Meredith > Meredith's Quotes

“Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.”
― Philip Pullman

“The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"

"You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.”
― Jon Stewart

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“And what a story. The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it's God's Son who pays the price? I tried to imagine Father saying to me, 'Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas. Yesterday another one killed a black buck. Last week two of them ate a camel. The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done. I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed them you.' ... 'Yes, Father, that would be the right and logical thing to do. Give me a moment to wash up'. What a downright weird story. What a peculiar psychology.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“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

“After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”
― Ann Richards

“To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.”
― Marquis de Sade

“In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.”
― Marquis de Sade

“Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.”
― Matt Groening, The Big Book of Hell

“No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”
― Margaret Sanger

“Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.”
― Saddam Hussein, The Revolution and Woman in Iraq

“Learning about sex was a little bit like learning grammar. Every teacher you had assumed some other teacher taught you the year before, or the year before that, as if none of them wanted to talk about it, as if grammar was a bunch of dirty words. A massive silence surrounded dangling participles and infinite clauses, and you learned to fear making mistakes you didn't know how to avoid.”
― Ann E. Imbrie, Spoken in Darkness: Small-Town Murder and a Friendship Beyond Death

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”
― Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You!

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!

“A person's a person, no matter how small.”
― Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who!

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
― Robert Fulghum, True Love

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”
― Dr. Seuss

“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”
― Dr. Seuss