to hang on to tradition rather than grasp reality)

"...nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary
demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned)
upon the testimony of biblical passages." (as quoted in Blind Watchers of the Sky, p. 101)
-- Galileo Galilei

"I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of
the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free
himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of
nature to feed and clothe the world."
"The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a
dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too
absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity
and ignorance called 'faith.'"
-- Robert G. Ingersoll

"My young son asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a
bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth--that
most of us go to Hell and burn eternally--but I didn't want to upset him."
"If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is 'God is
crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is 'Probably
because of something you did.'"
-- Jack Handey

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"All this [Paul's writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up
phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have
their fortune told." Age of Reason
-- Thomas Paine

"It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but of one thing I am certain; he will change
the climate there, and emigration will set that way." (as quoted in Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p.
97)

-- Edward Taylor (who inspired Melville's Father Mapple in Moby Dick)

"...there ... remains a huge following [of Ayn Rand's philosophy] of

those who ignore the indiscretions, infidelities, and moral inconsistencies
of the founder and focus instead on the positive aspects of her
philosophy. There is much in it to admire, if you do not have to accept
the whole package... Criticism of the founder or followers of a
philosophy does not, by itself, constitute a negation of any part of the
philosophy... Criticism of part of a philosophy does not gainsay the
whole." (Why People Believe Weird Things, p. 122)
"Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at
building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In
science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations.
It is also its greatest strength." (p. 124)
"Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and
life--birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age.
They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has
absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a
science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to
science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning,
and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation
and ruined it." (p. 130)
"It is sad that while science moves ahead in exciting new areas of research, fine-tuning
our knowledge of how life originated and evolved, creationists remain mired in
medieval debates about angels on the head of a pin and animals in the belly of an
Ark." (p. 141)
"The first-cause and prime-mover argument, brilliantly proffered by St. Thomas
Aquinas in the fourteenth century (and brilliantly refuted by David Hume in the
eighteenth century), is easily turned aside with just one more question: Who or what
caused and moved God?" (p. 146)
"Ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should
simply check the box next to 'African-American.' My maternal grandmother was
German and my maternal grandfather was Greek. The next time I fill out one of those

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forms I am going to check 'Other' and write in the truth about my racial and cultural
heritage: 'African-Greek-German-American.' And proud of it." (p. 251)
-- Michael Shermer

"I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that
Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of
ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than
any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there
is no reason to consider any of them." The Quotable Bertrand Russell p. 138
"The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure
about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts."
"A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful
hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the word uttered long
ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence."
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To
conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
-- Bertrand Russell

"Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never subjected
anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for the purpose of
promoting her ideas."
-- John W. Draper (1811-1882) U.S. chemist

"Theologian: An uncommon individual who, though possessing finite abilities, has

been called by God himself who, though possessing infinite abilities, requires the
assistance of the former in explaining Himself to the rest of us."
[Translation: if God existed, theologians would be out of work.]"
"God: The Preeminent Chameleon; whenever the need is felt by one or more of his
followers, He oblingingly recreates himself to suit the occasion."
"The biblical concepts of sin and salvation are an integral part of Christian doctrine.
Christianity first creates a problem (sin) and then offers a "solution" (salvation). This
is not unlike the protection racket; you either buy "protection"--or else!"
"Jesus' last words on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
hardly seem like the words of a man who planned it that way. It doesn't take Sherlock
Holmes to figure there is something wrong here."
-- "Rev." Donald Morgan

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Alphabetical index

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