I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
Robert Frost
As for kissing on the first date, you should never date someone whom you would not wish to kiss immediately.
Garrison Keillor, Salon Magazine
Lie to no one. If there's somebody close to you, you're gonna' ruin it with a lie. If they're a stranger, who the fuck are they you gotta' lie to?
Willie Nelson, Thief
You know I was talking about fellows like Pearse, who go on about blood sacrifice and glory and beauty and fightin'? Well, they're the ones you fuckin' shoot first.
Billy Cassidy, in Preacher by Garth Ennis
Because it's not a lack of knowledge that's holding you people back, it's a lack of will.
Marvin, Old Man Murray, 3/14/2001
One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that "violence begets violence." I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure—and in some cases I have—that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy.
Jeff Cooper, Cooper vs. Terrorism
"Wing tsun is a system of techniques whereby you defeat your enemy by means of your own wisdom. Man does not have a growl or sharp teeth, so man cannot fight like an animal. He does not possess the power of a gorilla nor can he ever become a superman, so we use wisdom and skill to defeat the enemy."
Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.
Marquis de Sade, Last Will and Testament
Cynic: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they should be.
Ambrose Bierce
The power of accurate vision is commonly called cynicism by those who do not have it.
G. B. Shaw
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903
The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don't adjust! Revolt against the reality!
Mordechai Anielewicz, Warsaw, 1943
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983
Our lives aren't our work. Work is only a means to an end. Remember that. When you die, the only people that will remember you for what your profession was didn't know you. Do you really know what all your friends do? What your uncles or grandparents did? See? It doesn't fucking matter.
mecawilson.com, 05/01/01
It's often said that people 'need' something more in their lives than just the material world. There is a gap that must be filled. People need to feel a sense of purpose. Well, not a BAD purpose would be to find out what is already here, in the material world, before concluding that you need something more. How much more do you want? Just study what is, and you'll find that it already is far more uplifting than anything you could imagine needing.
Richard Dawkins, Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder
Transience and limits are at the core of our nature, and you can consider that a curse or a blessing. Our lives are less than atomic flickers on the scale of the cosmos, but they would be equally infinitesimal if they lasted 10 million times longer, and they would still be infinitely precious to us. You have the chance to enjoy some morsel of the 1014 years that the sun and stars will last. You should.
John Rennie, Editor in Chief, Scientific American, November 1999
Believers in the supernatural claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?John Stossel, The Power of Belief, October 6, 1998
Cheer up friends. Do not be appalled if life seems to have no purpose. If there is no apparent purpose in evolution or in the scheme of things and you are despondent about it you can do something about that too. You can put a purpose into your life. You can go about doing good. Do something that needs to be done. Without a god there is plenty to do. The world needs you. Have a goal. Have a philosophy. No religion or church has a monopoly on morals or ethics despite what the clergy say.
G. Vincent Runyon, Why I Left the Ministry and Became an Atheist
"People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."
"Wear a gun to someone else's house, you're saying, 'I'll defend this home as if it were my own.' When your guests see you carry a weapon, you're telling them, 'I'll defend you as if you were my own family.' And anyone who objects levels the deadliest insult possible: 'I don't trust you unless you're rendered harmless'!
... Whenever personal arms have fallen out of fashion, society has become something no sane person would consider worth defending. The same thing happens to individual: they start rotting too, becoming helpless, disdaining to lift a finger because it's 'beneath them.' They're no longer fit to live and are simply proving that they know it!"
L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach
...the beauty of capitalism is that it reflects what people actually value, not what they dishonestly say they value. In that sense it's a brutally honest system.Angela Fiori, To Single Men On Today's Women: Caveat Emptor
To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds."
Justice Roberts, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)
Quemadmoeum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est.
A sword is never a killer, it's a tool in the killer's hands.Lucius Annaeus Seneca "the Younger" (4 B.C.E-65 C.E.)
To be honest, I don't much care if rape is natural or not. So is killing in self-defense. If it's "natural" for a man to rape me, it's equally "natural" for me to kill him for trying. Nature or nurture, he's out of the gene pool if he tries it.
It doesn't seem to be a problem if John Boy's revving on caffine, Jason stays calm with Ritalin, Mary Ellen perks up with Prozac, or Ma uses sleeping pills to get throught the night. But when Grandpa lights up a doobie all hell breaks loose. It's hypocritical and it's absurd.
J. Streck in rec.music.christian, May 19, 2000.
That rifle on the wall of the laborer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there!
George Orwell, 1940, in the democratic socialist weekly "Tribune," quoted in "Orwell: The Authorized Biography," by Michael Shelden
We are somewhat amused by the hysteria manifest in the press at the suggestion by Gordon Liddy that if one is menaced by bad guys (particularly the ninja) one is wise to shoot for the head. That statement has got a whole bunch of journalists and commentators bleeding from the nose. One wonders why it should. Where else should you shoot a man if he is probably wearing an armored vest? If you decide to shoot you have made the big decision. Where you place your shot is merely a technical matter.
Jeff Cooper's Commentaries, Independence Issue, 1995
I vote Libertarian, as the very thought of dope-smokin' gun-totin' wife-swappin' atheist Ayn-Rand-worshippers running the country gives me a warm feeling in the cockles of my heart.
John Hattan in alt.fan.bob-larson, March 23, 1999
When you disarm your subjects, however, you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an 'equalizer.' Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed—but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.
If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government—and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.
Edward Abbey, Abbey's Road, p. 39 (Plume, 1979)
It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.
H L Mencken
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Ch. III, "White Blackmail"
To say that taxation is merely theft is to understate the issue, and to downplay the truth. A thief, in most cases, strikes a given victim very few times, most often only once. And a typical thief does not try to convince the victim that it's her patriotic duty to submit to the theft, or that it's for "the good of all" (those who apologize for taxation are normally reluctant to say "for the good of the collective" which means, of course, for the good of those who wield political power).
Taxation is far greater an evil than theft. It is a form of slavery. If you cannot choose the disposition of your property, you are a slave. If you must ask permission to work, and/or pay involuntary tribute to anyone from your wages, you are a slave. If you are not allowed to dispose of your life (another way of defining money, since it represents portions of your time and effort, which is what your life is composed of) in the time, manner and amount of your choosing, you are a slave.
Rick Tompkins, The Libertarian, August 24, 1997
Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked whether a society's weapons policy might be one of the institutional arrangements that contributes to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage. Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being murdered—one does not usually lead to the other—but it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed.
Daniel D. Polsby, Washington University Law Quarterly, Volume 73, Number 3, Fall 1997
At what exact point, then, should one resist the communists? How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? Or, if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand... the Organs [police] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers... and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.
Alexander Solzhenicyn, Gulag Archipelago
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Philip K. Dick
No one is likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes happy or makes virtuous... Happiness and virtue are no arguments... Something might be true although harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it could pertain to the fundamental nature of existence that a complete knowledge of it would destroy one - so that the strength of a spirit could be measured by how much 'truth' it could take, more clearly, to what degree it needed it attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified.
- Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil"
"On the pre-scientific level, we hate the very idea that we may be mistaken. So we cling dogmatically to our conjectures as long as possible. On the scientific level, we systematically search for our mistakes...Thus, on the pre-scientific level... we are often ourselves destroyed... with our own false theories... On the scientific level, we systematically try to eliminate our false theories -- we try to let our false theories die in our stead."
- Sir Karl Popper
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money, so long as you have got it.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle In the Dark
The fact that a believer may be happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunk is happier than a sober man.
George Bernard Shaw
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.Douglas Adams
Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.Hippocrates (460 - 377 B.C.E.)
What is satanic is not egoism but the love of truth at the expense of happiness—to find one's happiness in truth, to oppose illusion, to value integrity above God, and character above salvation.
Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, p. 239
Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.
Ethan Allen
"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion. ... The psychological explanation for this phenomenon is that life sucks and we'd all rather fantasize about being someplace else."Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
Isaac Asimov
With cognitive dissonance, people end up believing they have received something valuable, something deserving of their loyalty, when in reality all that has happened is the people who were torturing them stopped.
Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme
Freethinkers—Atheists—admit that they don't know life's punch line. Indeed, we admit to not knowing a great many things. But we would rather be in ignorance than in error. And the best way to minimize error and the misfortunes that errors lead to, is to insist on facts and reason as the basis for our opinions. We resist the temptation to believe something for no better reason than that it might afford us a false—and probably temporary—sense of comfort or security. Indeed, we do not see beliefs themselves—at least about many things—as especially important. Rather, we consider that beliefs are merely stopping-off places, or resting points, in the essential process of the human condition, which is thinking. For you cannot think if you are believing. Nor can you believe if you are thinking.
Dr. Tim Gorski, Does God Exist? copyright 1997
Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
Steve Eley
"I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being."
Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith
As the new millennium dawns, may we finally rid ourselves of those grand absolutes, those terrible transcendent truths, in whose name human beings have routinely menaced one another. If the coming era must have a religion, then let it be a religion of everyday miracles and quotidian epiphanies, of short eternities and little myths. In the post-theistic age, let Christianity become merely kindness, salvation transmute into art, truth defer to knowledge, and faith embrace a vibrant doubt.James Morrow, The Eternal Footman
The gods don't go to church, and so the Epicureans follow their example.
Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if He is as little as that, He is beneath it.
Mark Twain, a Biography
It is alleged that God is the Being who may say, "I am who am."
It is just as easy to instead say of the universe, "It is what is."
nemo_outis@elsewhere.com
Christians, it is needless to say, utterly detest each other. They slander each other constantly with the vilest forms of abuse and cannot come to any sort of agreement in their teaching. Each sect brands its own, fills the head of its own with deceitful nonsense, and makes perfect little pigs of those it wins over to its side.
On True Doctrine, 2nd Century C.E.
Time and time again, I was told, "It's nothing you can do, all you have to do is believe and God takes care of the rest." But if you stray from them, it's "You never tried hard enough."
Amazing factoid: Every person who has ever told me that he was gonna be raptured Real Soon Now is, by an amazing coincidence, not a person that I'm gonna miss. Fancy that!
John Hattan in alt.fan.bob-larson, June 3, 1998
The dangers implicit in New Age pseudoscience, I feel, are no less pernicious than those posed by Old Age fundamentalism.
If a man accepts a religious proposition as true, it is hardly ever after having first considered it as a hypothesis and found compelling evidence through an impartial inquiry. Few religious people have studied comparative religion, and hardly any have attained their beliefs as a result of study: yet this would be de rigeur if the religious person's attitude toward the religious propositions he believes were at all similar to the historian's or the scientist's attitude toward the propositions with which they concern themselves. The fact that religious person frequently considers his religious propositions ever so much more important only aggravates the problem. The more important the issue at hand, the more it demands careful scrutiny. This is a simple but important issue which most religious people overlook.
Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, p. 104-105
Prayer is to social change what masturbation is to the continuation of the species.
Out of the New Testament they [theologians] pick appropriate verses and connect them to fashion an intellectual and moral self-portrait which they solemnly call "the message of the New Testament" or "the Christian view"; and out of other Scriptures they carve all kinds of inferior straw men. Theologians do not just do this incidentally: this is theology. Doing theology is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in which the verses of Scripture are the pieces: the finished picture is prescribed by each denomination, with a certain latitude allowed. What makes the game so pointless is that you do not have to use all the pieces, and that pieces which do not fit may be reshaped after pronouncing the words "this means." That is called exegesis.
Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, p. 219
Theology is the finding of bad reasons for things we are going to believe anyway.
G.E. Moore
Morality is the finding of bad justifications for things we are going to do anyway.
Steiner's Corollary
To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
Cardinal Bellarmine (1615, during the trial of Galileo)
The collateral damage that this scandal has caused to Christianity in general is staggering. Christian apologists insist that the "urban legend" of the Resurrection (as postulated by critics) could not have arisen in anything less than hundreds of years. But here, we have an urban legend arising in literally hours, even in our technologically- savvy and cynical society. And if it hadn't been for a pesky reporter insisting that the truth be told, it most likely would never have been told. Perhaps the most persuasive argument for the historicity of the Resurrection has now been conclusively refuted.
Ken Smith, on Cassie Bernall, in alt.fan.bob-larson October 6, 1999.
One immediately notices the similarities between "God the Father" and "The Godfather". Our villain creates the threat (hell/mob violence), creates a way out (subservience/protection money), and then sends out his goons with the message that we have some sort of "free" choice.
Personally, I'd love to see the Christian religion prosecuted under RICO. That's triple damages...
Peter Wykoff Walker II in talk.atheism July 23, 1999.
[...]if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference beween right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Christian
You see, the religious people—most of them—really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would have listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition.
Carl Sagan, Contact
Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.
French astronomer Laplace, when asked by Napoleon why he did not mention God in his writing. Quoted by George H. Smith in Atheism: The Case Against God
The Christian leadership in America makes the Pharisees look like saints; if Jesus doesn't destroy it both utterly and soon, he owes one hell of an apology to those nice moneychangers.
Ken Smith in alt.fan.bob-larson, November 21, 1997
In the unlikely event of losing Pascal's Wager, I intend to saunter in to Judgement Day with a bookshelf full of grievances, a flaming sword of my own devising, and a serious attitude problem.
Rick Moen in rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan, October 11, 1997
I've never understood child molestors. In order to molest a child, you have to be in the same room as a child, and I don't know how the perverts stand it.
Florence King
People sometimes rationalize their greed by saying that it is all for the good of their children but this is nothing but an excuse they use to make their despicable actions appear respectable and praiseworthy.
Having children brings much trouble and numerous responsibilities, and no matter how much care you give your children there is never any guarantee that they will not bring you great pain and heartbreak.
Men and women are like other living creatures: they bring children into the world with little or no thought about the matter and then they suffer and toil as best as they can to rear them. Men and women think that it is necessary to have children. It is not. It is their animal nature and social custom, rather than reason, which makes them believe that this is a necessity.
Don't have children; they bring much trouble, toil, and sorrow. What few advantages there are to having children rarely outweigh the disadvantages.
Democritus (460-370 BCE)
"Postnatal distress may be rather broader-based than we had previously thought."
Pauline Slade, a British psychologist, whose research suggests that labor and childbirth can trigger post-traumatic stress symptoms usually associated with war, as quoted by Newsweek.
Choose life. Choose childrearing. Choose pregnancy. Choose babies. Choose a fucking big financial burden, choose diapers, carseats, crib alarms and electrical childproofing. Choose bad health, bags under the eyes and high insurance. Choose minimum-repayment multi-decade mortgage loans. Choose a no-frills home. Choose Barney. Choose Sesame Street and vomit-resistant carpet. Choose endless replacement of kiddie clothing in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose sleep deprivation and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that carpet and watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing children's TV, while kids stuff Hyper-Sugared ADHD-pops in their mouths. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a retirement home, nothing more than an embarassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you spawned to replace yourself.
I chose differently. I chose to have a Life.
SteveD in alt.support.childfree, March 26, 2000.
'Saving the planet for the children' is like 'saving the rivers for toxic waste'.
Eve Forward-Rollins in alt.support.childfree, September 6, 2000.
When I consider how little of a rarity children are, — that every street and blind alley swarms with them, —that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance, — that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains, — how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. — I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them. If they were young phoenixes, indeed, that were born but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when they are so common—
Charles Lamb, "A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People"
The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works are proper to men. And surely a man shall see the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have shought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed. So the care of posterity is most in them who have no posterity."
Francis Bacon
"If motherhood doesn't interest you, don't do it. It didn't interest me, so I didn't do it. Anyway, I would have made a terrible parent. The first time my child didn't do what I wanted, I'd kill him."
Katherine Hepburn
Desperation to have a child comes from neediness, not instinct. It comes from the expectation that a child will fill an existing hole in our heart. Children, or anything else out there, can't fill that empty space. A feeling of wholeness comes from within.
Susan Jeffers
"We didn't worry about emotional stability in those days. All children were emotionally unstable. They were full of hatreds and frustrations. Who wouldn't be if you were half the size of the rest of the world and didn't have a nickel to your name?
"Those parents who concern themselves with their children's problems are crazy. The problems of a nine-year-old kid cannot be solved in any way except by becoming ten. The problems of a 16-year-old will only be solved by turning 17."
Al Capp, Reader's Digest, March 1959, p 99-100.
Copyright © 1998-1999 Jason & Heather Steiner