Quotes About Controversy

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.

While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?

The fascination of Germany in this century is the fascination of the abomination. You go there to catch a whiff of the smoke that still hangs in the air.

He could not deny what he still believed in his heart of hearts: that the censure of McCarthy would, despite everything, be a victory for the Communists

Sex and religion are closer to each other that either might prefer.

What is Logicke but the highe waie to wrangling, contayning in it a world of bibble babble. Need we anie of your Greek, Latine, Hebrue, or anie such gibbrage, when we have the word of God in English?

What is Logicke but the highe waie to wrangling, contayning in it a world of bible babble. Need we anie of your Greek, Latine, Hebrue, or anie such gibbrage, when we have the word of God in English?

There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice.

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

What is it the Bible teaches us? — repine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us? — to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.

But the christian story of God the Father putting his son to death, or employing people to do it, (for that is the plain language of the story,) cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better, is making the story still worse; as if mankind could be improved by the example of murder; and to tell him that all this is a mystery, is only making an excuse for the incredibility of it .

It is not then the existence or the non-existence, of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement, she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost.

I have now gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie; and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow.

It has happened, that all the answers that I have seen to the former part of 'The Age of Reason' have been written by priests: and these pious men, like their predecessors, contend and wrangle, and understand the Bible; each understands it differently, but each understands it best; and they have agreed in nothing but in telling their readers that Thomas Paine understands it not .

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible7 is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

Because there is such disagreement among the learned about these abstruse matters, we will consider them no further.

They're in love. Fuck the war.

There is nothing so absurd which some philosophers have not maintained.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

dissidence and controversy are what bring science forward. Agreement and acceptance rarely stimulate experiments and progress.

No tempest at sea is harder on a man than to stand alone encircled by a firing squad of international authorities. A firm conviction of being in the right becomes your only armor against the barrage of assaults that can often be both personal and unfair. Yet dissidence and controversy are what bring science forward. Agreement and acceptance rarely stimulate experiments and progress.

There's more than zero people famous for making vaginal-yeast brioche?