Time to piss off the right

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"    — Douglas Adams

"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet."    — Napoléon Bonaparte

". . . [W]ere we to take every word of the Bible literally, we would be in deep trouble with ordinary financial transactions, we would still be defining and murdering witches, our diet would be, to put it mildly, circumscribed, slavery would be politically correct and our agriculture would be in a mess.  I find it curious how selective and sex-obsessed Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalists of all persuasions can be."    — Peter Maxwell Davies

"It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow' disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate."    — Richard Dawkins

"I think it is more interesting to live not knowing answers than to have answers that might be wrong.  I have approximate answers, possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely certain of anything, and there's some things I know nothing about at all—like whether it means anything to ask, 'Why are we here?'  I might think about it for a little while, but if I can't figure it out then I'll go on to something else.  I'm not afraid of being lost in a mysterious universe with no purpose, which is the way it is, possibly.  It doesn't frighten me."    — Richard Feynman

"And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter."    — Thomas Jefferson

"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration—courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth."    — H. L. Mencken

"Much of what passes for religious faith today amounts to a side bet, covering a vague belief that 'there must be something' or that man needs to believe (especially when in foxholes)."    — Herbert J. Muller

"To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies—that one has no rational arguments to offer."    — Ayn Rand

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."    — Gene Roddenberry

"The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not dazzled by divine radiance."    — Bertrand Russell

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."    — Seneca the Younger

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."    — Mark Twain

"Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense."    — Voltaire

"To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 m.p.h. can survive the wreck of the car."    — Frank Zindler