Quotes About Belief

In the eighteenth century it was generally believed that people needed to take in a certain amount of "spirits" every day for strength and energy: Washington, in planning one long forced march, ordered extra rations of rum for the troops as a matter of course.

Accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope—Martin Luther King Jr.

The world will need sceptics after the war is over. Too many people are ready to believe anything they're told.

Rick bowed his head. He didn't pray much—usually, he figured if God was even there, the state of the world made it pretty clear he wasn't listening to the typical thirteen-year-old's prayer

The lesson of the biblical tale of Noah's ark was a simple one, a refrain that echoed throughout the Old Testament: behave, or God will fuck you up.

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.

And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated

There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle.

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do

The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

Don't take security in the false refuge of consensus.

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile.

Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen.

Did I ever think I might have been wrong? Yes, sometimes and briefly. But never because of the supposed majority against me.