Quotes | Confessions of a Disquisitive Writer

The Quotable Atheist

June 29, 2013 3 Comments

“Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man … living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.”
― George Carlin

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“All thinking men are atheists.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

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Carl Sagan on the Magic of Books

May 1, 2013 Leave a comment

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The Quotable Hitchens – 2

March 2, 2013 Leave a comment

“I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.”

“I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.”

“I’ve proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.”

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.”

“Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.”

“The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.”

“The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.”

“There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.”

“To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?”

“To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‘Why not?'”

“Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.”

“Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‘Well, good on you. See you there.'”

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Bradbury on Not Reading

March 2, 2013 Leave a comment

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All your books!

February 23, 2013 1 Comment

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Wodehouse on Quotations

February 23, 2013 Leave a comment

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The Quotable Mark Twain 2

February 6, 2013 1 Comment

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”

“All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.”

“There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”

“All generalizations are false, including this one.”

“Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.”

“Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

“When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.”

“When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.”

“‘Classic.’ A book which people praise and don’t read.”

“There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.”

“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”

“Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.”

“Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we.'”

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The Quotable Mark Twain

February 2, 2013 Leave a comment

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”

“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.”

“A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.”

“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.”

“A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.”

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

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The Quotable Reader

February 2, 2013 Leave a comment

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy. ~Edward P. Morgan

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. ~Mark Twain, attributed

My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter. ~Thomas Helm

You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. ~Paul Sweeney

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it. ~Oscar Wilde

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The Quotable Hitchens

January 27, 2013 1 Comment

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

“The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”

“If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species.”
―God Is Not Great

“Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing [in the ten commandments] about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly “in context” to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended?”
―God Is Not Great

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
―God Is Not Great

“I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.”
―Hitch-22

“Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life — except religion.”

“Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.”

“Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age’ was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.”

“For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.”