Favourite Quotations & Bon Mots

[NoMoreFaith]

"Any argumentative refutation of a belief that's largely based on experience is going to fall short, because any description of the experience on which the refutation is based will always seem inadequate by comparison." - Kel

"When you know that something's going to happen, you'll start trying to see signs of its approach in just about everything. Always try to remember that most of the things that happen in this world aren't signs. They happen because they happen, and their only real significance lies in normal cause and effect. You'll drive yourself crazy if you start trying to pry the meaning out of every gust of wind or rain squall. I'm not denying that there might actually be a few signs that you won't want to miss. Knowing the difference is the tricky part.” - Belgarath the Sorcerer

"The plural of anecdote is not data." - Roger Brinner

"A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking." - Steven Wright

"It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance." - Charles Darwin

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell

"So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath.
So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul."

So I hit him. What would you do?" - Spider Jerusalem

"Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need.
Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world..." - Spider Jerusalem

[LastPoet]

There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance.
-Ali ibn Abi-Talib

[apophenia]

"I looked up my family tree and found three dogs using it."
— Rodney Dangerfield


"The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards."
— Alexander Jablokov


"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."


Bart: "This is the worst day of my life."
Homer: "The worst day of your life so far."

[downbeatplumb]

"We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" Oscar Wilde

[apophenia]

"I bought a new Japanese car. I turned on the radio... I don't understand a word they're saying."
— Rodney Dangerfield

"It is easier to square a circle than to get round a mathematician."
— Augustus De Morgan

"Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician."
— Gottlob Frege

"He is very intelligent but he is not a mathematician: this as you know is a great defect."
— Blaise Pascal in a letter to Pierre de Fermat

"To create a good philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician."
— Bertrand Russell

"Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom;
elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism."
— Aldous Huxley, "Bruno Rontini" in Time Must Have A Stop (1944)

[Brian37]

Here is one of mine about people claiming historical figures in their holy books. It is a "so the fuck what, even if".

"We can prove that George Washington existed, but no sane person would claim he could fart a full sized Lamborghini out of his ass."

Point being it is why I hate "this person was real" crap. It still would not make magic real or invisible sky daddies by any name real.

[apophenia]

"The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of God exists in something else."
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason


"My earlier views at the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them."
— Abraham Lincoln

"It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster."
— Voltaire

[Brian37]

I love that quote from A Few Good Men. Occasionally when I get irked enough by a retarded argument from a theist I'll paint them as Colonel Jessup.

"I want the truth"

Jessup "YOU CANT HANDLE THE TRUTH. In theism we use fallicies, non-sequiturs, appeal to tradition, appeal to authority. The truth is what you don't say in public. My existence, while grotesque, provides fantasy to the gullible, it gives them a crutch. Who is going to do that YOU! You poke fun of my beliefs and wont bow to the theocracy I deny I want. I'd prefer you take your seat at the back of the bus and say thank you. EITHER WAY I DONT GIVE A DAMN what you think of my superstition!"

"Colonel Jessup, DO YOU HAVE ANY EVIDENCE!"

Jessup, "GOD DAMNED RIGHT I DONT!"

[Ace Otana]

"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand." - Bertrand Russell

"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this." - Bertrand Russell

[LastPoet]

I can live in doubt and not knowing, I think its much more interesting to live, not knowing, than to have answers that might be wrong.
- Richard Feynman