Superstition Quotes - Page 3

The pens sharpen – Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same – Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for women's bodies.

That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never again believe.

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.

Tribalism is an addiction that is driven by false beliefs that need to be reflected back to be perceived as true.

I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.

History warns us ... that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

When it’s your fourth marriage, you tend to lose faith in superstitions.

We were born in the '70s, back when twins were rare, a bit magical: cousins of the unicorn, siblings of the elves.

Theology is a superstition - Humanity a religion.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting-or even demanding-their own enslavement.

Statism ends with an eye roll.

When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.

Culture makes lies plausible through exposure to time. It makes prejudice seem like physics intergenerationally. It is therefore the most dangerous opponent of philosophy, because it feels the most credible to the average person.

Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture.

The vast majority of people are unthinking prejudice machines.

It seemed to them dreadfully dangerous to put it into words like that, for lately the things they didn't want to happen were the things that happened and the logic of this was that if you pretended not to want what you really wanted dreadfully you would be more likely to get it.

It is for the good of states that men should be deluded by religion.

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the
state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion,
of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the
fashionable idols!