Danial Tanvir > Danial's Quotes

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

“To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“God will endure for as long as the reasons that brought him into being;
And so will those who deny him.”
― Michel Onfray

“I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever.”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

“It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“Monotheism has also been recognized as inherently intolerant.”
― Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim

“Let humanity be the other name for religion.”
― Taslima Nasrin, Lajja

“Great minds are always feared by lesser minds.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“rabbit hole of relativism.”
― Irshad Manji, Allah, Liberty and Love: The Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom

“Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."

[Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005]”
― Salman Rushdie

“You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition.”
― Michel Onfray

“How strange that excision – female circumcision, with several languages using the same term for both kinds of mutilation – of little girls should revolt the westerner but excite no disapproval when it is performed on little boys. Consensus on the point seems absolute. But ask your interlocutor to think about the validity of this surgical procedure, which consists of removing a healthy part of a nonconsenting child’s body on nonmedical grounds – the legal definition of… mutilation.”
― Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

“The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted.”
― Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

“You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance, you cannot kill a dream or an ambition. God, manufactured by mortals in their own quintessential image, exists only to make daily life bearable despite the path that every one of us treads toward extinction. As long as men are obliged to die, some of them, unable to endure the prospect, will concoct fond illusions.We cannot assassinate or kill an illusion. In fact, illusion is more likely to kill us — for God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence, and the critical mind. All the rest follows in a chain reaction.”
― Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

“So old and persistent did Mother's unhappiness seem that I had never stopped to ask its true cause. Nothing is more acceptable than that which we are born into.”
― Hisham Matar

“A corrupt mind turns everything to its advantage.”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“Good religious people are not good because of the moral teachings in their holy books—they are good despite the immoral teachings—that is, their genetics and other factors, which would make them good people, outweigh their indoctrination. By the same token, bad religious people are bad despite the good teachings in their holy books. Both are victims of the indoctrination they’ve received as a part of their religion cycle. It’s all picking and choosing from the religious cafeteria. It’s all individual. It’s all relative.”
― David Silverman, Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World

“The believers who say they are praying for me are victims of a lie and think they are doing something good; I let them know they are not. I tell them to imagine I had a newfangled gun that forcibly turned religious people into atheists. I tell them the gun didn’t really work, but I thought it did. Let’s say I decided to force them to be atheists, so I pointed the atheist gun at them and pulled the trigger. Would they think that was a nice thing to do? Would they appreciate my effort, or would they feel assaulted? When you pray for me, you are asking your god to change me. You are asking your god to forcibly enter my life and my brain and change my way of thinking (using euphemisms such as asking God to “open my heart to Jesus” is evidence of the intent of the assault).”
― David Silverman, Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World

“What I am doing is not giving religion respect that it wants but it doesn't deserve. I respect people; I respect humans. I do not respect religion. And I do not respect the idea that religion deserves respect. ["Atheist organizer takes ‘movement’ to nation’s capital", Belief Blog (CNN), 23 March 2012]”
― David Silverman

“When fanatics say, “Obey our religious laws even if you’re not a believer,” the immediate response must be to break whatever religious laws they are talking about.”
― David Silverman, Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World