Homer Simpson: "Um, Ned, I have a confession to make." Ned Flanders: "Now don't go turning Catholic on me." Homer: "I can't. I don't fit in those booths."

"I've always thought religion is most beneficial when it's taken a la carte."

"You never get anywhere by arguing religion with a priest."

"Religion has been described as a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that is not there."

"The universe is so old, and human life so recent, so much of the volume of the universe is actively hostile to life, it seems arrogant that someone made it all 'for us'."

"If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people."

Grimm: "Why don't people ever take cats to church?" Atilla: "Cause cats don't like dogma."

"All religions are not the same. But all religions are crazy; there's no other way to describe a dogma that seeks to explain the nature of the universe while ignoring the reality of that universe."

"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds."

"Sorry, I'm in the Jehovah's Witnesses protection program."

"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie --

--through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. --

--Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to --

-- perceive with our frail and feeble mind."

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein

• "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
• "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
• "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."
• "...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."
• "He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
• "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Copyright: Kevin Harris 1995 (may be freely distributed with this acknowledgement)