“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
—Mark Twain
“Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.”
—Pablo Picasso
“Reduce everything you want to do to an action you can do right now.”
—Jason Randal
“The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”
—B. B. King
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
—Mahatma Gandhi
“For what is the best choice, for each individual, is the highest it is possible for him to achieve.”
—Aristotle
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
—T. S. Eliot
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
—Charles Darwin
“Oh, life it seems a struggle between
What we think, what we see
I’m not going to change my ways
Just to please you or appease you
Inside a crowd, six billion proud
Willing to punch it out
Right, wrong, weak, strong
Ashes to ashes, all fall down
Look around about this round
About this merry-go-round around
If at all God’s gaze upon us falls
It’s with a mischievous grin, look at Him
Forget about the reasons and
The treasons we are seeking
Forget about the notion that
Our emotions can be kept at bay
Forget about being guilty
We are innocent instead
For soon we will all find our lives swept away”
—Dave Matthews, from Seek Up
“Always question the perceived reality.”
—George Carlin
“When you’re born in the world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you’re given a front row seat.”
—George Carlin
“Look in the mirror, and don’t be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.”
—Stephen Jay Gould
“Skepticism’s bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so… Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency—the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.”
—Stephen Jay Gould
“To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.”
—Edward R. Murrow
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere.’ I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part… What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
—Richard Feynman
“It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”
—Richard Feynman
“Every one of the world’s ‘great’ religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain—from cosmology to psychology to economics—has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.”
—Sam Harris
“As with all matters of fact, differences of opinion on moral questions merely reveal the incompleteness of our knowledge; they do not oblige us to respect a diversity of view indefinitely.”
—Sam Harris
“This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn: We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”
—Richard Dawkins
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
—Carl Sagan
“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”
—Horace Walpole
“Hell is other people.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre
“Misanthropes have some admirable if paradoxical virtues; It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet; Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial ‘ships that pass in the night’; As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever.”
—Florence King
“We live together as rational human beings or we die together as fools.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. [Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from prescribing even those occasional performances of devotion, practiced indeed by the Executive of another nation as the legal head of its church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.] Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”
—Thomas Jefferson, from his letter to the Danbury Baptists
“Religion. Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object. In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty & singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, and the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand, shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”
—Thomas Jefferson, from his letter to Peter Carr
Napoléon Bonaparte: “How can this be! You made the system of the world, you explain the laws of all creation, but in all your book you speak not once of the existence of God!”
Pierre-Simon Laplace: “No, Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.”
“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
“And do you think that unto such as you
A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew
God gave a secret, and denied it me?
Well, well—what matters it? Believe that, too!”
—Omar Khayyám
“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”
—Christopher Hitchens
