Randolf > Randolf's Quotes

“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

“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.”
― Tom Waits, The Early Years: The Lyrics, 1971-1983

“Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?”
― R. Buckminister Fuller

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Belief gets in the way of learning.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Magic involves making the improbable possible. It's learning how even the slightest change you make can have a radical effect on the internal system of your psychology/spirituality, and the external system of the environment and universe you live in.”
― Taylor Ellwood, Multi-Media Magic: Further Explorations of Identity and Pop Culture in Magical Practice

“Most people hammer your mind with Thesis>Antithesis>Synthesis or as my old friend, the late Robert Anton Wilson, said: "Here's what it is, here's what it isn't, now here's why you need to go tell everyone how smart I am." I can't tell you how much that tired old formula skeeves me. When I do see people brave enough to (god forbid!) put the onus of drawing a conclusion back on the reader (heresy!), I am not only relived (what, me have to think?), my faith in humanity has it's execution stayed another day.”
― Joseph Matheny

“Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day.
Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.”
― Timothy Jones

“I have a problem with people who take the Constitution loosely and the Bible literally.”
― Bill Maher

“Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you'd want them to treat you. The religious right wants to tell people how to live.”
― Jesse Ventura

“Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs a million.”
― Mark Twain

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”
― H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
― Epicurus

“The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.”
― Frank Zappa

“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.”
― Frank Zappa

“A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider to be God-fearing and pious.”
― Aristotle

“The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

~quoted in the New York Times, April 9, 1944”
― Henry A. Wallace

“The World is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can't agree on whose fairy tales to believe.
In the end, Religion will kill us all.”
― Ed Krebs

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”
― Heinrich Heine

“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.”
― George Carlin

“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
― George Carlin

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

[Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]”
― Louis D. Brandeis

“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.”
― Norman Vincent Peale