Despite, or because of their faith in miraculous cures, a strain of superstitious belief ran through this proud, emotionally distant family of intellectuals.

The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of...

One increasingly hears rumors of a reconciliation between science and religion. In major news magazines as well as at academic conferences, the claim is made that that belief in the success of science in describing...

When it’s your fourth marriage, you tend to lose faith in superstitions.

Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.

Zeus, first cause, prime mover; for what thing without Zeus is done among mortals?

There was once a house built out of memories and inside this house lived a woman called The Memory Snatcher. This woman was my Aunt Beydan. She was a sorceress and as a child I...

A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling in America, as it has done in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced societies. Supernatural faith increasingly belongs to the Third...

Christianity is such a silly religion.

Superstition though does tend to have a sharp end, and I didn’t want to find myself impaled on it.

Combien de choses nous servoyent hier d’articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd’huy?How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

Intelligent design theorists have learned a few lessons from the failures of their predecessors and have devised a more sophisticated strategy to compete head on with evolution. One of the main things they [intelligent design...

Altho’ I rarely waste time in reading on theological subjects, as mangled by our Pseudo-Christians, yet I can readily suppose Basanistos may be amusing. Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible...

Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order. Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something...

The superstitious one will never walk upon a grave. It’s said that its sinful in the day and terrible bad luck in the dark.

Yes, I’m a materialist. I’m willing to be shown wrong, but that has not happened — yet. And I admit that the reason I’m unable to accept the claims of psychic, occult, and/or supernatural wonders...

I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.

A broken mirror is good luck if you want it to be.

As Karl Marx once noted: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’ William Jennings...

Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture.

The claim at the heart of this book has been carefully researched by several generations of scholars and is orthodox in academic circles, if not beyond. Christians under the Roman Empire were neither constantly persecuted...

As hatred is defined as intense dislike, what is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion, if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that...

There are none so superstitious as the educated, for often they see in their own time – as an article of faith unsubstantiated by experience – the final end of human progress.

What’s more, I believe in argument and I even love it. Argument is our most steadfast pathway toward truth, for it is the only proven arbalest against superstitious thinking, or lackadaisical axioms.

The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep...

Nothing can illustrate these observations more forcibly, than a recollection of the happy conjuncture of times and circumstances, under which our Republic assumed its rank among the Nations; The foundation of our Empire was not...

The widest cause of secularization may be the steady change of thinking so that there is the expectation that reason and a consideration of cause and effect will help with explanations. Supernatural power began to...

The reasoning man who rejects the superstitions of simpletons necessarily becomes their enemy; he must expect as much and be prepared to laugh at the consequences.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. … At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex...

I am all for curses and superstition, but there’s a point at which they start getting in the way. That point had arrived.

It is bad luck to fall out of a thirteenth story window on Friday.

To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and...

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

It was about that time [415 BCE] that the poet Diagoras of Melos was proscribed for atheism, he having declared that the non-punishment of a certain act of iniquity proved that there were no gods....

There are things about organized religion which I resent. Christ is revered as the Prince of Peace, but more blood has been shed in his name than any other figure in history. You show me...

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

It’s natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how...

The reason so many people never get anywhere in life is because when opportunity knocks, they are out in the backyard looking for four-leaf clovers.

If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them. If slaves are freed, man must free them. If new truths are discovered, man must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed;...

Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.

[In the theatre] Thanks.’ He paused on the stairs. “And good-“Don’t say it!” yelled Helena. “No whistling, no well-wishing.””I thought you weren’t superstitious.””I’m not,’ she said defiantly, ‘but obviously there are limits.

In consequence of Darwin’s reformed Theory of Descent, we are now in a position to establish scientifically the groundwork of a non-miraculous history of the development of the human race. … If any person feels...

Progress had not invaded, science had not enlightened, the little hamlet of Pieuvrot, in Brittany. They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as...

Superstition is another word for Everyday life.

The vast majority of people are unthinking prejudice machines.

Excuses, criticisms, and superstitions are vitamins for haters, but poison for the successful. Rise above!

I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll, who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma....

When you consider the superstitions and the imaginings of the old Cornish country-folk up to my grandmother’s day, how their lives were swaddled in them from the cradle to the grave, their daily actions in...

It seemed to them dreadfully dangerous to put it into words like that, for lately the things they didn’t want to happen were the things that happened and the logic of this was that if...

The problem is that one man’s superstition is another man’s religion, and vice versa. Many Protestants today still see Catholicism as being rife with superstition, … while atheists and agnostics would see bien-pensant Protestants as...