Quotes from Dale Ahlquist

It is easier to get rid of one's religion than to get rid of one's sins.

Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything." It

It is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

The problem is this. We worship the new instead of the eternal. And when we worship the new, we are always changing our allegiances, because there will always be something newer. Look

Why should your conscience be any more reliable than your rotting teeth or your quite special defect of eyesight?

You can say anything against a man who praises himself, but a man who blames himself is invulnerable.

Every leader-writer who thunders 'Galileo' at us assumes that we know even less about Galileo than he does.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes being corrected.

Someone who doesn't know history, he says, is "in the literal sense half-witted . . . He does not know what half his own words mean, or what half his own actions signify.

understanding the facts is more important than knowing the facts. But

The snobs of the world avoid words of one syllable because they avoid common sense, plain words, clear thinking. They prefer long words, which are a substitute for thinking.

so democracy means more than just going to vote. Democracy means that people should truly have the opportunity to govern their own affairs. The

Politicians now think they have to educate the electorate and explain to them what is good for them. Gone are the days when the electorate educated their representatives .

Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

When he traveled, he was writing. When he was at the pub, he was writing. He would stop in the middle of a staircase or a crowded street to write. When he ran out of paper, he would write on his shirt cuffs. He was always writing. He was one of the most prolific writers who ever lived. A hundred books, thousands of essays, hundreds of poems.

All proof begins with something which cannot be proved, but can only be perceived or accepted, and is called an axiom or first principle.

In our existing political conditions, when everybody agrees about something, it is generally untrue.

Everyone's belief is everyone else's concern.24 Those who talk of "tolerating all opinions" are very provincial bigots who are only familiar with one opinion.

something that is in the very nature of nature-worship. We can already see men becoming unhealthy by the worship of health; becoming hateful by the worship of love; becoming paradoxically solemn and overstrained even by the idolatry of sport; and in some cases strangely morbid and infected with horrors by the perversion of a just sympathy with animals. . . . There

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never

The two first facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous. . . . [A]ll

The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.

We already use catchwords as substitutes for thinking, thereby limiting our vocabulary along with the use of our brains. In

Popular science tries to define realities, and then finds that the definition can be extended to any number of unrealities.