Dave > Dave's Quotes

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
― Mark Twain

“Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.”
― Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters

“I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work.
Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm.”
― Robert Farrar Capon

“The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"

"You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.”
― Sam Harris

“Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not want to sign.”
― Théophile Gautier

“There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom

“The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“What has he found who has lost God?
And what has he lost who has found God?”
― Ibn 'Ata' Allah Al-Iskandari

“Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

“Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.”
― Dave Barry

“Reflection is the lamp of the heart. If it departs, the heart will have no light.”
― Imam Al-Haddad

“در غم ما روزها بی گاه شد
روزها با سوزها همراه شد”
― مولانا جلال الدین بلخی

“The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.”
― Diane Setterfield

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.”
― Carl Sagan

“I think, well, I've had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn't fair. Everyone I've ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time... But I think, any God that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night... 'Strewth, well, you've got to respect the old bastard, haven't you?”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists

“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”
― Edmond de Goncourt

“If absolute power corrupts absolutely, where does that leave God?”
― George Deacon

“Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

“I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.”
― Plotinus

“The Devil answer'd: bray a fool in a morter with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him; if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murder'd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defense before Pilate? covet when he pray'd for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments; Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Technos and clerics have much in common. Both take a world that can’t be fully understood and try to explain its fundamental properties.

Clerics postulate beliefs that can never be proven; they demand you accept these postulates as your Faith, which will guide your actions and thoughts. It’s a top down way of thinking; start with the big picture and derive rules for living. Fundamental knowledge is static. Even the derived rules rarely change.

Technos work from the bottom up. They build a baseline of observations and formulate theories to explain these phenomena. Nothing is sacred; with new observations, theories are discarded or modified to fit the facts.

Technos and clerics; how could they not be in conflict?
Dan Ronco’s Diary, 2016
”
― Dan Ronco, Unholy Domain

“God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”
― John Lennon

“Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”
― George Carlin