"There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades.
"
— Michael Shermer

"If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it."
— Robert Wright

"Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.
"
— Thomas Jefferson

"I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
— Thomas Jefferson

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
— George Bernard Shaw

"All thinking men are atheists."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)

"I was born a heretic. I always distrusted people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows."
— Susan B. Anthony

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
— James Madison

"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 A. Edison

"Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."
— Richard Dawkins

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
— Richard Dawkins

"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"The bible and the church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation."
— Elizabeth Stanton

"My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic."
— Carl Sagan

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." - "
— Gene Roddenberry

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

"The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known."
— John Stuart Mill

"Watch your thoughts; they became your words. Watch your words; they become your actions. Watch your actions; they become your habits. Watch your habits; they become your character. Watch your character; they become your destiny."
— Frank Outlaw

"I slept and dreamt that life was Joy. I woke and saw that life was duty. I acted, and behold, Duty was Joy."
— George Bernard Shaw

"A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"Love is the movement within life that carries us, that enables us, that causes us to break out of what Alan Watts calls the “skin-encapsulated ego.” Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego. Therefore it expands our lives and, needless to say, enriches it. Any human being would give anything to love or be loved. When it really happens, it is like heaven on earth."
— Huston Smith

"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you."
— Carl Sandburg

"When you blame others, you give up your power to change."
— Douglas Adams

"Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails."
— Clarence Darrow

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."
— Will Durant

"Only a life lived for others is worth living."
— Albert Einstein

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"Only the educated are free."
— Epectitus

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
— Aldous Huxley

"The opinions and beliefs of men follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds."
— Thomas Jefferson

"People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be."
— Abraham Lincoln

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. "
— Philip K. Dick

"To be enlightened may not be so difficult. What is difficult is not to be caught by enlightenment or attached to it. To express enlightenment in each moment is to live each moment afresh, without ideas or attachment anywhere. You can be trapped by your own way. You should not try too hard. To be sincere is not to make haste for attainment by self-centered ideas but to sit zazen for the sake of your big self. Do not make haste. Do not try to do something ahead of time or behind time. If it is raining out, do not walk fast, because it is raining everywhere."
— Suzuki Roshi

"Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done."
— Tracy Kidder

"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards."
— Mark Twain

"The purpose of money was to purchase one's freedom to pursue that which is useful and interesting."
— Benjamin Franklin

"So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do."
— Benjamin Franklin

"Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship."
— Benjamin Franklin

"The person who would like to make his dreams come true must stay awake."
— Richard Wheeler

"Kind prince there is nothing in the realm of ideas that is absolute, therefore all efforts to form ideologies are ultimately futile."
— Laozi (Hua Hu Ching)

"The spirit of life relates to what has been described by the word “heaven”; the phenomenal world around us to what is described by the word “earth.” Heaven and earth are one. Only man, in his foolishness, endeavors to separate them. To the extent that he is successful in this it becomes hell in his own experience. Hell is simply the absence of the experience of heaven; it is the absence of the experience of life, in whatever degree. The experience of life as it really is, is heaven."
— Martin Cecil

"A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
— Clifford Geertz

"I am not an Athenian nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world."
— Socrates

"When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary."
— William James

"There is the globe,
The foundation of my bodily existence.
It wears me out with work and duties,
It gives me rest in old age,
It gives me peace in death.
For the on who supplied me with what I needed in life
Will also give me what I need in death."
— Chuang Tzu

"A leader is best
When people barely know he exists
Of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will say, “We did this ourselves.”"
— Laozi (Tao Te Ching)

"A personalized God can be a mere idol carved in our own image- a projection of our limited needs, fears, and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: It means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, “he” can encourage us to remain complacently within them; “he” can make us cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as “he” seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religions, “he” can encourage us to judge, condemn, and marginalize."
— Karen Armstrong

"It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in Nature and in the world of though. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole."
— Albert Einstein

"All religions arise from and are maintained by transcendent experiences, therefore, they all lead us, by different paths, toward the same goal of wholeness and unity, in which the specific claims of individual faiths converge into an absolute, undifferentiated whole."
— Wayne Tisdale