Reality Crowd

“People will then often say “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would chose not to worship him anyway.)”

- Douglas Adams in an interview with American Atheist

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
- “Politics and the English Language”, 1946

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
- “Politics and the English Language”, 1946

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell

“…it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.”

“It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.”

-Charles Darwin

Some of the great minds of human history had pretty interesting things to say about religion. Benjamin Franklin is quoted: “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” I had to look that up to make sure. View the above video to see quotes of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Homer Simpson, and many other interesting personalities and their takes on religion.

View RealityCrowd’s Quoatable Quotes category to see other posts on influential people and their assertions about religion, faith, reason, and science.

In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

- Mark Twain

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

~How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later

“So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White’s beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.”

~ The Shifting Realities of Phillip K. Dick

“During the youthful period of mankind’s spiritual evolution, human fantasy created gods in man’s own image who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate influence, the phenomenal world… The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old conception of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes… In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vase power in the hands of priests.”

Albert Einstein, reported in Science, Philosophy and Religion: A Symposium

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

- Douglas Adams

Read on for some more Douglas Adam Quotes
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