"The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster cruel vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging three headed beast like god one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes fools and hypocrites. "
— Thomas Jefferson

"Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence - of a crime (I might almost call it a course of action) which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularise."
— Evelyn Waugh (Decline And Fall)

"To me the ultimate sin was refusing to listen to reason."
— Colin McGinn (The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy)

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
— Hélder Câmara

"All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically"
— Steven Weinberg (Dreams of a Final Theory)

"Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies
each with two hundred billion stars
then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?"
— Ron Patterson

"Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think"
— Niels Bohr

"Men rarely if ever dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. "
— Robert A. Heinlein

"There is truth in wine and children"
— Plato (Symposium and Phaedrus)

"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up."
— Lily Tomlin

"For I have had great joy and consolution in thy charity, because the bowels of the saints have been refreshed by thee, brother."
— Various (Holy Bible: Nestle-aland Novum Testamentum Graece)

"So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."
— Bertrand Russell

"Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated"
— William Shakespeare (The Sonnets)

"If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. "
— Confucius

"Eppur si muove."
— Galileo Galilei

"Women should not be enlightened or educated in any way. They should in fact be segregated as they are the cause of hideous and involuntary erections in holy men. "
— Augustine of Hippo

"...owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods."
— Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer)

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
— Denis Diderot

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"The definition of fascism is The marriage of corporation and state "
— Benito Mussolini

"Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
— Albert Einstein

"There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes."
— Walt Whitman

"Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores."
— John R. Searle

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it."
— Karl Marx

"During my sixteen years as a teacher of writing, I removed many adverbs and adverbial phrases from students' writing. I decided long ago that a writer who needlessly modifies words is either a nervous writer who does not believe in the worth of what they are writing or a vain writer who wants to be seen as discriminating and sensitive to nuances or meaning."
— Gerald Murnane

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
— Noam Chomsky

"Soon after I left university, I came up with another definition of a literary critic or would be critic: someoone who uses churlish towards the end of an article or review."
— Gerald Murnane

"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, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life."
— James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)

"Exit, pursued by a bear."
— William Shakespeare

"A Loud Laugh Bespeaks a Vacant Mind!"
— William Shakespeare

"I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning."
— Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions)

"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.""
— Carl Sagan

"Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion."
— Robertson Davies

"Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined."
— Samuel Goldwyn

"The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other milk."
— Ogden Nash

"Any event once it has occurred can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian."
— Lee Simonson

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My
father compounded with my mother under the
dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
major; so that it follows, I am rough and
lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing."
— William Shakespeare (King Lear)

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."
— Gustave Flaubert

"For what says Quinapalus? Better a witty fool than a foolish wit."
— William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)

"First, relax. ... And my second helpful hint is that you should not try to memorize anything you read in this book. ... My two words of advice are exemplified in what I call the Russian Novel Phenomenon. Every reader must have experienced that depressing moment about fifty pages into a Russian novel when we realize that we have lost track of all the characters, the variety of names by which they are known, their family relationships and relative ranks in the civil service. At this point we can give in to our anxiety, and start again to read more carefully, trying to memorize all the details on the offchance that some may prove to be important. If such a course is followed, the second reading is almost certain to be more incomprehensible than the first. The probable result: one Russian novel lost forever. But there is another alternative: to read faster, to push ahead, to make sense of what we can and to enjoy whatever we make sense of. And suddenly the book becomes readable, the story makes sense, and we find that we can remember all the important characters and events simply because we know what is important. Any re-reading we then have to do is bound to make sense, because at least we comprehend what is going on and what we are looking for.
(Reading, p. 10; ISBN:052131285X) "
— Frank Smith

"It's cold out there, colder than a ticket taker's smile at the Ivar Theatre on a Saturday night."
— Tom Waits

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
— Oscar Wilde

"She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say "when". "
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Life's disappointments are harder to take when you don't know any swear words."
— Bill Watterson

"Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in."
— Evelyn Waugh