Steve Miller > Steve's Quotes

“I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence”
― Doug McLeod

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion

“Confidence is not 'they will like me'. Confidence instead is 'I'll be fine if they don't'.”
― Christina Grimmie

“Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

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

“We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“If there is a god maybe it rewards those who don't believe on the basis of insufficient evidence--and punishes those who do.”
― Peter Boghossian

“Faith is an unclassified cognitive illness disguised as a moral virtue.”
― Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists

“The best advice I've ever received is, 'No one else knows what they're doing either.”
― Ricky Gervais

“It’s a strange myth that atheists have nothing to live for. It’s the opposite. We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for.”
― Ricky Gervais

“The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.”
― Ricky Gervais

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . . Then he said, "Let there be light." Which means he made the entire universe in the dark! How fucking good is that? He's brilliant.”
― Ricky Gervais

“You could easily spot any Religion of Peace. Its extremist members would be extremely peaceful.”
― Ricky Gervais

“Remember, when you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It is only painful for others.
The same applies when you are stupid.”
― Ricky Gervais

“Mondays are fine. It's your life that sucks.”
― Ricky Gervais

“An educated theologian: someone who's better at rationalizing what they're pretending to know.”
― Peter Boghossian

“secular people don’t believe in life after death, but rather, they believe in life before death.”
― Phil Zuckerman, Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions

“The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Bill O'Reilly: I'll tell you why it's not a scam. In my opinion, all right? Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that. You can explain why the tide goes in…
David Silverman: Tide goes in, tide goes out…?
O'Reilly: Yeah, see, the water — the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in…
Silverman: Maybe it's Thor up on Mount Olympus who's making the tides go in and out… [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 4 January 2011]”
― David Silverman

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind