Quotes 15

"The best and most beautiful things in world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart."-The lecturer, teacher, AND RADICAL COMMIE/SOCIALIST Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind

"What is a man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"-Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Seven Gothic Tales (1943)

"Suffering opens up space within that otherwise would not be there--so that God can come in and fill it."-Mother Teresa, the 1979 Nobel Laureate for Peace

"I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alone--the chance that all the functions of the individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity."-George Gallup, 1984

"But when the focus of Greek intellectual activity shifted to Athens, the leading minds concentrated their attention upon ethical problems. Forsaking the study of the macrocosm for that of the microcosm, they lost the key to the thought of the great Ephesian, which, I imagine, is more intelligible to us than it was to Socrates, or to Plato. Socrates, more especially, set the fashion of a kind of inverse agnosticism, by teaching that the problems of physics lie beyond the reach of the human intellect; that the attempt to solve them is essentially vain; that the one worthy object of investigation is the problem of ethical life; and his example was followed by the Cynics and the later Stoics. Even the comprehensive knowledge and the penetrating intellect of Aristotle failed to suggest to him that in holding the eternity of the world, within its present range of mutation, he was making a retrogressive step. The scientific heritage of Heracleitus passed into the hands neither of Plato nor of Aristotle, but into those of Democritus. But the world was not yet ready to receive the great conceptions of the philosopher of Abdera. It was reserved for the Stoics to return to the track marked out by the earlier philosophers; and, professing themselves disciples of Heracleitus, to develop the idea of evolution systematically. In doing this, they not only omitted some characteristic features of their master's teaching, but they made additions altogether foreign to it. One of the most influential of these importations was the transcendental theism which had come into vogue. The restless, fiery energy, operating according to law, out of which all things emerge and into which they return, in the endless successive cycles of the great year; which creates and destroys worlds as a wanton child builds up, and anon levels, sand castles on the seashore; was metamorphosed into a material world-soul and decked out with all the attributes of ideal Divinity; not merely with infinite power and transcendent wisdom, but with absolute goodness.

The consequences of this step were momentous. For if the cosmos is the effect of an immanent, omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent cause, the existence in it of real evil, still less of necessarily inherent evil, is plainly inadmissible. Yet the universal experience of mankind testified then, as now, that, whether we look within us or without us, evil stares us in the face on all sides; that if anything is real, pain and sorrow and wrong are realities."-T.H. Huxley, "Evolution and Ethics" (1893)

"The propounders of what are called the "ethics of evolution," when the 'evolution of ethics' would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution. I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the [80] one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the æsthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and that is ugly."-T.H. Huxley, "Evolution and Ethics" (1893)

"You're so heavenly minded, you're no earthly good."-Johnny Cash

"Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God."-a prayer by Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision

"To make a photocopier, simply photocopy a mirror"-Core Bot 3

"In Victorian England, a commoner was not allowed to look directly at the Queen, due to a belief at the time that the poor had the ability to steal thoughts. Science now believes that less than 4% of poor people are able to do this."-Core Bot 3

"You know Browning; I usually get kissed before I get fucked."-Victoria McPherson, "Still Life"

"My favorite comment I ever got was, "Biblical scholarship is just people making things up about things people made up." When the atheists turned on me after I criticized Thunderf00t's Bible for Beginners videos I was dumbstruck by the depth of their ignorance. Until I got on Youtube my acquaintance with atheist thought was through reasonably intelligent books and articles. I was unprepared for the onslaught of the ignoramus Youtube atheist horde."-Kevin Carney

"I'm STILL getting accused of being religious...it only makes me want to attack YouTube atheism more!"-Andrew Wolf