[The Truth Seeker is] Devoted to: science, morals, free thought, free discussions, liberalism, sexual equality, labor reform, progression, free education and whatever tends to elevate and emancipate the human race.Opposed to: priestcraft, ecclesiasticism, dogmas, creeds,...

The odor of burning sulphur shifted on the night air, acrid, a little foul. Somewhere, the Canaan dwellers had learned of a supplier of castor – an extract from the beaver’s perineal glands. Little packets...

It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating...

I have my superstitions, though. They could be termed quirks. I have to add up all numbers: there are some people I never telephone because their number adds up to an unlucky figure. Or I...

If there is a god maybe it rewards those who don’t believe on the basis of insufficient evidence–and punishes those who do.

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly...

deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be....

Superstition was with me at that moment, but it was not yet her hour for complete victory.

The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious belief in lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to...

Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.{Letter to his son and 6th US president, John Quincy Adams, November 13 1816}

Did you think you had educated the superstition out of those people?”I certainly did think it.”Well, then, you may unthink it.

The greater the gap between self perception and reality, the more aggression is unleashed on those who point out the discrepancy.

Superstition would seem to be simply cowardice in regard to the supernatural.

The destroyer of weeds, thistles, and thorns is a benefactor whether he soweth grain or not.

When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another — except brute, physical force.

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

Strange though it may seem, people rarely show such enthusiasm as when they are seeking the proof of a ghost story—the soul gathers all this sort of thing to its hungry bosom.

If the Goddess is kind, then she will allow you your doubts, and embrace believers and unbelievers alike. If she is not, then the witches are mistaken, and we should not be worshipping her anyway.

[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...