ben holum > ben's Quotes

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“There is no one right way to live.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

“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, The God Delusion: A Study of Religious Belief and Skepticism

“Agnostics are just atheists without balls.”
― Stephen Colbert, I Am America

“Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion: A Study of Religious Belief and Skepticism

“People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed