The risk of failing to put pursuit of truth first

“He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, “Moral and Religious Aphorisms,” no. 25 (1825)

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In praise of quotes

A novel in every sentence! 

I’ve been collecting quotes for years.  Here are some of my favorites.  No particular topic.  BTW, “The Quotations Page is a good place to get a quote of the day. 

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (referring to the benefits of openness and transparency).

If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’ If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them.

Robert G. Ingersoll, American politician and lecturer

Why should we take advice on sex from the Pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t.

George Bernard Shaw

“Success is going from failure to failure without a loss in enthusiasm.”

Winston Churchill

“The best time to plant a tree… was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.”

Chinese Proverb

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead

The besetting sin of political and media types is that about 98 percent of their public conversation is utterly dishonest. The language is inflated, …

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Another good source for freethinker quotes

These (among numerous other quotes) are from a site called “My Favorite Quotes.”  Beware, neocons: These quotes might cause you to doubt that the United States was founded as a “Christian” nation!  Here are some of my favorites:

  • “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.”
    [Thomas Paine]
  • “There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice….”.
    [Thomas Paine]
  • “The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.”
    [Abraham Lincoln]
  • “My earlier views at the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.”
    [Abraham Lincoln, letter to Judge J.S. Wakefield, after the death of Willie Lincoln]
  • “If not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence. All his ideas of obligation or retribution were bounded by the present life.”
    [President John Quincy Adams on Thomas Jefferson, 1831]
  • “The Christian God is a being of terrific character — cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.”
    [Thomas Jefferson, _Jefferson Bible_]
  • “..our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”
    [Thomas Jefferson]
  • “We discover [in the gospels] a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism
…
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Continue ReadingAnother good source for freethinker quotes

Superstition, Religion and Reason Quotes

At this Cape Cod history and genealogy page, you can find a collection of hundreds of quotes regarding superstition and reason.  I had not seen many of these quotes before.  Here's a sampling: A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. - Winston Churchill You…

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