Mandy

“We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft

“That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“goose or a duck by putting it in a cage where it can’t move, shoving a tube down its throat, and force-feeding it to make its liver fatty in order to make foie gras for people to spread on crackers? The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 applies to crows because some of their populations migrate. But the treaty provides that a species under its auspices may be hunted under regulations preventing detrimental effects on the overall population if there is good cause. Crows are exempted from the act’s protection when they “harm livestock” by eating corn. So American crows, Corvus brachyrhynchos, are considered great for target shooting. There is no bag limit. There used to be a specific crow-hunting season, beginning in September in some states. But in my state of Maine you can now shoot crows in any number at any time, except on Sundays. Migratory woodpeckers, such as the northern flicker, in contrast, are as far as I know not fair game even when they are damaging a home. And I think that is fair and reasonable.”
― Bernd Heinrich, One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives

“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”
― H.P. Lovecraft