Brian Engler > Brian's Quotes

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense

“The line “But some of my best friends are [X],” well deserving of the taunts it now gets, has persisted because it is such an efficient way of resolving the dissonance created when a prejudice runs headlong into an exception.”
― Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Joe Schwarcz, Is That a Fact?: Frauds, Quacks, and the Real Science of Everyday Life

“Given the alarming state of his knowledge, you might wonder what job he could get. Unfortunately, he’s not hypothetical, and the job he got, in 2016, was president of the United States.”
― Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

“Who’s the most ignorant person the United States is willing to elect?”
― Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

“Over the past fifty years, what some of our most prominent politicians didn’t know could fill a book. This is that book.”
― Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

“when you travel, go slow, with your eyes wide open, ready for the unexpected.”
― Derek Baxter, In Pursuit of Jefferson: Traveling through Europe with the Most Perplexing Founding Father

“Thomas Paine had come to believe that religion was the worst form of tyranny because it pursued you through death and into eternity—something no king or despot had yet managed to do. At last, Marcus settled on repeating something Thomas himself had written. “ ‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
― Deborah Harkness, Time's Convert

“I just want to change the default setting of American culture and politics from “In God We Trust” to “secular until proven otherwise.”
― Kate Cohen, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe

“you can conduct a full life, a wonderful, even profound life, without relying on either the familiar religious structures or the supernatural beings that supposedly animate them.”
― Kate Cohen, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe

“If someone, somewhere, was interested in a subject, no matter how obscure, there was a book about it. And if there was a book about it, someone, somewhere, wanted to read it. Her job was to connect the two, and it was one she took very seriously.”
― Barbara Davis, The Echo of Old Books

“Being well educated is especially important for those who will go on to run the political and administrative systems for everyone else.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Whenever we see leaders or ideologies overruling the conscience, liberty, and reasoning of actual human beings with the promise of something higher, anti-humanism is probably in the ascendant.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Alone of all mankind, the scholar is no stranger in foreign lands; after losing kinsmen and intimates he still finds friends; he is a citizen in every state, and fearlessly despises the awkward chances of fortune.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“to govern well, one should be able to speak well, reason well, practice moderation and balance, and be suffused with “humanity” in all its senses—including knowing something of how real human stories had played out in the past.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“To prefer good government to bad is to prefer order to chaos, peace to war, prosperity to starvation, and wisdom to stupidity.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Enlightenment and humanist thinkers share a tendency to look to this world more than to the next, and to humanity more than to divinity.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“If we want to live in a well-regulated, peaceful society, then we must create one and maintain it.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Human-based morality implied that we needed no external authority to guide our ethical choices. This worried the political establishment, as well as the religious one, because it suggested a state of moral anarchy in which people could follow their own ideas.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Mary Wollstonecraft. Her Vindication of the Rights of Women of 1792 began by stating: “I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Universality without diversity would be an empty abstraction; there would even be something inhuman about it. Diversity without an idea of universal humanity would leave us all isolated, with few avenues of contact.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“just because some people do not like the sound of something, or do not want to do it themselves, that does not mean that it is wrong.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“one could live joyously and openly, acknowledging all the parts of one’s life instead of leaving some in shameful obscurity.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Connections, communications, moral and intellectual links of all kinds, as well as the recognition of difference and the questioning of arbitrary rules: these all go to form the web of humanity.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Don’t do something to others if you wouldn’t like it yourself.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“He had a humanist’s view of morality: he thought that its seeds lie in our own natural predisposition toward kindness and fellow feeling. Such impulses need guidance and development, but they do not need replacing by state-imposed commandments.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“If the state imposes moral principles by diktat, it obstructs their natural development. Thus, in effect, a state that enforces a particular belief is denying people the right to be fully human.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Humboldt thus asserts the key principle of political liberalism. The government is not there to tell people whom to marry, or what to believe or say, or how to worship, but mainly to make sure their choices do not harm others.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“The forming of well-rounded, fully human, free, cultured individuals had no place in the Fascists’ world. They had no wish to “humanize” anyone; quite the opposite.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope