Chris Gale > Chris's Quotes

“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”
― Clifford D. Simak

“There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.”
― James Randi

“No amount of belief makes something a fact.”
― James Randi

“Yes, I'm a materialist. I'm willing to be shown wrong, but that has not happened — yet. And I admit that the reason I'm unable to accept the claims of psychic, occult, and/or supernatural wonders is because I'm locked into a world-view that demands evidence rather than blind faith, a view that insists upon the replication of all experiments — particularly those that appear to show violations of a rational world — and a view which requires open examination of the methods used to carry out those experiments.”
― James Randi

“There used to be an intellectual class in America. . . . These people kept the world of ideas alive. But today the distinction between intellectuals and nonintellectuals doesn’t make any difference; celebrity is the only standard. . . . Everybody has become a talker of cheap philosophy that anybody can pick up.”
― James Randi, The Faith Healers

“Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.”
― James Randi

“On the contrary, to know that you are an individual not put here for some mysterious reason by some supernatural means, and that you are not protected by unknown powers or beings; to know that you are a product of millions of experiments in the evolutionary process and not the result of a seed thrown on this planet by extraterrestrials—that, to me, is very exciting.”
― James Randi, Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions

“Ben Franklin said it well: "Quacks are the greatest liars in the world, except their patients.”
― James Randi, Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions

“Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless "beasts", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.”
― Henry Stephens Salt, Seventy years among savages

“The essential quality of life is living; the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution: and we are part of it.

The static, the enemy of change, is the enemy of life, and therefore our implacable enemy.”
― John Wyndham

“Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion