Roger Bailey > Roger's Quotes

Showing 1-28 of 28

#1

“Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

429 likes

#2

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

5977 likes

#3

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

tags: capitalism, greed, growth

766 likes

#4

“The way we’ve set up corporations, even a majority vote of stockholders cannot demand that a corporation’s policies reflect the public good or preserve the environment for future use. That’s because profit is the one and only motive. It’s up to government and it’s up to people to protect the public interest. Corporations are simply not allowed to.”
― David Suzuki, From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis

8 likes

#5

“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: misattributed-to-einstein

9513 likes

#6

“If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”
― Ernesto Che Guevara

tags: justice, social-justice

954 likes

#7

“To be inspired is great, but to inspire is an honor.”
― Stacey T. Hunt

tags: action, adventure, adventures, art, artist, beginning, begins, book, break, broken, but, cascade, cheerful, cool, cover, dance, day, fantasy, fiction, fine, fire, go, great, happiness, happy, honor, honorable, i, independance, independent, inspirational, inspire, joy, laugh, learn, live, love, mask, me, most, night, positive, romance, science-fiction, series, sing, sky, skyfire, teen, teen-fiction, teenager, thoughts, to, wanted, wherever, writing, ya, you, young-adult

70 likes

#8

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

tags: books, humor

152107 likes

#9

“There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extrovert.”
― Pierce Brown, Golden Son

697 likes

#10

“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov

tags: evidence, faith, skepticism, ufo

238 likes

#11

“I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

tags: faith, skepticism

468 likes

#12

“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: dissent, freedom-of-thought, independent-thought, skepticism

1629 likes

#13

“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan

1476 likes

#14

“It's not my responsibility to be beautiful. I'm not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.”
― Warsan Shire

tags: beautiful, existence, feminism, self-esteem

2334 likes

#15

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

tags: biology, design, disease, evolution, fear, indifference, natural-selection, purpose, science, starvation, suffering

522 likes

#16

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
― Bertrand Russell , Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

tags: babylon, belief, burden-of-proof, christian-god, egyptian, fiction, gods, hypothesis, knowledge, olympus, probability, proof, rational, reason, santa, satan, superstition

822 likes

#17

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: belief, delusions, faith, insanity

1794 likes

#18

“It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands, on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his reason, is contradicting himself.

There can be no knowledge of what is good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.”
― George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God

tags: atheism, religion, skepticism

45 likes

#19

“Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.”
― Emmett F. Fields

tags: atheism, misattributed-to-carl-sagan, religion

1106 likes

#20

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

tags: atheism, religion

8905 likes

#21

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

tags: fact, ignorance, truth

10556 likes

#22

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
― Steven Weinberg

18 likes

#23

“This is what science always has to do, but religion will not do that. While scientists themselves may be religious individuals of many different faiths, their methodology was designed to be the antithesis of faith—it requires that all assumptions be questioned, that all proposed explanations be based on demonstrable evidence, and that all hypotheses be testable and potentially falsifiable. Blaming magic is never acceptable because miracles aren't explanations of any kind, and there has never been a single instance in history when assuming the supernatural has ever improved our understanding of everything. In fact, such excuses have only ever impeded our attempts at discovery.”
― Aron Ra, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

tags: faith, miracles, science, skepticism, skepticism-of-religion

2 likes

#24

“Once, when a religionist denounced me in unmeasured terms, I sent him a card saying, "I am sure you believe that I will go to hell when I die, and that once there I will suffer all the pains and tortures the sadistic ingenuity of your deity can devise and that this torture will continue forever. Isn't that enough for you? Do you have to call me bad names in addition?”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir

tags: asimov, humor, rebuttal, religion, zealots

222 likes

#25

“As so often happens in philosophy, clever people accept a false general principle on a priori grounds and then devote endless labour and ingenuity to explaining away plain facts which obviously conflict with it.”
― C D Broad

4 likes

#26

“Not one of the orthodox ministers dare preach what he thinks if he knows a majority of his congregation think otherwise. He knows that every member of his church stands guard over his brain with a creed, like a club, in his hand. He knows that he is not expected to search after the truth, but that he is employed to defend the creed. Every pulpit is a pillory, in which stands a hired culprit, defending the justice of his own imprisonment.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Individuality From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'

tags: justice, pulpit, skepticism, truth

26 likes

#27

“Being religious doesn't mean you're righteous. It just means you're gullible.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America

tags: atheism, atheism-quotes, atheist, atheist-quotes, religion, religion-quotes, twitter, twitter-quotes, twitter-size-quotes

6 likes

#28

“Spirituality is your own imagination.

Religion is someone else's imagination.

Both are based on nothing more than wishful thinking.

Science is the search for evidence-based truth. Very different from wishful thinking.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert

tags: atheism, atheism-quotes, religion-quotes, religion-spirituality, science, science-quotes, spirituality, twitter-quotes, twitter-size-quotes, words-of-wisdom

2 likes

All Quotes

Roger Bailey > Roger's Quotes

Tags From Roger’s Quotes