Trevor > Trevor's Quotes

“The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster cruel vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging three headed beast like god one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes fools and hypocrites. ”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence - of a crime (I might almost call it a course of action) which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularise.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

“To me the ultimate sin was refusing to listen to reason.”
― Colin McGinn, The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy – An Intellectual Memoir from Oxford to America with Russell and Chomsky

“Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies
each with two hundred billion stars
then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?”
― Ron Patterson

“All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically”
― Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for The Fundamental Laws of Nature

“Men rarely if ever dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. ”
― Robert Heinlein

“Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think”
― Niels Bohr

“No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.”
― Lily Tomlin

“There is truth in wine and children”
― Plato, Symposium / Phaedrus

“So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”
― Bertrand Russell

“If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. ”
― Confucius

“Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated”
― William Shakespeare, The Sonnets

“Eppur si muove.”
― Galileo Galilei

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
― Denis Diderot

“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

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“The definition of fascism is The marriage of corporation and state ”
― Benito Mussolini

“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein

“There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.”
― John Searle

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

[These words are also inscribed upon his grave]”
― Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

“During my sixteen years as a teacher of writing, I removed many adverbs and adverbial phrases from students' writing. I decided long ago that a writer who needlessly modifies words is either a nervous writer who does not believe in the worth of what they are writing or a vain writer who wants to be seen as discriminating and sensitive to nuances or meaning.”
― Gerald Murnane

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Soon after I left university, I came up with another definition of a literary critic or would be critic: someoone who uses churlish towards the end of an article or review.”
― Gerald Murnane

“Exit, pursued by a bear.”
― William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time