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 | Anon: "Everyone dies, but no one is dead." Ancient Tibetan saying. |
| Anon: "Progress happens, one funeral at a time." |
| Sir Winston Churchill: "Broadly speaking, human beings may be divided into three classes: those who are billed to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death." |
| Richard Dawkins: "After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked why I bother to get up in the mornings." |
| Bill Ferris: "When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground." |
| Dr. Jack Kevorkian: physician and euthanasia activist; USA Today on 1996-JUL-30: "Had Christ died in my van, with people around him who loved him, [his death] would have been far more dignified." |
| Albert Pike: "What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal." |
| Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1869): "Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability." |
| Joseph Stalin: "One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are merely a statistic." |
Death penalty:
| John J. Curtin, Jr.: "A system that will take life must first give justice. |
| Dick Gregory: "If Christ was executed today, I bet Christians would wear little electric chairs around their necks." |
| Justice Thurgood Marshall: "When ... the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery. If not remedied, the scandalous state of our present system of capital punishment will cast a pall of shame over our society for years to come. We cannot let it continue. |
| Theodore L. Sendak: "We should weigh the death of the convicted murders against the loss of life of his victims and the possibility of potential victims to murder." He was the Attorney General of Indiana. |
| Potter Stewart: "We may nevertheless assume safely there are murders, such as those who act in passion, for whom the threat of death has little or no deterrent effect. But for many others, the death penalty undoubtedly, is a significant deterrent." From his ruling as a U.S. Supreme Court justice in Gregg v. Georgia. |
| Mary Sue Terry: "Evidence of innocence is irrelevant!" She was the Attorney General of Virginia, and was responding to an appeal to introduce new evidence from a prisoner on death row. |
Doubt:
| Gordon Allport: "The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt." | ||||
| About religious doubt in the military:
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| Editors of the Catholic Encyclopedia:
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| Richard Feynman: "There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made." | ||||
| Darrell J. Fasching: |
"I have found a fullness in the doubts and questions of my life that I once thought could only be found in the answers. Mercifully, doubts and questions have come to be so fulfilling that I find myself suspicious of answers, not because they are necessarily false or irrelevant, but because even when relevant and true they are, and can only be partial. It is doubt and questioning that always lure me on to broader horizons and deeper insights through an openness to the infinite that leave me contentedly discontent." 8
| Paul Manata: "Believers should not be afraid to wrestle with their doubts. ... Struggling with your doubts will make your faith 'your own,' rather than something you inherit." From a book review. 12 |
| Mark Taylor: "Religious conflict will be less a matter of struggles between belief and unbelief than of clashes between believers who make room for doubt and those who do not." 10 |
| Paul Tillich: "Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith." |
| Michael White: "God isn't afraid of our doubts, but He doesn't want to leave them with us either." |
| Additional quotes on "doubt." |
Education:
| Gary Bauer, former head of the Family Research Council -- a Fundamentalist Christian advocacy group: "We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. 1 But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe." |
| Baba Dioum, Senegal: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, we will understand only what we are taught." |
| Arthur Lipkin: "[Children's] cognitive restraints imposed at home may be jostled loose by inquiry, discussion, and student disputation. The dissonance they experience can lead students to question their home, community, and church values. Liberals see that process as growth; the Right see it as heresy." 2 |
| William Butler Yeats: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." |
Environment:
| Anon, a Cree prophecy: "After the last tree has been cut down; after the last river has been poisoned; after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten." |
| Jack Handey: "Many people never stop to realize that a tree is a living thing, not that different from a tall, leafy dog that has roots and is very quiet." |
| Attributed to a 1854 speech by Chief Seattle. It was actually written by a screenwriter in 1972 for a film about ecology called "Home:" "Whatever befalls the Earth - befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life - he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." |
Evil:
| Anon: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." This quotation comes in various forms and is traditionally attributed to Edmund Burke (1729 -1797), an Irish philosopher and statesman. However, it does not appear in his writings. 3 |
| Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "There is nothing quite so terrible as evil masquerading as virtue." |
| Martin Luther: "Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Man can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women?" |
| Blaise Pascal: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." This quote is often attributed to Sam J. Ervin, Jr. from his book: "Protecting the Constitution." (1984). But it was originally said many years before by Pascal. |
| Jonathan Sacks: Each individual has responsibility "to heal where others harm, mend where others destroy, [and] to redeem evil by turning its negative energies to good." From his book "To heal a fractured world: The ethics of responsibility." Rabbi Sacks is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. |
| Socrates: "The only good is knowledge. The only evil, ignorance." |
| Henry Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." |
| Steven Weinberg: "I think that on the balance the moral influence of religion has been awful. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil. But for good people to do evil -- that takes religion." |
Evolution:
| Francis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project): "God decided to create a species with whom he could have fellowship. Who are we to say that evolution was a dumb way to do it? It was an incredibly elegant way to do it." 4 | ||||
| Charles Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." | ||||
| Theodosius Dobzhansky: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." | ||||
| Jane Goodall: "You may not believe in evolution, and that is all right. How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves." | ||||
| Institute for Creation Research:
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| Sir Arthur Keith: "Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it only because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable." | ||||
| Steven Weinberg:
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Fear:
| Anon: "There is no anger, jealousy, hatred, suspicion. There is only fear and its various derivatives" |
| Heinrich Heine, from his 1821 play Almansor: "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." |
| Eric Hoffer, from his book The True Believer: "The acrid secretion of the frustrated mind, though composed chiefly of fear and ill will, acts yet as a marvelous slime to cement the embittered and disaffected into one compact whole." |
| President Franklin D. Roosevelt: "There is nothing to fear but fear itself" |
| Carol Tavris: "During McCarthyism, teachers feared for their jobs if they belonged to a left-wing group. Today teachers fear for their jobs if they hug a crying child. As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person's life. Hysteria trumps evidence." |
| William Sloane Coffin: senior minister, Riverside Church, NYC: "In life you can either follow your fears or be led by your values, by your passions" 7 |
Feminism:
| Jerry Falwell: "Most of these feminists are radical, frustrated lesbians, many of them, and man-haters, and failures in their relationships with men, and who have declared war on the male gender. The Biblical condemnation of feminism has to do with its radical philosophy and goals. That's the bottom line." |
| Randall Terry, head of Operation Rescue; from a speech to a group of anti-abortion Roman Catholic priests, quoted in Front Lines Research : "...make dads the godly leaders [of the family] with the women in submission, raising kids for the glory of God." |
Forgiveness:
| Dag Hammarskjold: "Forgiving is forgetting, in spite of remembering." |
References used:
The following information sources were used to prepare and update the above essay. The hyperlinks are not necessarily still active today.
- The term "pluralism" is ambiguous. It is sometimes used to refer to religious diversity. Other times, it refers to the belief that all religions are true. It is not clear which meaning is being used here.
- Excerpt from the preface of a book by Ian K. Macgillivray: "Gay-Straight Alliances: A Handbook for Students, Educators, and Parents." at: http://www.ianmacgillivray.com/
- The Columbia World of Quotations (1996), at: http://www.bartleby.com/
Roger Highfield, "DNA pioneers lash out at religion," London Daily Telegraph, 2003-MAR-24, at: http://washingtontimes.com/
- "Tenets of Scientific Creationism," Institute for Creation Research, at: http://www.icr.org/
- Steven Weinberg, "Facing Up : Science and Its Cultural Adversaries," Harvard University Press, (2001) Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store
- "Profile: William Sloane Coffin," 2004-AUG-27, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, at: http://www.pbs.org/
- Darrell J. Fasching, "Narrative Theology After Auschwitz: From Alienation To Ethics," Fortress Press, (1992), Page 4.
- "Doubt," Catholic Encyclopedia, at: http://www.newadvent.org/
- Mark C. Taylor, "The Devoted Student," New York Times, 2006-DEC-21. See reldoubt1.htm
- Bill Cooke, "The Gathering of Infidels: A Hundred Years of the Rationalist Press Association," Prometheus Books (2004).
- Timothy Keller, "The Reason for God: Belief in an age of skepticism," Dutton Adult, (2008). Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store. Paul Manata's review is at: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/
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Posted 1996 to 2008 by Ontario
Consultants on Religious Tolerance.
Copyrights for the individual quotations held by their creators
Last updated: 2008-FEB-07
Compiled by: B.A. Robinson
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