> SAYINGS
>
> * Hell to a religious bigot is another bigot of a different religion
>
> * End-of-the-world prophets cannot be wrong;
> they can only be premature
>
> * If a quote is sufficiently pithy,
> it becomes a kind of poetry
>
> * There is not a shred of evidence.
> The evidence has all been shredded.
>
> * Disbelief in conspiracies is a helpful service
> those who engage in conspiracies.
>
> * Normality is the insanity to which we have become accustomed.
>
> * Modesty is a way of bragging about how humble you are.
>
> * A friend should never count his friends in the manner
> that a miser counts his coins
>
> Friends are not shiny objects to increase one's status,
> or to hoard possessively from others.
>
> * Lying does not necessarily imply a lack of sincerity.
> Many people come to believe their own lies very passionately.
>
> * If you pound a belief into people's heads, hard enough, you can make
> them believe that they actually believe it.
>
> Hell, that's nothing. If you pound a belief into people's
> heads, long enough, hard enough, you can make them believe that they
> thought of it first, all by themselves.
>
> * Your faith is not being tested. It is being contradicted.
>
> * The only thing worse than an ignorant bigot is an educated bigot.
>
> (someone who has a PhD in bigotry, and can explain to you in
> great detail the philosophical basis and historical context
> for his bigotry)
>
> * Do not investigate conspiracies. Engage in them.
> Then the know-it-alls who disbelieve in conspiracies
> will be working for your benefit, to keep you from
> being discovered.
>
>
> * Democracy is a form of government based on the assumption
> that million bastards will not be nearly so much of a bastard as any one,
> individual bastard, among them.
>
> * We have a much better system in America; we freely elect our dictators
>
> * A democracy of tyrants is still a tyrant.
>
> * Faith is a virtue only if that belief in which you have faith
> actually happens to be true
>
> * Faith does not measure the strength of your beliefs.
> It measures the weakness of your mind.
>
> * Sincere bigots are so much more appealing than the insincere ones.
>
> I am always so glad when someone casts unfair aspersions on
> your kind, but they don't really mean a word of it.
>
> * Religious bigotry is still bigotry. It is the most pernicious
> kind of bigotry, precisely because its adherents are so convinced of
> their good intent.
>
> * Freedom of speech is uplifting only if someone
> manages to say something uplifting.
>
> Freedom of religion is uplifting only if someone
> manages to believe something that is uplifting
>
> * The Rights of Man are beautiful things.
> They exist only in the eye of the beholder.
>
> * Perhaps human infants are not really any more
> innocent than baby sharks. Innocence should not be
> confused with incompleteness or lack of opportunity.
>
> Whatever damns us, damns us in our seed.
>
> * The phrase "innocent human being" is perhaps
> an oxymoron.
>
> * The phrase "religious scholar" is an oxymoron.
> It is like having a PhD in astrology or tea-leaf reading.
>
> * The pretense of civilization, the outward appearance,
> the false veneer of civilization IS civilization.
> The things that we do only because we believe that we are expected to do
> them; the things that we profess
> to believe or feel only because we think that we are
> expected to believe and feel them; when we pretend
> to be kind to people toward whom we secretly feel
> very unkind - that is civilization.
>
> * As it is here on earth, so too must be in Heaven
> for they have the same Creator
>
> * Christianity is hijacked Judaism.
>
> * Religion is organized neuroticism
>
> * Happy atheists are like happy hookers.
> They are only happy because they have not yet
> discovered how bad is the pension system.
>
> * For most people, by the time that you take the collection
> of things that they dare not believe, and the collection of things that
> they feel obligated to believe,
> the Truth has already been pretty much gutted.
>
> * Before trying to determine why a fact is true,
> first try to determine if it is truly a fact.
>
> * A half-truth is generally a thing far more pernicious
> than a complete lie
>
> * If I wanted to tell a lie, I assure you that I could
> concoct a much better-sounding lie than to have to tell you the
> ridiculous-sounding truth.
>
> * Machismo is the second greatest human illusion, after religion
>
> * terrorist \'ter or ist\ n: the smaller army with the less effective
> public relations and less professional propaganda mill
> * The greatest Truths are all blasphemies.
>
> * Youth is when you worry about losing your hair because
> of male pattern baldness. Old age is when you worry about
> losing your hair because of chemotherapy.
>
> * I do not envy youth. There is no such thing as youth.
> Only naive, young people are deluded, otherwise.
>
> However, the duration of their delusion is too brief
> to be of significance.
>
> * Aging is one of God's many sins against us.
>
> * Don't throw away your life, if you have one,
> but don't keep clinging to your life, if you don't have one.
>
> * The only thing sadder than a motherless child
> is a childless mother
>
> * They will tease you for being bald, but they will tease you for
> wearing a wig. They will tease you for coloring your hair,
> but will tease you for being gray. You cannot win other than for
> the impossibility of immortal youth, so just say to hell with them.
>
> * When people say, "I am only kidding!", they probably are not.
>
> * The debate was over a long time ago, but the quarreling continues.
>
> Ideologues do not need honest debate. It is more like a filibuster
> technique. They seem to feel that so long as they never stop
> talking, they cannot have lost the argument.
>
> * People who complain the loudest about abortion are the same people who
> should have been aborted
>
> * Someone needs to save the world from all the people
> who want to save the world
>
> * The fact that a judgement is wrong in retrospect
> does not mean that it was not the right judgement
> for the time and circumstances in which it had been made.
>
> * I do believe in Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.
> It is everybody else that I don't believe in.
>
> * There is too much senseless violence in the world.
> What we need is more violence that makes sense.
>
> * Too much violence in the world? Maybe there hasn't
> been nearly enough violence. There are still human beings
> left. Solving one problem would solve the other.
>
> * I do believe in non-violence. Absolutely not one bullet
> more than what is necessary.
>
> * It is meaningless to aspire to be a lawful citizen
> when you are living under a lawless government
>
> * My philosophy is an absolutely terrible philosophy.
> The only thing that I can even think to say in its defense
> is that it is the truth.
>
> * Human beings almost invariably opt for comforting
> falsehood over harsh reality. Most human beings are
> willing assistants to their own propagandizing.
>
> * What we call "religion" should be called by its rightful name -
> "speculation". Speculation should be
> classified among our most tentative of beliefs, not our most
> self-certain.
>
> * Excessive certainty of belief can represent delusion.
> However, there is nothing delusional about speculation,
> so long as the boundary is respected between speculation and fact.
>
> * Shakespeare is revered in large part because so few
> people can really understand what he is saying.
> His real messages have sometimes promoted moral
> relativism, endorsed violence and murder, and
> justified suicide.
> Bless him for being unfathomable to the smaller minds
> of moralists.
> * Poetry should no more be the exclusive province of
> famous names, than chess should played only by grandmasters. It is for
> everyone.
>
> * Religion preaches humility, then instills the arrogant
> notion that we can possess absolute truth.
>
> Religion preaches truth, then weaves a world of fairy-tales
> and superstition.
>
> Religion preaches love, then instills hatred of heretics
> and infidels.
>
> Religion preaches peace, and is a powerful instigation to war.
>
> * Religion is not the peer or the brother to Science.
> It is the crazy uncle that needs to be kept locked
> in the attic.
>
> * I cannot think of a better use for my dying breath
> than to whisper a blasphemous obscenity in the ear
> of the priest who wants to "save" me, after all that
> his kind has done to mine.
>
> * The human mind, in attempting to understand its world,
> is a case of the inadequate, trying to comprehend the unknowable and
> unprovable.
> It is a nice grain of humility, to realize that we could conceivably get
> it wrong.
>
> * True morality is about different people being able
> to live together in harmony, without destroying each other-
> The very thing of which moralists tend to be least capable.
>
> * Of course I know the difference between right and wrong.
> They have no intrinsic difference.
>
> Right and wrong are human artifacts, a category
> of human opinion, equivalent to "I like modern art" or "I do not like
> modern art."
>
> * I feel that profanity degrades the public discourse.
> However, we live in a world so profane that verbal expression
> loses it accuracy, if not dressed in appropriate obscenity.
>
> * Sometimes a pithy statement is just a pissy statement
> with a lisp.
>
> * A quotable quote is still a quotable quote,
> even if no one ever quotes it. You can quote me on that.
>
> * "Things exist for the whimsical reason that there is nothing to prevent
> them from existing."
>
> * Creation occurs at the intersection of
> randomness and infinity
>
> * Everything happens. An unimaginably small probability
> of something happening does not prevent it from happening.
> It *guarantees* that it will happen. It will only happen
> an unimaginably small part of the time, but will
> happen all the same. Every possible outcome is permanently enshrined in a
> tiny corner of a Tree of Infinity. The magic trick of Creation involves
> Nature pursuing every possible path.
>
> * Randomness is too fine of an art to leave to the sloppy
> forces of nature. True randomness must be crafted
> carefully, in the loving hands of a mathematician.
>
> * Living with a known risk is rarely so dangerous
> as living with an illusion of safety
>
> * There is hardly such a thing as "unnatural".
> If something exists in the real world, it is
> by definition "natural".
>
> * People who like to make noise about "unnatural"
> things are often the same ones who are believers
> in things "supernatural".
>
> If something exists, then it is by definition
> part of Nature, not something more than Nature,
> and therefore not "supernatural".
>
> * I would be perfectly happy to let bygones be bygones
> -if they were gone. It is difficult to let them
> be gone, when they are still here.
>
> * Part of a good revenge is denying your opponent
> an opportunity to take revenge on you, in his
> retaliation for your revenge on him.
>
> * If you don't want to live under the constant threats of dangerous
> enemies, then try not to make so many dangerous enemies.
>
> * No matter how serious you might try to be,
> you cannot escape the absurdity. Just because
> you don't believe in existentialism, does not mean
> that it is not an apt description of your existence.
>
> * You cannot escape existential hell, simply because
> you refuse to believe in it.
>
> * Friendship makes terrible liars of us. Life puts us in the bind that we
> cannot both speak the truths that
> matter and make pleasant conversation.
> * Truth and Justice, first. Peace and Love, second.
>
> * Self-certainty tends to exist in direct proportion
> to wrong-headedness
>
> * A good spy is precisely someone who does not look,
> or act, or seem in any way like a spy.
>
> * Wisest is he who makes up new "old Chinese sayings"
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> POET'S POSTSCRIPT
>
> I think that a prejudice exists, a notion that no one
> should try to compose sayings, as if this would be
> be like awarding yourself a medal. The feeling is that
> you are supposed to say something innocently and
> unself-consciously, then be validated by someone quoting it:
> only then it becomes a quote.
>
> That seems like a very bad attitude. There is a certain appeal to
> one-and-two line expressions. as natural as singing songs or
> reading/writing poems.
>
> It would be a horrible if everyone had a notion that
> no one in the world should sing, because that would be
> putting on airs, as if you were a virtuoso. If you are not ready for
> Carnegie Hall, then you should not sing in the shower.
> Who do you think you are?
>
> I wonder if the Modesty Police would object to singing
> the "Happy Birthday" song at a small, private gathering?
>
> To hell with that. I enjoy collecting other people's quotes,
> of all kinds, and enjoy trying to coin new ones.
>
> It is like a coin collection or personal photo album- you pull it out,
> every now and then, enjoy the memories,
> and put it back. You would think that nearly everyone would do it.
>
> Another nice thing about it is that a collection like this
> can become a living document, never really finished, to which you make
> additions and improvements over time.
> Like watching a tree grow. If you have ever planted one,
> it is a satisfying thing. I recommend it for anyone that hasn't
> done so, yet, not to mention the improvement to your carbon footprint.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>