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a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
“There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”
He was a Freethinker, which is to say a skeptic about conventional religious beliefs,
“Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.”
“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.”
Everybody forgets his or her troubles during the marriage ceremony. After the groom kisses the bride, though, the party goes flat again.
Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife.
I had been raised by interesting and moral people who, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were nonetheless skeptics about what preachers said was going on.
only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism.
Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the Humanists’ Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion was for them.
I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.
“While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole,
Three Horsemen of the Oncologic Apocalypse, Surgery, Chemotherapy, and Radiation.
Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!
Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”
