"Aaah ... when two Neptunes appear in the sky it is a sure sign that a midget in glasses is being born, Harry..."
— J.K. Rowling

"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition."
— Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations)

"The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses."
— Francis Bacon

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."
— Aldous Huxley

""Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit."
"
— Emma Goldman

"Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times."
— Bernard Beckett (Genesis)

"To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?"
— Angela Carter

"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge."
— Robert G. Ingersoll

"It's not like I got caught masturbating, for chrissake; she doesn't know me, why the hell would she care if I'm superstitious? - Karen"
— S.D. Perry

"Superstition [is] cowardice in the face of the Divine."
— Theophrastus

"Progress had not invaded, science had not enlightened, the little hamlet of Pieuvrot, in Brittany. They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as little as its learning. They toiled hard all the week on the ungrateful soil that yielded them but a bare subsistence in return; they went regularly to mass in the little rock-set chapel on Sundays and saint’s days; believed implicitly all that monsieur le cure said to them, and many things which he did not say; and they took all the unknown, not as magnificent but as diabolical"
— Eliza Lynn Linton

"You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms."
— Susan Neiman (Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists)

"Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant.""
— Karl Jaspers (Man in the Modern Age)

"The problem is that one man's superstition is another man's religion, and vice versa. Many Protestants today still see Catholicism as being rife with superstition, ... while atheists and agnostics would see bien-pensant Protestants as worshiping an equally absurd form of the supernatural.
"
— David Gibson

"With their backs to the sunrise they worship the night."
— Robert G. Ingersoll