WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Philosophy - Quotes from Various Sources - Mostly Freethought.txt

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Excellent Quotes from various sources--mostly freethoughtThinking Quotes
Additional quotes can be found off of the Richard Dawkins' list of quotes and
excerpts

Alphabetical index



"Men have never fully used [their] powers to advance the good in life, because
they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the
work they are responsible for doing."
"The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the
way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry
are synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into
possession of the immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized than
discoveries that quantitatively increase the store on hand." (from
Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. xvii)
"Reason is experimental intelligence, conceived after the pattern of science,
and used in the creation of social arts; it has something to do. It liberates
man from the bondage of the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into
custom. It projects a better future and assists man in its realization. And its
operation is always subject to test in experience... The principles which man
projects as guides... are not dogmas. They are hypotheses to be worked out in
practice, and to be rejected, corrected and expanded as they fail or succeed in
giving our present experience the guidance it requires. We may call them
programmes of action, but since they are to be used in making our future acts
less blind, more directed, they are flexible. Intelligence is not something
possessed once for all. It is in constant process of forming, and its retention
requires constant alertness in observing consequences, an open-minded will to
learn and courage in re-adjustment." (ibid., p. 96)
"Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's
desire." (ibid., p. 104)
"In the degree in which life is uneasy and troubled, fancy is stirred to frame
pictures of a contrary state of things. By reading the characteristic features
of any man's castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying
desires which are frustrated." (ibid., p. 104)
"It is not truly realistic or scientific to take short views, to sacrifice the
future to immediate pressure, to ignore facts and forces that are disagreeable
and to magnify the enduring quality of whatever falls in with immediate desire.
It is false that the evils of the situation arise from absence of ideals; they
spring from wrong ideals." (ibid., p. 130)
"Intelligent thinking means an increment of freedom in action--an emancipation
from chance and fatality. 'Thought' represents the suggestion of a way of
response that is different from that which would have been followed if
intelligent observation had not effected an inference as to the future." (ibid.,
p. 144)
-- John Dewey



 "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education,
and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor
way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after
death."
"[My] deep religiosity... found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through
the reading of popular scientific books." (as quoted in Einstein, History, and
Other Passions, p. 172)
"It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which [I] lost,
was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the 'merely personal,'
from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings."
(as quoted in Einstein, History, and Other Passions, p. 172)
"A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in
time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something
separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This
delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and
affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from
this prison by widening our circle of compasion to embrace all living creatures
and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely
but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a
foundation for inner security." (as quoted in Quantum Reality, Beyond the New
Physics, p. 250)
-- Albert Einstein



"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it
remains premature today."
-- Isaac Asimov



"I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of
heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God."
-- Thomas Edison



"Accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of
general laws, in circumstances where the uninformed and unenquiring eye
perceives neither novelty nor beauty, [the scientist and natural philosopher]
walks in the midst of wonders."
-- John Herschel (as quoted on page 124 of Emerson: The Mind on Fire)



"In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every
case gotten at second-hand, and without examination."
"[The Bible] has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of
obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies."
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't
know."
"A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he
knows."
"I have seen several entirely sincere people who thought they were (permanent)
Seekers after Truth. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully,
cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted judgment--until
they believed that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. That was
the end of the search. The man spent the rest of his life hunting up shingles
wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather. If he was seeking after
political Truth he found it in one or another of the hundred political gospels
which govern men in the earth; if he was seeking after the Only True Religion he
found it in one or another of the three thousand that are on the market. In any
case, when he found the Truth he sought no further; but from that day forth,
with his soldering-iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other he tinkered
its leaks and reasoned with objectors." (from What is Man?)
-- Mark Twain



"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the
world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
-- Margaret Mead



"Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of
common sense."
-- Chapman Cohen



 "Part of the power of Emerson's individualism is his insistence, at crucial
moments, that individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is
not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the
sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence." (Emerson: The Mind on Fire
p. 88)
"Just as science is more immediate and exciting than the history of science, so
is insight more compelling than a history of insight." (p. 227)
"[Emerson] was interested not in the bookworm, not even in the thinker, only in
Man Thinking." (p. 264)
"If death is the end of everything, then living is everything." (p. 375)
-- Robert D. Richardson



"Teaching and imparting of knowledge make sense in an unchanging environment...
But if there is one truth about modern man it is that he lives in an environment
that is continually changing. The only man who is educated is the man who has
learned how to learn ... how to adapt and change ... who has learned that no
knowledge is secure, that only the process of seeking knowledge gives a basis
for security"
-- Carl Rogers



"The great end in religious instruction, is not to stamp our minds upon the
young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look
inquiringly and steadily with their own; not to give them a definite amount of
knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth; not to form an outward
regularity, but to touch inward springs; not to bind them by ineradicable
prejudices to our particular sect or peculiar notions, but to prepare them for
impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects may be offered to their
decision; not to burden memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of
thought;" (as quoted on page 30 of A Chosen Faith)
"It is an important truth that the ultimate reliance of a human being must be on
his own mind." (as quoted on page 47 of Emerson: The Mind on Fire)
-- William Channing



"I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I
doubt."
-- Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)



"I've come to the conclusion that there can be little or no dialogue between
'proclaimers of truth' (religious and secular ideologues) and 'discoverers of
truth' (empiricists). The former tend to debate, the latter tend to discuss."
-- Edward H. Ashment



 "Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that
real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the
absence of an idolatrous theology." (from Huxley, p. 79)
On Huxley encountering natives on a remote island... "Untouched people; not
necessarily noble savages, but apparently happy ones. They lived in a land of
plenty, ready to share their bananas and guavas and coconuts. They were to be
envied for their 'primitive simplicity and kind-heartedness'. Where was that
'malady of thought' afflicting industrial England? [Huxley] realized that
'civilization as we call it would be rather a curse than a blessing to them'.
Huxley knew the fate in store for them, slamming the 'mistaken goodness of the
"Stigginses" of Exeter Hall, who would send missionaries to these men to tell
them that they will all infallibly be damned'." (p. 120)
"[William Henry] Flower [the Anglican] too praised evolution as a cleansing
solvent, dissolving the dross which had 'encrusted' Christianity 'in the days of
ignorance and superstition'." (p. 305)
"Science was tearing through the 'fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs' to behold a
new cosmos, in which our Earth is merely an 'eccentric speck' -- a world of
evolution 'and unchanging causation'. It invited new ways of thinking. It
demanded a new rationale for belief. With science's truths the only accessible
ones, 'blind faith' was no longer admirable but 'the one unpardonable sin'." (p.
345)
"A man got up [after one of Huxley's 'sermons'] and said 'they had never heard
anything like that in Norwich before'. Never 'did Science seem so vast and mere
creeds so little'." (p. 366)
-- Adrian Desmond



...it may be that there is no God, that "the existence of all that is beautiful
and in any sense good is but the accidental and ineffective byproduct of blindly
swirling atoms," that we are alone in a world that cares nothing for us or for
the values that we create and sustain - that we and they are here for a moment
only, and gone, and that eventually there will be left no trace of us in the
universe. "A man may well believe that this dredful thing is true. But only the
fool will say in his heart that he is glad that it is true."
-- Sterling M. McMurrin



"Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel."
-- Horace Walpole



 "Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race
spends centuries deciphering the message."
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an
underlying truth."
"If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere,
hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity."
"I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference
between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit
of believing."
"When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing:
they believe in everything."
"When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us--and rightly--that
we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary
that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been
ashamed."
"All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to
tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real."
-- Umberto Eco



"Philosophy itself cannot but benefit from our disputes, for if our conceptions
prove true, new achievements will be made; if false, their refutation will
further confirm the original doctrines." (as quoted in Galileo at Work : His
Scientific Biography, p. 108)
"I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us
our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us
by some other means the information that we could gain through them." (ibid., p.
226)
"I truly believe the book of philosophy to be that which stands perpetually open
before our eyes, though since it is written in characters different from those
of our alphabet it cannot be read by everyone." (ibid., p. 412)
"The hypothesis is pretty; its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor
demonstrable. Who does not see that this is purely arbitrary fiction that puts
nothingness as existing and proposes nothing more than simple noncontradiciton?"
(ibid., p. 169)
(Galileo was here referring to the philosophers of the time who refused to give
up the idea that the moon's surface was smooth so they said that although it
appeared to have mountains and craters, it was really encased in smooth
transparent crystal--obviously his statement can apply to a whole host of ideas
that people create in order to hang on to tradition rather than grasp reality)
"...nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which
necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much
less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages." (as quoted in Blind
Watchers of the Sky, p. 101)
-- Galileo Galilei



"I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the
development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end
that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take
advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world."
"The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss,
while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting
pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy
mixture of insanity and ignorance called 'faith.'"
-- Robert G. Ingersoll



"My young son asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under
a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the
truth--that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally--but I didn't want to upset
him."
"If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is 'God
is crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is
'Probably because of something you did.'"
-- Jack Handey



"All this [Paul's writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who
picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who
come to have their fortune told." Age of Reason
-- Thomas Paine



"It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but of one thing I am certain; he will
change the climate there, and emigration will set that way." (as quoted in
Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 97)
-- Edward Taylor (who inspired Melville's Father Mapple in Moby Dick)



 "...there ... remains a huge following [of Ayn Rand's philosophy] of those who
ignore the indiscretions, infidelities, and moral inconsistencies of the founder
and focus instead on the positive aspects of her philosophy. There is much in it
to admire, if you do not have to accept the whole package... Criticism of the
founder or followers of a philosophy does not, by itself, constitute a negation
of any part of the philosophy... Criticism of part of a philosophy does not
gainsay the whole." (Why People Believe Weird Things, p. 122)
"Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry
aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or
confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at
the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength." (p. 124)
"Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and
life--birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old
age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that
has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science,
or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an
insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the
significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story
of creation and re-creation and ruined it." (p. 130)
"It is sad that while science moves ahead in exciting new areas of research,
fine-tuning our knowledge of how life originated and evolved, creationists
remain mired in medieval debates about angels on the head of a pin and animals
in the belly of an Ark." (p. 141)
"The first-cause and prime-mover argument, brilliantly proffered by St. Thomas
Aquinas in the fourteenth century (and brilliantly refuted by David Hume in the
eighteenth century), is easily turned aside with just one more question: Who or
what caused and moved God?" (p. 146)
"Ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America
should simply check the box next to 'African-American.' My maternal grandmother
was German and my maternal grandfather was Greek. The next time I fill out one
of those forms I am going to check 'Other' and write in the truth about my
racial and cultural heritage: 'African-Greek-German-American.' And proud of it."
(p. 251)
-- Michael Shermer



 "I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot
prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of
Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is
more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable
knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them." The
Quotable Bertrand Russell p. 138
"The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are
so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts."
"A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a
regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by
the word uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a
free intelligence."
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of
cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
-- Bertrand Russell



"Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never
subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for
the purpose of promoting her ideas."
-- John W. Draper (1811-1882) U.S. chemist



"Theologian: An uncommon individual who, though possessing finite abilities, has
been called by God himself who, though possessing infinite abilities, requires
the assistance of the former in explaining Himself to the rest of us."
[Translation: if God existed, theologians would be out of work.]"
"God: The Preeminent Chameleon; whenever the need is felt by one or more of his
followers, He oblingingly recreates himself to suit the occasion."
"The biblical concepts of sin and salvation are an integral part of Christian
doctrine. Christianity first creates a problem (sin) and then offers a
"solution" (salvation). This is not unlike the protection racket; you either buy
"protection"--or else!"
"Jesus' last words on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
hardly seem like the words of a man who planned it that way. It doesn't take
Sherlock Holmes to figure there is something wrong here."
-- "Rev." Donald Morgan




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Alphabetical index