Earl > Earl's Quotes

“It is impossible to make peace with the Roman Catholic Church. It is one of the permanent enemies of all that is decent in human spirit.”
― Harold Laski

“INCEST, n. In many parts of the Bible Belt, the most popular form of dating”
― Charles Bufe, The Devil's Dictionaries: The Best of the Devil's Dictionary & the American Heretic's Dictionary

“The human race is the most stupid and unfair kind of race. A lot of the runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water.

Some runners are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side.

It's not surprising a lot of people have given up compeating altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk and shout abuse.

What the human race needs is a lot more streakers.”
― Banksy, Cut It Out

“Ben Franklin said:
"Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy wealthy and wise"

Lately I have read the advice given to William Randolph Hearst, when a young man, by his father:
"Go downtown at noon and rob the other fellows of what they have made during the morning.”
― E. Haldeman-Julius

“It is a good thing that women are so easily manipulated. Otherwise, most of us wouldn't be here.”
― William Randolph Hearst

“When she left I realized my roommate, Dave, was awake the whole time and was witness to my entire interaction with Heather. He said something like, 'Good try, man. Just remember, if Christ wants something to happen it will, but it will happen in his time.' which was my first real taste of the born-again-flavored shit pie he was going to force-feed down my throat every day of our freshman year.”
― Chad Kultgen, The Lie

“When confronted by a ‘believer’ it is easy for me to contrast the views of the skeptic with those of the rationalist. I simply reach into my pocket and pull out my change.

Holding a quarter aloft, I say, ‘This is a most remarkable coin, for it is heavier than all the sins of humanity committed since the beginning of the human race.’

I then hold up a nickel and say, ‘This coin is even more amazing, as it is brighter and shinier than the flames that proceeded from the Burning Bush discovered on Mt. Sinai by Moses.’

Then I raise a penny and state, ‘This portrait of President Lincoln is more realistic and true-to-life than any portrait of Satan ever painted.’

And finally, I hold out a bright, shiny dime and say, ‘And this dime is the most amazing of all because it is heavier and contains more precious metals than all the gold bricks in the streets of Heaven.’

I end with ‘Give to Caesar what is his, and hold the rest of it dear—for it is all you see and touch—and the Christian god can take care of all his things, for they amount to less than this 41 cents I hold here in my hand.”
― E. Haldeman-Julius

“Bill O'Reilly calls his tv show the "No Spin Zone" but the man is practically a whirling dervish. He combines willful ignorance with a simple child-like faith in the system that, not coincidentally, has made him a millionaire.”
― Earl Lee

“All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”
― Upton Sinclair

“A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief.”
― Upton Sinclair, Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation

“Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you.”
― Voltaire

“Did anyone tell Toscanini, or Bach, that he had to choose between music and family, between art and a normal life?”
― Elizabeth Mann Borgese

“The delay in the application of the policy to books has several explanations. For one thing, Blackshirts were not, nor have they yet become, bookworms; and the intellectual bread of Mussolini himself is made, usually, of clippings. They did not care too much about things which they could not hate since they usually did not know them....”
― Giuseppe Borgese

“Ramrod felt a great sadness building up, deep within. There were no words to express his feeling of loss. The sorrow rose up from the pit of his stomach and caught in his throat. He had a strangled ejaculation buried deep down in his soul. Yes, Ramrod missed his wife very, very much. He missed the warmth of her breasts pressed up against him in the night. He even missed her cold feet. And he especially missed her bedtime facial. Yes, it’s true—he missed her eyes, he missed her mouth. He had trouble remembering how she wore her hair the last time he saw her, and he missed that, too. It’s like, where Love was concerned, Ramrod’s aim wasn’t very good. Yes, life was becoming very, very hard on Ramrod. ”
― Earl Lee, Kiss My Left Behind 2: The Tribulation Farce

“I'm a Skeptic. And I'm a Journalist. I look up things in the library—a lot! I believe in the motto of Missouri, the 'Show-me, don't just blow me' state. I need evidence. I need demonstrations. I need show-and-tell. Even though I pray to God every once in a while, especially when I'm in trouble—which for most guys my age is every 28 days—I still think deeply about the issues and don't automatically jump to a religious or mystical answer to questions. I am, by nature, doubtful about the existence of God, and even whether He is a He or a Her. I don't believe in New Age stuff. For me, 'Past Life Regression' means not calling a girl after she gives me her phone number. Sure I own a lucky rabbit's foot, a lucky penny, a lucky 4-leaf clover and a lucky horeshoe [sic], and a pair of lucky underwear and several pairs of lucky socks that I only wash every seven days. But under it all I am a died–in-the-wool skeptic.”
― Earl Lee, Raptured: The Final Daze of the Late, Great Planet Earth

“Sarah Palin is living proof that you can't make a silk purse out of a horse's ass.”
― Earl Lee

“...given sufficient ignorance, one can doubt evolution....”
― Steven E. Landsburg, The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

“Yes, Bush spouted a bunch of religious crap, but at least he didn't believe in it.
Give the man a beer. Sometimes hypocrisy is better than faith.”
― Earl Lee

“The rules your parents teach you to live by are very different than the rules the world actually runs by. Most of the conventional wisdom is not only wrong, it's a lie told to us by people who want to control us. It doesn't help us, it helps them. Pretty much everything we're told as children (and adults, really) by the established power structures in our lives are made up fairytales us to reinforce that control: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, fat-free frozen dinners, religion, and metering lights on the highway--the list goes on”
― Tucker Max, Hilarity Ensues

“Envy and resentment are terribly corrosive passions. To suffer at the sight or even the thought of others' enjoyment of life makes one a committed enemy of human happiness. Such people end up being practically a curse upon the human race. They vandalize life, exerting themselves not in the pursuit of gain or pleasure, but to hinder others' enjoyment.”
― Robert Sheaffer, Making of the Messiah

“The priest invents and encourages every kind of suffering and distress so that man may not have the opportunity to become scientific, which requires a considerable degree of free time, health, and an outlook of confident positivism. Thus, the religious authorities work hard to make and keep people feeling sinful, unworthy, and unhappy.”
― Robert Sheaffer, Making of the Messiah

“Christianity also stands in opposition to intellectual, as well as physical, health. To doubt becomes sin. 'Faith means not wanting to know what it true' a description that strikes me as stunning and quite exact.”
― Robert Sheaffer, Making of the Messiah

“MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“How far the gentlemen of dark complexion will get with their independence, now that they have declared it, I don’t know. There are serious difficulties in their way. The vast majority of people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin.”
― H.L. Mencken

“It’s pretty clear that they must have had some kind of romantic relationship, because it is impossible to hate a man that much who you haven’t blown in the men’s room of a four-star luxury hotel”
― Ms. Dominique Suches-Koch

“Ann Coulter is living proof that you can’t make a silk purse out of a horse’s ass”
― Andrew Breitbart, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World

“Quiet fell upon the pickup and lasted for a little over nineteen minutes.
Is that why you hang around with him?", Loretta asked. "Cuz he saved your life?"

"Sort'a. I know Earl isn't always easy to get along with. Fact is, he can be a real pain the ass more often than not, but after you spend enough time with him, and you learn to ignore his personality, he's a pretty decent guy."

"If you say so.”
― A. Lee Martinez, Gil's All Fright Diner

“One of my friends told me that he knows a family of Mormons who wear holy underwear. Can't they afford to buy new underwear, without the holes?”
― Ms. Dominique Suches-Koch

“The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window.”
― Steven Pinker

“Fiction is empathy technology.”
― Steven Pinker