Mark Kenderdine > Mark's Quotes

“The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence”
― Bertrand Russell

“It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“I'm completely in favor of the
separation of Church and State.
... These two institutions screw us up enough
on their own, so both of them together is
certain death.”
― George Carlin

“He - and if there is a God, I am convinced he is a he, because no woman could or would ever fuck things up this badly.”
― George Carlin

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls - while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”
― Charles Bukowski

“One mark of a great soldier is that he fight on his own terms or fights not at all.”
― Sun Tzu

“The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays

“Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them.
(Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims

“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Common sense is not so common.”
― Voltaire, A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary

“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.”
― Voltaire

“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."
(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)”
― Voltaire

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss

“Forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be born.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

“The universe is the way it is , whether we like
it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent
of our desires . A world without God or purpose may seem harsh
or pointless, but that alone doesn ' t require God to actually exist.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing