The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
Eric Hoffer

You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.
Abbie Hoffman

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
Richard Hofstadter

The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

For nothing burns with such amazing speed, As the dry sticks of a religious creed.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr

Obviously, anyone in contradiction with authority must possess equivalent knowledge and additional fact in order to sustain his argument.
Samuel Homola

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.
Elbert Hubbard

Writing science fiction for a penny a word is no way to make a living. If you really want to make a million, the quickest way is to start your own religion.
L. Ron Hubbard

Not until the empirical results are exhausted need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation.
Edwin Hubble

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
David Hume

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
David Hume

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
David Hume

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
Thomas Henry Huxley

I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.
Thomas Henry Huxley

What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Thomas Henry Huxley

The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a séance.
Aldous Huxley

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas Henry Huxley

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religions. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.
Aldous Huxley

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Thomas Henry Huxley

Science is nothing but trained and organised common sense differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit; and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
Thomas Henry Huxley

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
Thomas Henry Huxley

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.
Thomas Henry Huxley

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley

A man should never put on his best trousers when he goes out to battle for freedom and truth.
Henrik Ibsen

To hate men and worship God seems to be the sum of all creeds.
Robert Ingersoll

Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.
Robert Ingersoll

The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.
Robert Ingersoll

No man with any sense of humour ever founded a religion.
Robert Ingersoll

Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.
Robert Ingersoll

Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tenant for the mind of an honest man.
Robert Ingersoll

This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves
Robert Ingersoll

The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence of reason, observation and experience meets everlasting pain, is to absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called faith.
Robert Ingersoll

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James

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 blind-folded fear.
Thomas Jefferson

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
Thomas Jefferson

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
Thomas Jefferson

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.
Thomas Jefferson

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
Thomas Jefferson

In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot.
Thomas Jefferson

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible positions.
Thomas Jefferson

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson

There is nothing more unequal, than the equal treatment of unequal people.
Thomas Jefferson

Quack: A boastful pretender to arts which he does not understand. A vain boastful pretender to physick; An artful, tricking practitioner in physick.
Samuel Johnson (Dictionary, 1755)

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.
Immanuel Kant

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
John Maynard Keynes

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
John Maynard Keynes

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
John Maynard Keynes

Men talk of heaven, - there is no heaven but here;
Men talk of hell, - there is no hell but here;
Men of hereafters talk, and future lives, -
O love, there is no other life - but here.
Omar Khayyám

Nobody remembers the words of our enemies, but we do remember the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King Jr