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Meditation 301
Quotations XXVII

"I hate quotations, tell me what you know." Ralph Waldo Emerson.

But as some people do like quotations and think they can be useful in succinctly communicating an opinion, we will publish a selection occasionally, mostly but not entirely relevant. This is the twenty-seventh in an ongoing series.

1. Faith is believing what you know ain't so. Mark Twain
   
   
2. The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray. Robert G. Ingersoll
   
   
3. The Christian religion was not only the first attended by miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. David Hume
   
   
4. I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in ours one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies. Thomas Jefferson
   
   
5. The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning. Voltaire
   
   
6. Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel Arabian Proverb
   
   
7. History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing. Baron de Montesquieu
   
   
8. Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these. Ovid
   
   
9. The death of dogma is the birth of morality. Immanuel Kant
   
   
10. A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in times of trouble. Adlai Stevenson
    
    
11. The minister must take his pious grasp off of the throat of Sunday. Lemuel K. Washburn
    
    
12. The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was... accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on Earth. Friedrich Nietzsche
    
    
13. The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. Thomas Jefferson
    
    
14. I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force. Mark Twain
    
    
15. In America, sex is an obsession. In other parts of the world, it's a fact. Marlene Dietrich
    
    
16. Because I'm Jewish, a lot of people ask why I killed Christ. What can I say? It was an accident. It was one of those parties that got out of hand. I killed him because he wouldn't become a doctor. Lenny Bruce
    
    
17. The gods too, are fond of a joke. Aristotle
    
    
18. Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed. Immanuel Kant
    
    
19. The only thing that keeps god from sending another flood is that the first one was useless. Nicolas Chamfort
    
    
20. If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Derek Bok