And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all.
Indeed, one modern President abjured God altogether, ending speeches with a chaste 'Thank you very much. ' This was Jimmy Carter, the most genuinely devout President of the postwar period.
I light candles. I meditate. And I don't believe in anything. By default I move simultaneously towards mysticism and atheism. It's not something that's ever going to get fixed.
Open your mouth and shut your eyes and see what Zeus will send you.
Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.
To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage.
What has changed is that nothing has changed. . . that's what has made me more unhappy than everything else.
It seems to me that the bane of our country is a profession of faith either with no basis of real belief, or with no proper examination of the grounds on which the creed is supposed to rest.
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
Blasphemy is what an old dogma screams at a new truth.
Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group!. . . Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate.
I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.
Why do men go to zoos?
A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.
One had better put on gloves before handling the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it highly advisable.
There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value. This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute. . . it may be the most important contribution that we can make.
The government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion.
Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.