Meditation 122
Quotations IX
"I hate quotations, tell me what you know." Ralph Waldo Emerson.
But as some people do like quotations and think they can be useful in succinctly communicating an opinion, we will post a selection occasionally. This is the ninth in an ongoing series.
- Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error, it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. Robert H Jackson
- The best way to keep one's word is not to give it. Napoleon Bonaparte
- Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein
- Always do right. This will astonish some people and gratify the rest. Mark Twain
- What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Salman Rushdie
- Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proven innocent.
Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein) - The universe is an intelligence test. Timothy Leary
- It is better to know nothing than to know everything by halves. Friedrich Nietzsche
- It is very much better to know something about everything than to know all about something. Blaise Pascal
- If you are doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch GET IT IN WRITING. His word isn't worth sh*t - not with the good Lord telling him how to f*ck you on the deal. William F Burroughs
- People find happiness both in wisdom and folly, virtue and vice. Contentment is no index of true worth. Vauvenargues
- How comforting and encouraging the make-believe of religion can be for the common man. Kurt Vonnegut
- If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life. Henry David Thoreau
- Religion has the power to induce so much evil. (Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum) Lucretius
- The pessimist complains about the wind, the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails. Ward, William Arthur
- I enjoy life far too much to waste another minute listening to someone preaching belief in the unbelievable. John Tyrrell
- I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought. Robert Ingersoll
- A faith of convenience is a hollow faith. Father Mulcahy (M*A*S*H)
- Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. Leo Tolstoy
- The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance... logic can be happily tossed out the window. Stephen King