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#1

“Trolls have 5,400 words for rocks and one for vegetation. "Oograah" means everything from moss to giant redwoods. The way trolls see it, if you can't eat it, it's not worth naming it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

tags: humor, vegetation

12 likes

#2

“But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

tags: science

67 likes

#3

“Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

tags: gods, witches

367 likes

#4

“Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

tags: atheism, funny, humour, religion

89 likes

#5

“It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.”
― Peter De Vries

18 likes

#6

“The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages ; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.”
― RUSSELL BERTRAND, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy

tags: philosophy

12 likes

#7

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

tags: travel

3993 likes

#8

“I can call the spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come, when you do call for them?”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1

tags: magic, science

55 likes

#9

“The very concept of sin comes from the Bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?”
― Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist

tags: religion-christianity, sing

25 likes

#10

“Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.”
― Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist

tags: belief, faith

42 likes

#11

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

3181 likes

#12

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

tags: evidence, skepticism

395 likes

#13

“Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

379 likes

#14

“With the development of the printing press, not only could text be mass-produced quickly, it could also be mass-produced quickly and incorrectly.”
― The Bureau Chiefs, Write More Good: An Absolutely Phony Guide

tags: history, humor, journalism, literacy, printing-press

3 likes

#15

“Drinks like this tend to get called Traffic Lights or Rainbow's Revenge or, in places where truth is more highly valued, Hello and Good-Bye, Mr. Brain Cell.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

tags: bartending, drinks

27 likes

#16

“Time and space were, from Death's point of view, merely things that he'd heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

tags: death, physics, space, time, topology

20 likes

#17

“If you want me to treat your ideas with more respect, get some better ideas.”
― John Scalzi, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded

218 likes

#18

“fifty-story skyscrapers stood side by side with older ten-story buildings like fathers and sons at the urinal together.”
― Yahtzee Croshaw, Jam

tags: humor

2 likes

#19

“It was a major and deeply embarrassing teenage revelation. It must be how straight teenage boys feel when they realize those boobs they like have heads attached to them.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

tags: adolescence, teenagers

9 likes

#20

“I know it’s bullshit that I say “babysitter” instead of nanny. What I have is a full-time nanny, and I should be roundly punished for trying to make it seem like the teenager next door comes over one night a week. But I don’t like the word “nanny.” It gives me class anxiety and race anxiety. And that is why I will henceforth refer to our nanny as our Coordinator of Toddlery.”
― Tina Fay

tags: bossypants

7 likes

#21

“I think we should stop treating ["God works in mysterious ways"] as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, "Oh good! I love a mystery. Let's see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas?”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

tags: apologetics, philosophy, theology

19 likes

#22

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
― John Rogers

tags: atlas-shrugged, ayn-rand, books, children-s-literature, education, fantasy, jrr-tolkien, life-changing, lord-of-the-rings, reading, real-world

1113 likes

#23

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

tags: absurdities, atheism, atrocities, barbarity, injustice, religion, skepticism

3200 likes

#24

“Nearly everywhere I've been, popular wisdom has it that the location of humanity's original planet is unknown, mysterious. In fact it isn't, as anyone who troubles to read on the subject will discover, but it is very, very, very far away from nearly anywhere, and not a tremendously interesting place. Or at the very least, not nearly as interesting as the enchanting idea that your people are not newcomers to their homes but in fact only recolonized the place they had belonged from the beginning of time. One meets this claim anywhere one finds a remotely human-habitable planet.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

tags: humor, science-fiction

7 likes

#25

“The Kraken stirs. And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

133 likes

#26

“DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

tags: death, humor

3471 likes

#27

“Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. ”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

962 likes

#28

“The ducks in St James's Park are so used to being fed bread by secret agents meeting clandestinely that they have developed their own Pavlovian reaction. Put a St James's Park duck in a laboratory cage and show it a picture of two men -- one usually wearing a coat with a fur collar, the other something sombre with a scarf -- and it'll look up expectantly.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

208 likes

#29

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens

tags: books, christopher-hitchens, humour, literature, writing

1187 likes

#30

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

tags: atheism, child-abuse, children, feminism, hell, religion, religion-and-children, rhetorical-questions, sexism, women, women-and-religion

1512 likes

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