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Freethinkers Speak Across the Ages
| "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one." Voltaire |
"Ubi dubium ibi libertas (where there is doubt, there is freedom)." Latin proverb |
"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies." Thomas Jefferson |
"Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error." Thomas Jefferson |
"Only those who have lived all their lives under the dark clouds of vague, undefined fears can appreciate the joy of a doubting soul suddenly born into the kingdom of reason and free thought. Is the bondage of the priest-ridden less galling than that of the slave, because we do not see the chains…?" Elizabeth Cady Stanton |
"A believer is a bird in a cage; a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing… there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought you are without a chain…" " Robert Ingersoll |
"The church in all ages and among all peoples has been the consistent enemy of… liberty of thought and expression. It has been the sworn enemy of investigation and intellectual development." Robert Ingersoll |
"Let the human mind be loose…Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it." John Adams |
"…when you know a man's religious complexion, you know what sort of religious books he reads when he wants some more light, and what sort of books he avoids, les by accident he get more light than he wants." Mark Twain |
"…science is the thing forbidden [with priests and gods].. This alone is morality: Thou shalt not know." Friedrich Nietzsche |
"Euripides long ago said, 'Who dares not speak his free thought is a slave.' I nominated myself as an 'infidel' as a challenge to thought for those who are asleep." Luther Burbank |
"The Catholic Church…has been the implacable enemy of all freedom of thought." Sigmund Freud |
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality." George Bernard Shaw |
"…Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit, it is opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking." H. L. Mencken |
"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." Carl Sagan |
"Religion…is the first enemy of the ability to think. That ability is not used by men to one-tenth of its possibility, yet before they learn to think they are discouraged by being ordered to take things on faith. Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought." Ayn Rand |
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." Benjamin Franklin |
"…the wonderfully interlocking self-protective structure of a great religion - any of the religions; they are all alike in this claim, -- 'Here is something more important than anything else: it must be believed; if you do not believe, you will be terribly punished." Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless." Leo Tolstoy |
" 'The Heavenly Father feedeth the fowls of the air' - and in winter He letteth them starve to death." Jules Renard (This quote doesn't relate to reason and logic…or DOES it?) |
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Freethinkers of Colorado Springs
P.O. Box 62946
Colorado Springs, CO 80962-2946
Phone: 719-594-4506