They Said It (Some selected quotations for you)

We are all murderers and prostitutes -- no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.
R. D. Laing (1927-89), British psychiatrist. The Politics of Experience, Introduction (1967).

We are only fabulous beasts, after all.
-- John Ashbery, US poet

The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know."
-- John Heywood, English writer (c.1497 – c.1580)

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)

Falsehoods not only disagree with truths, but usually quarrel among themselves.
-- Daniel Webster, US statesman and orator

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
Lenin (1870 - 1924)

...it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions.
-- Richard Dawkins

One man's religion is another man's belly laugh.
-- Joseph Campbell, author

I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose
-- Clarence Darrow, US lawyer, Scopes Monkey Trial , 1857-1938

If there were gods, how can I bear to be no god.
-- Nietzsche

If, as they say, God spanked this town
For being much too frisky,
Why did He burn His churches down
And save Hotaling's Whiskey?
 -- Poem on 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, in which the city's largest whiskey distillery was left unscathed

God is OK, it's some of his fan clubs that worry me.

"No efficiency. No accountability. I tell you,
 Hobbes, it's a lousy way to run a universe."
  -- Calvin & Hobbes comic

The Holy Father is neither.

If you talk to God, you're praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
-- Thomas Szasz

I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.
-- Emo Philips, US comedian

It’s easier to seek forgiveness than ask for permission.
- Proverb

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
-- Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.
- Albert Einstein

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
-- George Orwell

"The world holds two classes of men -- intelligent men
 without religion, and religious men without intelligence."
- Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri (973-1057; Syrian poet)

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
-- Edward Abbey

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it.”
--  George Bernard Shaw quotes (Irish literary Critic, Playwright and Essayist. (1856-1950)

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
-- Lillian Hellman, physicist

Trial by combat of wits in disputations has no attraction for the seeker after truth; to him the appeal to experience is the last and the only test of  the merit of an opinion, conjecture or hypothesis.
-- J. W. Mellor - Modern Inorganic Chemistry, Longman's Green & Co., 1924

Faith without facts availeth nothing.
-- J. W. Mellor

No one is fit to encounter an adversary's case successfully unless he can make it for the moment his own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it for himself, and take account not only of what the adversary says, but also of the best he might say if only he had chanced to think of it."
--  William Hurrell Mallock (1849 – 1923), English novelist and economics writer.

Had I been there at the Creation, I would have given a few useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.
-- King Alfonso X of Castile

My creed is this:
  Happiness is the only good.
  The place to be happy is here.
  The time to be happy is now.
   The way to be happy is to make others so.
-- Robert Ingersoll

Men will wrangle for religion
Write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but -- live it.
-- Charles Caleb Colton (1780–1832), English cleric and writer

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilised, become humanists.
-- Walter Lippmann

God is a conjecture: but I should like your conjecturing restricted to the conceivable.
-- Zarathustra

When all are wrong, everyone is right.
-- La Lehaussee