Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions/Quotes
"Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one quite adequate."
—Captain Kirk, Star Trek: The Original Series, "Who Mourns for Adonais?"
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A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
—Carl Sagan
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Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen—or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.
—Carl Sagan
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Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence--stuffed and in a museum.
—Mark Twain, Notebook
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Bruce: Is this in the old days, when people still put ice in their drinks and believed in someone named God? |
I am for that thing in your genome that demands it. I am for that thing which keeps you animals alive. I am, at most, a slice of monkey suspended within the stuff of universal intelligence. You are a monkey in nice clothes. —Morrigan Lugus, Supergod #3
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"One hundred years from my day there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity seeker."
—attributed to Voltaire
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"Ever hear the phrase 'there's no atheists in a foxhole'? I've been in a lot of foxholes."
—possible response to Ashley Williams' asking Shepard if being religious bothers him/her, Mass Effect 1
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