Science and Skepticism - Quotes

How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot. - Christiaan Huygens, c. 1690

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have. - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

There are worlds on which life has never arisen. There are worlds that have been charred and ruined by cosmic catastrophes. We are fortunate: we are alive; we are powerful; the welfare of our civilization and our species is in our hands. If we do not speak for Earth, who will? If we are not committed to our own survival, who will be? - Carl Sagan, "Cosmos"

You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place. - Jonathan Swift

A belief in the powers of certain delusive arts, particularly astrology, has greatly retarded the progress of knowledge, by engrossing the attention of many of the finest geniuses the world has ever produced. - Olinthus G. Gregory, 1774-1841

After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what - how - when - where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. - Henry David Thoreau, "Walden Pond"

Far indeed are we from allowing grown men to listen to such tales. Even to our own children, when they are crying their heart out, as the saying goes, we are not in the habit of telling fabulous stories to soothe them. - Clement of Alexandria, "Exhortations to the Greeks" (c. 190), in a dismissal of pagan beliefs

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land. - T.H. Huxley, 1887

We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened. - Mark Twain, "Huckleberry Finn"

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. - Edmund Way Teale, "Circle of the Seasons", 1950

I have...a terrible need...shall I say the word? ...of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars. - Vincent van Gogh

"You must use the stars as your management guide."
"Does that work?"
"If you believe it works, then you're not bright enough to make your own decisions anyway. So randomness is probably an improvement." - Scott Adams, "Dilbert"

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably, some part of him is aware that they are myths, and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dares not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed. - Bertrand Russell

Perhaps the sharpest distinction between science and pseudoscience is that science has a far keener appreciation of human imperfections and fallibility than does pseudoscience (or "inerrant" revelation). If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge where we are liable to fall into error, then we can confidently expect that error - even serious error, profound mistakes - will be our companion forever. But if we are capable of a little courageous self-assessment, whatever rueful reflections they may engender, our chances improve enormously. - Carl Sagan, "Demon Haunted World"

The search for the mot juste is not a pedantic fad but a vital necessity. Words are our precision tools. Imprecision engenders ambiguity, and hours are wasted in removing verbal misunderstandings before the argument of substance can begin. - Anonymous civil servant

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. - Winston Churchill

Once there was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled - this time is called the Dark Ages. - bumper sticker

Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse. - Carl Sagan, "Cosmos"

Never attribute to malice that which can be adquately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's Razor

The foundation of morality is to.....give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge. - T.H. Huxley

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy (of) the interposition of a deity. More humble and I think truer to consider him created from animals. - Charles Darwin, "The Origin Of Species"

We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. - Tombstone epitaph of two amateur astronomers

I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character...by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so. - Carl Linnaeus, the founder of taxonomy, 1788

Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity. Today there are even commercials in which real scientists, some of considerable distinction, shill for corporations. They teach that scientists too will lie for money. As Tom Paine warned, inuring us to lies lays the groundwork for many other evils. - Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World"

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) in G. Simmons Calculus Gems, New York: McGraw Hill Inc., 1992.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune - often the surfeit of our own behavior - we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. - Shakespeare, "King Lear"

The entire Earth is but a point, and the place of our own habitation but a minute corner of it. - Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, "Meditations, Book 4", (CA. 170)

Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. - Carl Sagan

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but if someone tries to take them from us, we defend them with almost an illicit passion. - James Harvey Robinson

Convinced that powerful vested interests, including the scientific establishment, are conspiring to hold back a scientific revolution, speakers complained that "new" science is denied funding, rejected by journal editors and even subjected to ridicule, just because it doesn't fit some outdated paradigm. Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right - Robert L. Park, discussing attendees of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, a group that accepts psuedoscience as serious science.

In good speaking, should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is to speak? - Plato, "Phaedrus"

To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes? - A question put to Pythagoras by Anaximenes (c. 600 B.C.) according to Montaigne

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope? - Carl Sagan, "Demon Haunted World"

For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them. - Thomas Henry Huxley, "A Liberal Education" [1868]

It can therefore be said that, from the viewpoint of the doctrine of the faith, there are no difficulties in explaining the origin of man, in regard to the body, by means of the theory of evolution. - Pope John Paul II, 1986, "Man the Image of God is a Spiritual and Corporal Being"

Deep sky is, of all visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Notebooks" (1805)

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. - Carl Sagan

Superstition (is) cowardice in the face of the divine. - Theophrastus

Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in progessing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. - Tom Paine, "The Age of Reason", on religion

...ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enought for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in. - Stephen W. Hawking, "A Brief History Of Time"

For the first time in my life, I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light - our atmosphere. Obviously, this was not the "ocean" of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance. - Ulf Merbold, German space shuttle astronaut (1988)

In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. - Stephen Jay Gould

"Truly, that which makes me believe there is no inhabitant on this sphere, is that it seems to me that no sensible being would be willing to live here." "Well, then!" said Micromegas, "perhaps the beings that inhabit it do not possess good sense." - One alien to another, on approaching the Earth, in Voltaire's "Micromegas: A Philosophical History" (1752)

(Science) has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. - Carl Sagan

A man says to God, "Prove you exist." God says to the man, "I refuse to prove I exist, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." So the man says to God, "Well, the existence of the Babblefish, which could never have evolved and must have been created, proves you exist; therefore you don't!" And poof! God disappears in a puff of logic. - A tongue-in-cheek argument against Creationism, paraphrased from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", by Douglas Adams.

Facts are stubborn things. - Alain Rene Lesage

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would." For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding. - Francis Bacon, "Novum Organon", 1620

If the fact that brutes abstract not be made the distinguishing property of that sort of animal, I fear a great many of those that pass for men must be reckoned into their number. - Bishop Berkeley, in response to John Locke's statement that "Beasts abstract not."

Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified. - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

Interpreters of prophecy during the last few centuries have been, most of them, childish and nonsensical; the fact is, when fancy is their guide men wander as in a maze; they see, like children gazing into the fire, not what is really before them, but what is in their own heads. - Charles H. Spurgeon, 1834-1892

It almost never feels like prejudice. Instead, it seems fitting and just - the idea that, because of an accident of birth, our group (whichever one it is) should have a central position in the social universe. - Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot"

William James used to preach the "will to believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will to doubt.".... What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite. - Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1928)

(Some people claim to be psychic) because they know so little science that they don't realize how ridiculous they look to others. - Marilyn Vos Savant

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. And see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. - Henry David Thoreau

(The newspapers) did not quote me properly.....When I told the press they misquoted me, and in the excitement of it all, one newspaper and another one got it so ensnarled up that nobody knew just exactly what they were talking about.....These objects more or less fluttered like they were, oh, I'd say, boats on very rough water.....And when I described how they flew, I said that they flew like they take a saucer and throw it across the water. Most of the newspapers misunderstood and misquoted that, too. They said that I said that they were saucer-like; I said that they flew in a saucer-like fashion. - Kenneth Arnold, the civilian pilot who saw something peculiar near Mt. Rainier on June 24, 1947, in an interview with CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow on April 7, 1950, commenting on the odd coining of the phrase "flying saucer"

That was an historic misquote. While Mr. Arnold's original explanation has been forgotten, the term "flying saucer" has become a household word. - CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, commenting on Kenneth Arnold's preceding comment. Arnold himself had concluded that the train of nine objects that he saw were simply a new kind of winged aircraft.

I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I - nor would I want to - conceive of an individual that survives his physical death. Let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. - Albert Einstein

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home. - Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot"

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. - Aldo Leopold

Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts which they entertain on such subjects. They make a merit of implicit faith; and disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest assertions and the most positive bigotry. - David Hume, on doctrinaire religions

Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives along side the twentieth century the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms.....Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! - Leon Trotsky, on the eve of the Hitler takeover in Germany

The defect that hinders communication betwixt them and us, why may it not be on our part as well as theirs? - Montaigne

If then...the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion - I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. - Thomas Henry Huxley, 1860. This was his devastating reply to Bishop Wilberforce during the most famous debate of modern science, when the Bishop and Huxley shared the stage in a public debate over evolution. Wilberforce concluded his attack on evolution with a question: was Huxley's descent from the apes on his mother's or his father's side? Huxley's reply, above, threw the crowd into hysterical laughter, and Huxley won their rapt attention as he proceeded to demolish every word of the Bishop's argument.

Jesus save us from his Christians. - www.conrado.net

Safeguarding the water we drink and the air we breathe and the global environment that sustains us is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for all our other activities. - Carl Sagan

Reason can never permit the mind to reject a greater evidence to embrace what is less evident, nor allow it to entertain probability in opposition to knowledge and certainty. - John Locke, 1632-1704

You are told, by astrologers, psychics and other such "experts", that you are not the capable, responsible and rather remarkable person that you really are. We belong to a species that has reached out a quarter of a million miles to set foot on the moon, and if that is not miracle enough for us all, I despair for our sense of wonder. The modern soothsayers suggest that you stop thinking for yourselves. They ask you to retreat to the caves from which our ancestors are said to have come, while you have the choice of going to the stars. I have opted for the stars, and I invite you to join me. - James Randi, "The Mask of Nostradamus"

...I looked out the open window, letting my eyes roam over a large part of Amsterdam, over the rooftops and on to the horizon, a strip of blue so pale it was almost invisible. "As long as this exists," I thought, "this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?" The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature's beauty and simplicity. As long as this exists, and that should be forever, I know that there will be solace for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances. I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer. - Anne Frank, "The Diary of Anne Frank"

As children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror. - Lucretius, "On the Nature of Things", c. 60 BC

Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion. - Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan" (1651)

A credulous mind.....finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such. - Samuel Butler, "Characters" (1667-1669)

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. - Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891)

A biologist from some other solar system, in an unblinking examination of the teeming lifeforms of Earth, would surely note that they are all made of almost exactly the same organic stuff, the same molecules almost always performing the same functions, with the same genetic codebook in use by almost everybody. The organisms on this planet are not only kin; they live in intimate mutual contact, imbibing each other's wastes, dependent on one another for life itself, and sharing the same fragile surface layer. This conclusion is not ideology, but reality. It depends not on authority, faith, or special pleading by its proponents, but on repeatable observation and experiment. - Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" (1992)

Magic, it must be remembered, is an art which demands collaboration between the artist and his public. - E.M. Butler, "The Myth of the Magus" (1948)

What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and - especially important - to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is true. - Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World"

Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument. - Francis Bacon

The reliance on carefully designed and controlled experiments is key, as I tried to stress earlier. We will not learn much from mere contemplation. It is tempting to rest content with the first candidate explanation we can think of. One is much better than none. But what happens if we can invent several? How do we decide among them? We don't. We let experiment do it. - Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World"

Baloney, bamboozles, careless thinking, flimflam, and wishes disguised as facts are not restricted to parlor magic and ambiguous advice on matters of the heart. Unfortunately, they ripple through mainstream political, social, religious, and economic issues in every nation. - Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World"

To be sure, the vast majority of people who are untrained can accept the results of science only on authority. But there is obviously an important difference between an establishment that is open and invites every one to come, study its methods, and suggest improvement, and one that regards the questioning of its credentials as due to wickedness of heart, such as (Cardinal) Newman attributed to those who questioned the infallibility of the Bible. Rational science treats its credit notes as always redeemable on demand, while non-rational authoritarianism regards the demand for the redemption of its paper as a disloyal lack of faith. - Morris Cohen, "Reason and Nature" (1931)

It's not the things in the Bible I don't understand that bother me, it's those that I do. - Mark Twain

Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are laboring to dethrone; but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument. - Ethan Allen

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. - Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man" (1871)

Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth. - Bertrand Russell, "Mysticism and Logic" (1929)

So we keep asking, over and over, until a handful of earth stops our mouths - but is that an answer? - Heinrich Heine, "Lazarus" (1854)

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. - Epictetus, "Discourses"

We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling. - Henri Poincare (1854-1912)

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. - George Washington, address to Congress, January 8, 1790

Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom. - Latin proverb

Some again will object and say, If Witches cannot kill, and do many strange things by Witchcraft, why have many confessed that they have done such Murthers, and other strange matters, whereof they have been accused? To this I answer, If Adam and Eve in their innocency were so easily overcome, and tempted to sin, how much more may poor Creatures now after the Fall, by perswasions, promises, and threatenings, by keeping from sleep, and continual torture, be brought to confess that which is false and impossible, and contrary to the faith of a Christian to believe? - Thomas Ady, "A Candle in the Dark" (1656) on witchcraft trials

I believe that science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon the discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic, and it doesn't work. - James Randi, "The Mask of Nostradamus"

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably untrue. - H.L. Mencken

Man's responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases - Andre Gide

On two occasions, I have been asked (by members of Parliament), 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

Children are usually taught what to think, not how to think. That's why so many adults live in a state of perpetual misunderstanding about the world. - Marilyn Vos Savant

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion. - Steven Weinberg

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. - Blaise Pascal

Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as "Christ-killers", no Northern Ireland "troubles", no "honour killings", no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money ("God wants you to give till it hurts"). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it. - Richard Dawkins

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion. - Robert M. Pirsig

I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it. - Albert Einstein

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire

Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do. - Bertrand Russell

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The lawyer Wendy Kaminer was exaggerating only slightly when she remarked that making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion Hall. The status of atheists in America today is on a par with that of homosexuals fifty years ago. - Richard Dawkins

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. - Charles Darwin

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. - Carl Sagan

Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that "God is the ultimate" or "God is our better nature" or "God is the universe." Of course, like any other word, the word "God" can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that "God is energy", then you can find God in a lump of coal. - Steven Weinberg

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. - Albert Einstein

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. - Albert Einstein

The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive. - Albert Einstein

I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. - Albert Einstein

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. - Albert Einstein

If by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying...it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity. - Carl Sagan

Religion...has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, "Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? Because you're not!" If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says, "I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday," you say, "I respect that". Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows - but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe...no, that's holy? ...we are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody get absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be. - Douglas Adams

If the advocates of apartheid had their wits about them they would claim - for all I know truthfully - that allowing mixed races is against their religion. A good part of the opposition would respectufully tiptoe away. And it is no use claiming that this is an unfair parallel because apartheid has no rational justification. The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe "religious liberty". - Richard Dawkins

(This assumes) that the values of Islam trump anyone else's - which is what any follower of Islam does assume, just as any follower of any religion believes that theirs is the sole way, truth and light. If people wish to love a 7th century preacher more than their own families, that's up to them, but nobody else is obliged to take it seriously. - Andrew Mueller, in response to the Danish cartoon debacle of 2006

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. - H.L. Mencken

To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like "God was always there", and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say "DNA was always there", or "Life was always there", and be done with it. - Richard Dawkins