User:Belthil

One must have a chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra's Prologue, part 5

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in, some of us just go one god further.

— Richard Dawkins, unknown

Enlightenment is when a person leaves behind a state of immaturity and dependence for which they themselves were responsible. Immaturity and dependence are the inability to use one's own intellect without the direction of another. One is responsible for this immaturity and dependence, if its cause is not a lack of intelligence or education, but a lack of determination and courage to think without the direction of another. Sapere aude! Dare to know! is therefore the slogan of the Enlightenment.

— Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

— Immanuel Kant, Critics of Pure Reason

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

— Steven Weinberg, Washington, D.C., April 1999

One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.

— Steven Weinberg, ibid.

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

— Bertrand Russell, Collected Papers, vol. 11, p. 91

Without faith we might relapse into scientific or rational thinking, which leads by a slippery slope toward constitutional democracy.

— Robert Anton Wilson, unkown

I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.

— Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays, p. vi.

If a religion is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.

— Bertrand Russell, attributed

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

— Bertrand Russell, attributed

Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny — and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).

— Stephen Jay Gould, unknown source