#gnostic

Interviewer: "Didn't [Sagan] want to believe?" Druyan: "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know. ↗

— Ann Druyan

#astronomy #atheism #carl-sagan #science #science

All of the great empires of the future will be empires of the mind. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#kingdom #prognostication #inspirational

The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have my demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same lack of humor, charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases. ↗

— Robert Anton Wilson

#christianity #humor #humor

The position of the Atheist is a clear and reasonable one. I know nothing about ‘God’ and therefore I do not believe in Him or in it; what you tell me about your God is self‐contradictory, and therefore incredible. I do not deny ‘God,’ which is an unknown tongue to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without God. ↗

— Annie Wood Besant

#atheism #god #atheist

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" "I give." "You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#dogs #dyslexia #god #humor #insomnia

The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists. ↗

— William Jennings Bryan

#atheists #back #children #faith #god

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence. ↗

— John Fowles

#atheist #coward #intelligence #intelligence

Even now, there are still days so beautiful, I almost believe in God. (132) ↗

— Ann Hood

#atheism #beauty #belief #faith #god

The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#agnosticism #mortality #religion #death

For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless. ↗

— Sean S. Kamali

#agnosticism #agnostics #anti-theism #atheism #atheist