Alonia > Alonia's Quotes

“People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.”
― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

“I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“What's the world's greatest lie?... It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Don't listen to the malicious comments of those friends who, never taking any risks themselves, can only see other people's failures.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Certain things in life simply have to be experienced -and never explained. Love is such a thing.”
― Paulo Coelho, Maktub

“If you start by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work towards getting it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Life takes us by surprise and orders us to move toward the unknown -even when we don't want to and when we think we don't need to.”
― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

“The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all. It is worth remembered, in this context, that when a person's brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst.

Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter's potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“Recently , crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world - burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people - in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper. When was the last atheist riot?”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not 'cowards,' as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

“The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

“What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.”
― Sam Harris

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

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

“A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
― Richard Dawkins

“...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”
― Richard Dawkins

“There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality”
― Richard Dawkins

“The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict—its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of conflicts, then vanished of itself—what's the expression—ah, yes, 'not with a bang, but a whimper,' as the economic and social environment changed. And then, new problems, and a new series of wars.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“Compassion is the basis of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.”
― C.S. Lewis

“My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness