Famous Quotes.

Just because a famous person says something, does not make what they say as accurate or correct.  However, it is interesting to hear people's views.  

Have a look here at dumb quotes.

Just because someone, famous, intelligent, highly esteemed or educated says something, doesn't mean they are right.  Mike, Not so famous Agnostic (1961-?).

I like this one:  

"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I didn't know." 

This is in my opinion a quote displaying humility and honesty, unlike many who respond with presumption, arrogance and misinformation.  Some more:

"Uncertainty is an honest state of emotion.
A person has broken well into the open when he or she can say "I don't know"(or "I'm not certain").
To realize that you don't know this or that is the beginning of new wisdom.
It is never wrong to be spiritually hungry.
What IS wrong is to accept a piece of fruit without determining whether it is real or artificial."
-Vernon Howard

"The less you know, the more you think you know, because you don't know you don't know."
Ray Stevens

"Only when we know a little do we know anything; doubt grows with knowledge."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
Winston Churchill

"I refuse to engage myself in a battle of wits with a man who is unarmed."
Mark Twain

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
Aldous Huxley

"To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect."
Lao Tse

"Eventu rerum stolidi didicere magistro."
(The stupid have no teacher except their own experience.)
old maxim (old saying that is widely accepted on its own merits).

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.
- A. A. Milne, Recalled on his death: January 31, 1956

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
- H.L. Mencken, Damn! A Book of Calumny, (1918)

Those of us who were brought up as Christians and who have lost our faith have retained the Christian sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyzes us in action.
Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), The Unquiet Grave (1945).

The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.
Thomas Paine

The beginning of thought is in disagreement — not only with others but also with ourselves.
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, (1955).

In matters of the intellect follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration... and do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895), Reflection #142, Aphorisms and Reflections.

The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one’s opinion, but rather to know it.
Andre Maurois, quoted in Frederic B. Wilcox, A Little Book of Aphorisms (1947).

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.
Daniel Dennett

Reasoning with a drunkard is like going under water with a torch to seek for a drowning man.
Tiruvalluvar, The Sacred Kural.

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.
Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words, (1858).

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

Careful and correct use of language is a powerful aid to straight thinking, for putting into words precisely what we mean necessitates getting our own minds quite clear on what we mean.
William Ian Beardmore Beveridge, Quoted in: Introduction to Logic, by Irving M. Copi and Carl Cohen.

Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters of religious theory, doctrine, and practice. It may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another or even against the militant opposite. The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.
Abe Fortas, Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97, 1968

Millenarianism appeals to the marginalized, those whose expectations of power, possessions, or prestige have been disappointed — the relatively deprived who take their deprivation absolutely. Apocalyptic visions appeal to them because these visions let their hostility and resentment find a religiously acceptable release in a God who does the work of judgment for them.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: Why Christians Believe and Why It Matters (2004).

Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.
Abraham Lincoln, Letters to Thurlow Weed, March 14, 1865

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 god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
Aristotle, Politics.

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
H.L. Mencken, Damn! A Book of Calumny, (1918)

 

When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.
Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Richard Price. October 9, 1790.

Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful.  What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, s. 89.

There is no murky pit of hell awaiting anyone ... Mind cannot arise alone without body, or apart from sinews and blood ... You must admit, therefore, that when then body has perished, there is an end also of the spirit diffused through it. It is surely crazy to couple a mortal object with an eternal...
Lucretius, quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, by James A. Haught.

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), The Summing Up (1938).

“If I take a lamp and shine it toward the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth ... for understanding. Too often, we assume that the light on the wall is God, but the light is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall.
The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the sense of revelation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search — who does not bring a lantern — sees nothing.”
“What we perceive as God is the by-product of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the light ... pure and unblemished ... not understanding that it comes from us. Sometimes we stand in front of the light and assume that we are the center of the universe — God looks astonishingly like we do — or we turn to look at our shadow and assume that all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose, which is to use the light of our search to illuminate the wall in all its beauty and in all its flaws; and in so doing, better understand the world around us.”
Citizen G’Kar, Babylon 5

In every unbeliever’s heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic’s Hell.
H.L. (Henry Lewis) Mencken (1880-1956), A Mencken Chrestomathy, (1949).

...while there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religion — there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy.
Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion

When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there is no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.
Bertrand Russell, Can Religion Cure our Troubles, 1954.

Certainly one may say, ‘Freedom to speak or write can be taken from us by a superior power, but never the freedom to think!’ But how much, and how correctly, would we think if we did not think, as it were, in common with others, with whom we mutually communicate!
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one’s own ratiocination, and does not extend to that of other men.
Charles Peirce, The Fixation of Belief

I am suspicious of the notion of unrequited suffering, in particular, of its inescapable implication that suffering can be “requited”. Suffering is not a debit entry in some ledger, something that can be offset by an appropriate credit on another page. Suffering is intrinsic disvalue. Positive consequences may flow from it, but it cannot thereby be “made good”.
Jay F. Rosenberg

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism”

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.
Francis Bacon, quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, by James A. Haught.

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.
Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670)

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.
David Hume, Letters

Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.
Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986), “Atheists, Like Fundamentalists, are Dogmatic,” Pieces of Eight, Houghton Mifflin (1985)

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)

More quotes (part 2).

Maybe you'd like to comment on these quotes.

Email me at mikesforum@tpg.com.au.