The prayers of the millions. How they must fight and destroy each other on the way to the throne of God.
John Steinbeck

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
Victor Stenger

I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.
David Suzuki

It is impossible to reason someone out of something that he did not reason himself into in the first place.
Jonathon Swift

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Jonathon Swift

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you get your money as long as you have got it.
Edmund Way Teale

I would like to be remembered as a person who made trouble where trouble was needed.
Studs Terkel

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life, so aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau

To think freely is great, but to think correctly is greater.
Thomas Thorild

When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason.
Thucydides

It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
James Thurber

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
James Thurber

I have always observed that when people are interrupted in the performance of some egregious stupidity their feelings are hurt.
Anthony Trollope

Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four.
Ivan Turgenev

If you build a person without any bones in him he may look fair enough to the eye, but he will be limber and cannot stand up; and I consider that evidence is the bones of an opinion.
Mark Twain

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.
Mark Twain

Faith is believing what you know ain't so.
Mark Twain

Never argue with an idiot; they'll just bring you down to their level and beat you with experience
Mark Twain

It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand
Mark Twain

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that the cat only has nine lives.
Mark Twain

One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview - not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson

The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance
Neil deGrasse Tyson

Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
Miguel de Unamuno

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant.
Miguel de Unamuno

In essence, science is a perpetual search for an intelligent and integrated comprehension of the world we live in.
Cornelius van Neil

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'Lord, make my enemies ridiculous!' And God granted it.
Voltaire

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.
Voltaire

Prejudice is opinion without judgment.
Voltaire

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.
Voltaire

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing in a biography of Voltaire

The Bible. That is what fools have written, what imbeciles command, what rogues teach, and young children are made to learn by heart.
Voltaire

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
Voltaire

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
John von Neumann

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.
Steven Weinberg

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
Alfred North Whitehead

You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.
William Wilberforce

Science is the record of dead religions.
Oscar Wilde

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Oscar Wilde

Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence
Robert Anton Wilson

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

A cult is a religion with no political power.
Tom Wolfe

Large skepticism leads to large understanding. Small skepticism leads to small understanding. No skepticism leads to no understanding.
Xi Zhi