Some of my favorite quotes:
Saying that atheism requires faith because you do not understand science is a non sequitur.
— VJACK at Atheist Revolution, “Atheism Does NOT Require Faith“, January 10, 2008.
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Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was created by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything—anything—be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith (W.W. Norton 2004)
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What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
— Christopher Hitchens
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No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.
— Steve Jobs, 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford University
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There’s a clumsy little two-step move creationists like to make: first, point to dissent in the scientific community over real and often interesting issues at the edge of knowledge, and second, swap in their dissent over basics, like common descent, and pretend that the scientists are actually sharing in their ignorance-based concern.
— PZ Meyers, “Manufactured controversies vs. the real edge of science“, Pharyngula, May 7, 2008.
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It’s becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, and probably fairly close to us, is a fairly remote idea. And, the chance that some of it isn’t more intelligent than ours is also a remote idea.
— Stephen Petranek, Editor-in-chief Discover magazine, speaking at the TED Conference of February 2002 at Monterey, California.
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Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.
— Winston Churchill
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If the facts are on your side, pound the facts; if the law is on your side, pound the law; if neither is on your side, pound the table.
— Time-honored legal maxim
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We just took our kids to an open house for a private school … so we go into the room and talk to the teacher, and we said “is the school non-religious?” And they say “completely non-religious.” So we said “is there any celebration of holidays?” And they said “well, you know, around the winter holiday we decorate a menorah, but not in a religious way.” OK Well, I said “do you celebrate Easter?” And they said “well, we celebrate Easter–we decorate eggs and talk about the Easter Bunny. We talk about Easter, but not in a religious way.” So, I just want to know how you talk about Easter in ‘not a religious way’ and how you decorate a menorah in ‘not a religious way?’
And I just want to say this to all those people that are doing these educational holiday things in ‘not a religious way,’ there’s no god–and I mean that in, you know, ‘not an atheist way.’
— Penn Jillette, Penn Says video podcast “Not in a Religious Way“, March 13, 2008
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[I]t’s difficult to reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
— Phil Plait, “Is science faith-based?”, Bad Astronomy Blog, February 18, 2008 (paraphrasing Jonathan Swift)
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Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? - because you’re not!’ … Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe, no, that’s holy? What does that mean? … Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.
— Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in a speech given at Magdelene College Cambridge, September 1998
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Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. ‘People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
— Steve Jobs, Interviewed in The New York Times magazine “The Guts of a New Machine“, November 30, 2003
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I don’t care what your religion is, if your holy book contradicts everything we know about reality, I pick reality.
— Phil Plait, “Around the Weird Wide Web”, Bad Astronomy Blog, March 20, 2008
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How does young-earth creationism make sense to intelligent, well-meaning people? Well, much of any religion appears counterfactual. After all, preachers in liberal churches proclaim that a Jewish peasant executed by an empire is the God who rules the cosmos, and that we should love our enemies and that the poor are blessed. If you can believe that stuff, you can believe a lot.
— Jason Byassee, “Dinosaurs in the Garden: A Visit to the Creation Museum”, The Christian Century Magazine, February 12, 2008
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Say it with me: evolution is not a belief system! You cannot believe in it or not. It is a matter of scientific fact. It exists, it is real, whether you stick your fingers in your ears and sing la-la-la or not.
— Phil Plait, “6000 years of Republican debates”, Bad Astronomy Blog, May 4, 2007
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People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
— Dave Barry, “25 Things I Have Learned in 50 Years”, Dave Barry Turns 50 (Crown 1998)
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The secret to happiness–this is what you all came for–the secret to happiness is low expectations.
— Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, speaking at the TED Conference, July 2005 in Oxford, UK
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The President’s job is never to promote a religion. The great thing about America … is that you should be able to worship freely. I like to tell people, you’re equally American whether you’re a Jew, Muslim, Christian, or Atheist – you’re equally all Americans – and that if we ever lose that, we begin to look like the Taliban.
— President George W. Bush, Interview of the President in the Oval Office by Kai Diekmann of BILD, May 5, 2006
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Nothing that results from human progress is achieved with unanimous consent. And those who are enlightened before the others are condemned to pursue that light in spite of the others.
— Christopher Columbus
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If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance ‘God’.
— Jerry A. Coyne, “God in the Details: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution”, Nature, September 19, 1996 (reviewing the book Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe)
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Evolution is not opposed to religion unless people make it so. The message of evolution is that we are just as Genesis told us, we are made out of the dust of the Earth and that we are united in this web of life with every other living creature on the planet, and I think that’s a fairly grand notion.
— Kenneth Miller, Professor of Biology at Brown University and author of the book Finding Darwin’s God
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Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
— Adlai Stevenson
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The truth should stand up to questioning.
— unknown (basic scientific principle)
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Evolutionists have proof without certainty; Creationists have certainty without proof.
— unknown
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You want to know what’s wrong with our society? Our biggest problem is that we live in a society that no longer values the concept of not sticking one’s nose into other people’s business. We are increasingly becoming a culture of “nosey Nellys”, and this from a culture originally founded upon the principles of freedom!
Make no mistake about it: the desire to tell other people how to live their lives is a character flaw. It is a personality defect. Our grandparent’s generation would have considered it a social “faux pas” of the highest magnitude, and so should we.
— Paul Landry, speaking extemporaneously to a friend, November 14, 2007
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There is a time when panic is the appropriate response.
— Eugene Kleiner
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There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, which man should not wish to learn.
— Augustine of Hippo (”Saint Augustine”) [354 - 430] A. D.
(What he’s saying is that it’s better not to understand—something that most religions still teach… —PL)
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As a musician who writes my own stuff and really has a lot of value invested in the art-work, it’s fantastic that Steve Jobs is actually making it more fun to pay for it than steal it, which is great!
— KT Tunstall, at the Apple “The Beat Goes On” Special Event, Setember 5, 2007
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The point of all this is that in some cases, some people seem unwilling to concede that any criteria other than the ones they themselves deem important actually matter, or even exist.
That’s dogmatism,1 and the nature of dogma is such that it pretty much kills any reasonable discussion or debate.
1. I very much like the definition of “dogmatism” from Mac OS X’s New Oxford American Dictionary: “the tendency to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true, without consideration of evidence or the opinions of others”.
— John Gruber, “And Oranges”, Daring Fireball, Thursday, 15 June 2006, http://daringfireball.net/ 2006/06/and_oranges
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It’s amazing how few people understand that the Constitution is there to protect us from democracy—you don’t want the majority to rule. If the majority rules then it’s illegal to be [in any way different]… What you want is a democracy that has safety measures for nuts—that’s all they were doing. The Constitution is essentially saying “we’re going to let the mob rule, but we’re going to protect these particular whack-jobs. And that’s why your whack-jobs always love the Constitution and your mob always loves democracy.
— Penn Jillette, Penn Radio Podcast of November 6, 2006
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It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
— Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia
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On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this Supreme Being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in “A,” “B,” “C” and “D.” Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of “conservatism.”
— Senator Barry Goldwater, Five-term U.S. Senator and Hero of American Conservatism, Speech in the U.S. Senate, September 16, 1981
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Saying condoms make teenagers have sex is like saying the headlights on my car make the sun go down.
— Bengt Washburn on The Bob & Tom Show, Wednesday, August 16, 2006
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An sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
— Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (1961) [aka Clarke's Third Law]
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Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life’s work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. It’s a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth’s living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it’s “just” a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is “just” a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory. Continental drift is a theory. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomic theory. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That’s what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally—taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.
— “Was Darwin Wrong?” by David Quammen, National Geographic magazine, November 2004
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Tell you what… both of youse can grab one of my [books] you [mother father, chinese dentist].
— Anthony “One Time” Branca, Mr. Show (with Bob and David), Sketch: “Pallies”, (Season 4) Episode 27 “The Story of Everest”, originally aired November 23, 1998
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What occasions the focusing of attention on the Negro? Granted that white people have long enjoyed the Negro entertainment as a diversion. Is it not something different, something more, when they bodily throw themselves into Negro entertainment in cabarets? Now Negroes go to their own cabarets to see how white people act, and what do we see? Why, we see them actually playing Negro games. I watch them in that epidemic Negroism the Charleston. I look on and envy them. They Camel and Fish-tail and Turkey, they Geche and Black-bottom and Scrunch, they Skate and Buzzard and Mess-around, and they do them all better than I! This interest in the Negro is an active and participating interest. It is almost as if a traveler from the North stood watching an African tribe dance, then suddenly found himself swept wildly into it, caught in it’s tribal rhythm. Maybe these Nordics at last have tuned into our wavelength. Maybe they are at last learning to speak our language.
— Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934), in The American Mercury magazine [date unknown]
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No one has a keener eye than one who is too eager to see.
— Peter Huber, Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom (Basic Books 1991)
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…recent research suggests that there are, in fact, some 10500 perfectly good M theories, each describing a different physics. The theory of everything, as Smolin puts it, has become a theory of anything.
— George Johnson, “The Inelegant Universe” (reviewing the book, The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin), Scientific American magazine, October 2006
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Wait a minute—where are you getting this information? The point of religion is to hate people with different religions. I mean, if you’ve read the Koran or the Bible or the Torrah, they all say that those who do not accept the real God are heathens and infidels and should be at least banished, if not punished. There’s no idea behind religion of acceptance—if anything, the idea of acceptance is an American Secular idea.
— Penn Jillette, Penn Radio Podcast of March 23, 2006 at 35:23
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Unattributed/Anonymous:
Keep your theology off my biology!
My karma ran over my dogma.
Don’t pray in my school and I won’t think in your church.