[Josiah P. Mendum memorial at Paine Hall][He turned] the strait-laced Boston of sixty years ago [into] the enlightened Hub of today, . . . to ‘destroy bigotry and uproot the evils of superstition.

Superstition is the poetry of life.

I’m offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that’s all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it’s not really that intense or even that serious, but...

good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the ‘minimal view’ is that in trying to be...

Perhaps our judgement of the purple woman was unfair. No doubt her theories concerning the “approach of the Teatro” made us all uneasy. But was this reason enough to cast her out from that artistic...

That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never again believe.

[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss][Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal...

There is a superstition in avoiding superstition.

Four times during the first six days they were assembled and briefed and then sent back. Once, they took off and were flying in formation when the control tower summoned them down. The more it...

But let me say this. I am a superstitious man, a ridiculous failing but I must confess it here. And so if some unlucky accident should befall my youngest son, if some police officer should...

I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay hands on everything they can get.

Petronius was surely right in saying Fear made the gods. In primitive times fear of the unknown was normal; gratitude to an unknown was impossible.

History warns us … that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a...

It will seem to many persons very inconsistent with their ideas of the dignity of a spirit that they should appear and act in the manner I have described, and shall describe further; and I...

When I visited George Bernard Shaw, in 1948, at his home in Aylot, a suburb of London, he was extremely anxious for me to tell him all that I knew about Ingersoll. During the course...

I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath,...

There is a faculty in man that will acknowledge the unseen. He may scout and scare religion from him; but if he does, superstition perches near.

The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation.

When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is ‘being offended’.

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,And could sculpt like...

The name of Robert G. Ingersoll is in the pantheon of the world. More than any other man who ever lived he destroyed religious superstition. He was the Shakespeare of oratory — the greatest that...

It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was ‘a war without end.’ I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war...

What we don’t understand we can make mean anything.

My mother believed in all superstitions, plus she made some up.

Are you superstitious?” Annabelle asked with a grin.Daisy glowered at her. “There’s a reason for superstitions, you know. At some point in time, something bad happened to someone who was standing right next to a...

A theory of personal resurrection or reincarnation of the individual is untenable when we but pause to consider the magnitude of the idea. On the contrary, I must believe that rather than the survival of...

Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God...

The American people spend thousands of dollars to propagate the doctrines of the fall of man, the creation of the world out of nothing in six days by a personal God, vicarious atonement, absolution from...

The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and...

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for...

He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a...

The notion that writings created at a time when men huddled in superstitious terror from an eclipse can possibly be a credible representation of the Creator (whatever that word means to each person) is so...

Our house was an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with...

She once told him about the mysterious trampled-down places found in fields, which the peasants superstitiously called werewolves’ nests. Coming across one of these sites, she fell to her knees and buried her face in...

There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous [founding nations upon superstition]; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful....

There is in every village a torch- the schoolteacher; and an extinguisher: the priest.

There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter...

The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education,...

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.

Imagine a land where people are afraid of dragons. It is a reasonable fear: dragons possess a number of qualities that make being afraid of them a very commendable response. Things like their terrible size,...

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.

Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting–or even demanding–their own enslavement.

Lies don’t make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.

When we are meditating in a haunted graveyard, or even in our rooms, frightening external and internal appearances may arise during Chöd practice. If this happens, check the two ‘superstitions’—the external, frightening appearance, and the...

Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words ‘Special Relationship’ to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow.

There’s a superstition among falconers that a hawk’s ability is inversely proportional to the ferocity of its name. Call a hawk Tiddles and it will be a formidable hunter; call it Spitfire or Slayer and...