dreamslaughter

2010-06-01T23:18:00.000-07:00

Precious

"I can make this shot" Mal mumbled.

"I suggest you come up with a better idea." Zoe whispered back.

"I would if I could, but I can't, so I won't. Thank you very much."

Mal laid the hand held rocket launcher on a metal cross beam and slowly took aim. A little up, a little down. A little left, a little right. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. A technician opened the access door. The Hardnose missile streaked across the hanger underneath a farpoint crawler, through the access door, down the hall, through another door and exploded in the main hanger blast door lift field console; sparks, fire, flashes, but ultimately, nothing.

“Ruttin Tsai boo shr!” "Ta ma duh!" They cried simultaneously.

Mal was up in a flash, gun in hand, firing round after round into the distant console. Zoe was next to him in half a flash firing just a little slower. Some guards showed up and started firing; Mal and Zoe ignored the danger and continued firing at the console. The main hanger door creaked for a second then started its slow, inevitable tip and fall. The guards scrambled out of the way as the huge door crashed to the ground.

Serenity was through the opening in an instant. Mal and Zoe jumped into the ship chased by more small arms fire. As they flew out of the hanger, Kaylee released a FauxHunter beacon; "They won't be catching that baby for a while," she thought.

Wash made a quick dive just outside the door and snuggled Serenity back into the dark structural nooks and crannies of the fortress. The beacon reached speed. After what seemed like a relatively short eternity; ration chase ships exited the hanger in pursuit of the beacon. They disappeared into the distance.

Wash slowly brought the ship around and re-entered the hanger. Serenity paused for a second. "Okay, it's clear, security's gone." There was nobody left except engineers and technicians. Jayne and Mal jumped out. Serenity turned ninety degrees to the left. “Security command at three o'clock.” Wash thought. He pushed the throttle forward. The front of serenity pierced the fortified wall at ground level, completely destroying the command room. Temporary hardeners protected the ship's nose. “Up to five o'clock high.” The nose tore through the building's structure up and to the right.

Jayne ran to each of the remaining ration ships planting explosives. Mal ran into the building wreckage, gun in hand.

The monstrous conference room was a shambles. Standing between two diamond plated pillars, at the end of the long Komtek command and communications table stood Lillacutt Preston; one of the most beautiful women Mal had ever seen. Mal re-holstered his gun as he took the extraordinarily long slow walk along the side of the table, their eyes permanently locked in an emotional tsunami. He didn't look down as he picked up the small leather bag from the table. Mal gave her the best smile he had.

She blinked and whispered, “You looked better with the mustache.” Her eyes melted ever so very slightly; but Mal noticed it. He turned and walked out through the debris.

Mal and Jayne ran back into the ship chased by parts of exploding ration ships. Serenity made a swift exit. Kaylee released another beacon in the opposite direction of the first one. Wash snuggled Serenity back into the fortress's underbelly. It would be more than a month before they would be able to leave their hiding place. No worries, it was a small up front, but massive back end. Retirement level massive.

Serenity was gloomy, all the systems were shutdown, only life support and some minimal lighting, run from an old diesel generator. It was loud and stunk and could be heard all over the ship, but nobody but Kaylee was paying attention.

Jayne stood next to the dinning table all puffed up and ready to bicker. “Come on Mal, let's have a look at what all the excitement was about. I'm willing to die for stuff, but I'd sure like to see the stuff I'm willing to die for.”

Everybody was there except Kaylee and Inara, Kaylee was trying to figure out a way to silence the genny and Inara was visiting home. Mal took out the small leather bag and dropped it on the table. “Now I'm all for curiosity and such, but the contract said no looking, said it was dangerous.”

“Heaven forbid you'd wanna to do anything dangerous!” Shepherd quipped.

“Mal, let's have a look, don't you think it's smart knowing what we're dealing with here?” Zoe asked.

“There ya go again, always with the smart thing. I don't know whether you're trying to insult me again or trying to compliment me for the first time.”

Mal looked at the little bag held closed by a strand of leather. “Well, how much danger could be in a little bag like that?” Mal picked up the bag and tried to open it. He couldn't. They each had a go at it, but it was beyond their ability. “Forget it, let's celebrate a success. I'm thinking there isn't enough celebrating on this ship lately.” Everybody got busy pulling out food, drink and merriment.

Shepard brought out a large artificial strawberry cake. “I'm not sure hitting the most powerful ration around here was the best thing to do. You said there wasn't gonna be any shooting at people.”

Mal shook his head. “Didn't plan to shoot at anyone; anyway they started shooting at us first.”

“What about the Hardnose and pistols?” Zoe asked.

“We weren't shooting at anyone, we were shooting at a machine.”

Kaylee showed up. The generator was as loud as ever. “That piece of antiquity just won't obey my modern simplicity." She saw the cake and a big smile spread across her face. "But I think a little bit of strawberry cake might help a lot with comming up with a solution.” She sat down at the table and picked up the leather bag. She also couldn't undo the knot at first, but when she pulled a hairpin from her hair and fiddled with the knot; she had it open in no time at all.

A big beautiful intricate high tech jade earring fell to the table top. It was a clip on earring, with unusual tendrils emanating from it. Everyone froze in its extreme beauty, with eyes wide open, unable to move, entranced.

Suddenly everyone except Shepard and River made a move for the earring, but Kaylee had it first and it was on her ear. A flexible tendril moved into her ear channel, others pushed against her head behind her ear. Her wide eyes opened wider. She was closest to the door and ran out towards her room. Everyone but Shepard and River ran after her. Shepard just shook his head.

As Shepard approached Kaylee's bunk room, everyone but River was there, pounding on the locked door and yelling.

“Hey, hey! Everyone relax. Everybody! Hey! Nee mun doh bee-jway.” Shepard yelled. “What are you gonna do, break the door down and beat her up?”

Mal turned to Shepard. “If there's a beating being needed, then it will be served." He turned to Jayne. "Jayne, get the torch.”

As Jayne applied the torch to Kaylee's door, Shepard continued, “Let me talk to her first, I can talk her down. I don't want any fancy footwork by a bunch of stormtroopers. Someone might get hurt.” Everyone completely ignored him. Shepard pulled Mal's gun from his holster and raises it above his head. "I SAID STOP IT!" They continued to ignore him.

Shepard took careful aim into the distance and found the perfect spot; he fired a round into the hull. Hull breach alarms went off drowning out the generator.

Mal turns and caught Shepard with a direct punch to the chin. He went down like a companion with a paycheck.

"Kaylee, Jayne, plug the leak. Wash, Zoe go to the pit and a see if you can help life support. Everyone else go to your bunks and seal the door for now." Mal commanded.

They all ran down the corridor leaving Shepard in a heap on the floor.

As the sound of footsteps disappeared Mal yelled, "And shut off that alarm." Shepard's eyes opened. He sat up and finished cutting the last of Kaylee's door restraints. He slowly pushed it open.

Kaylee was curled up on her bed rocking back and forth real slow. “Kaylee?” Shepard moved to the bed and sat down. “Hey girl, what's up?” She ignored him.

The alarm stopped and the annoying drone of the generator reappeared.

“Kaylee?” he shook her. “Kaylee, what is it honey, what's going on?”

"It's wonderful, it feels so good, everything's so easy to understand.” Kaylee looked at Shepard. “I can hear things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Everything, Shepherd, I can hear everything. Bird's chirping, my folks arguing over what to have for breakfast, angels singing. I can hear what you were saying outside the door. I can hear ration executives making plans to get their precious back. I can hear Mal right now, telling the others to finish plugging the hole. I can hear his footsteps walking this way. Everything makes so much sense now.”

Shepard moved quickly, precisely and forcefully. He grabbed Kaylee's arms, and flipped her on her stomach and placed his knee in her back. He tore a sheet and tied her hands and feet. “Haven't done anything like that in a while.” He pulled the earring off Kaylee's ear.

“Nooooooooo! Ni ta ma de. Tianxia suoyoude ren dou gai si!” Kaylee screamed. She started sobbing softly.

Shepard walked to the table, held up the earring and inspected it carefully. He brought it towards his ear. He hesitated, then closer to the ear, then hesitated again. Finally, he put the earring on the table and picked up a big stone statue. He raised it above the earring ready to crush it.

“I wouldn't do that my peaceful friend. I'd have to shoot you in the arm and I'm not too sure doc ud be able to reattach it with the gear he's got here.” Shepard looked at Mal hard. “I'll do it reverend. You know I'm good to my word” Shepard put the statue down. “Now use some of those strips to tie up you feet." Shepard complied. “Now tie another around a wrist and a bedpost.” Mal picked up the earring. He almost had it in his ear when he heard the pisssst of an injector. The drug worked quickly; Mal stumbled onto the bed.

Gaffers tape made quick work of Mal's hands and legs. Simon picked up the earring and gazed at it in awe. Before he could put it in his ear he was tackled from behind.

When Simon opened his eyes, he found himself in handcuffs, gaffer's tape around his ankles and looking at Jayne's grinning face. “Curse you!” Spittle splayed from Simon's lips.

“Sorry doc, no harm, no foil. Ya know, a man's gotta do what he does." Jayne snickered. Jayne turned to the earring. His face changed from extreme glee to overwhelming horror. River stood next to the earring with the statue in her hand. "Si san ba." Jayne cursed. He pulled his gun and brought it up towards River's head, but before it got there, River smashed the statue on the earring. It turned to powder, chunks and bleeding micro-neutrino circuitry.

They all looked at River and screamed semi-unison.

River just smiled her inscrutable smile and walked away.

Jayne looked at Mal, Mal fumed back. Jayne looked away quickly. "Mal! I was only gonna scare her. I wasn't gonna shoot her. Honest Mal. It was that ruttin' earring, Mal, . . you believe me, right?"

Wash and Zoe looked through the door and started laughing. Zoe nudged Wash, “Come on baby, I know there's a joke here somewhere. Please share.”

copyright 2010 dreamslaughter

Notes from Fireflyfans.net (BYTEMITE)(PLATONIST)

Let's Not Forget What They Said.

2010-05-19T00:24:00.000-07:00

I look at you all
n see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
And I look at this floor
and I notice it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps

I don't know why nobody told you
How to unfold your love
I don't know how someone controlled you
They bought then they sold you.
Well I look at the world
and I notice it's turning
Still my guitar gently weeps

With every mistake we surely must be learning
My my guitar gently weeps
I don't know why you were diverted
You were perverted too
An I don't know how you were inverted
No one alerted you.

Well I look at you all
I see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps

Gently
Gently
Gently Weeps

<(acoustic demo)>

I look from the wings
At the play you are staging
While my guitar gently weeps
As I'm sitting here
Doing nothing but aging.
Still my guitar gently weeps

<(original last verse)>

I look at you all
see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
Look at you all...
Still my guitar gently weeps.

<(rehearsals only)>

I look at the trouble
And hate that is raging
While my guitar gently weeps
While I'm sitting here
Doing nothing but aging
Still, my guitar gently weeps.

<(not used)>

The problems you serve
Are the troubles you're reaping,
Still, my guitar gently weeps.
~ George Harrison

Firefly - Thanks Joss Whedon

2010-04-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

.

I did some background work a while ago. Got the call for a new science fiction series. Cool, I read every piece of science fiction I could get my hands on from fifth grade through high school.

I showed up and was lead to a container storage area near Long Beach. We all went to the set and waited. There's a lot of waiting. They say that the first day on a movie set is the most exciting day of your life, the second day is the most boring.

I was wearing the camouflage I used when I played paintball. I had a red rag I used to clean my paintball gun with and wrapped it around my neck as a scarf.

I noticed that they were setting up a crane next to a tent full of chickens. There was a row of old tires in front of the tent, so I went over and laid down on the tires and tried to take a nap(sic). They went ahead and set up the shot.

When Joss showed up he let me stay.

My paintball gun was a double action cow marking gun; I played paintball in the days before specialized single action and automatic guns. Double action was so much more fun than when it turned to auto. I had modified it with some gaffer tape to make it look a bit different.

Behind me you can see a tent. There was a guy that was chasing the chickens out of the tent. I asked Joss if when the guy chased the chickens out, I could draw my gun as if I was startled out of sleep. He said sure. The guy tried chasing the chickens at me, but it didn't quite work. That version didn't make the cut, but they filmed it.

It takes an extraordinary human being to let an extra lay down and take a nap in the middle of his shot and let them stay. It takes an even more awesomeness to let an extra make a suggestion and film it.

I thought I heard that this was the first day of shooting the series, but I know now that 'The Train Job' was actually the pilot, it may have been the first day of that episode. I wish I could find out if this was indeed the first day of the series, because in one of my deepest fantasies, I would love it if they saw my brown camouflage and red scarf and ran with it. I know, I know, the chances of that are so very slim, I'm sure the all costumes were already designed; but the coincidence has always been heart warming for me either way.

Thanks Joss Whedon.

Wash: This sounds like something from Science Fiction.
Zoë: Honey, we live in a space ship.
Wash: So?

Mal: Well, my days of not takin' ya seriously are certainly comin' to a middle.

Zoe: Preacher, don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killin'?
Book: Quite specific. It is, however, somewhat fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps.

Zoe: If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skin into their clothes … and if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order.

"Pity the warrior that kills all his foe." ~ Seyetik and Sisko, citing a fragment of G'Trok's Fall of Kang

2010-03-09T15:14:00.000-08:00

"Those who wish to seize Vietnam, must kill us to the last man, woman, and child."
~ Hồ Chí Minh

Vietnamese deaths during the Vietnam war were somewhere around 5,000,000 people.

For every enemy soldier killed; four civilians were killed.

Vietnam population in 1960 was ~ 35.000,000. This means that the war killed about 14 percent of the total population of Vietnam.

The population of the United States in 1960 was ~ 180,000,000.
14 percent of 180,000,000 is 25,000,000.

Proportionally, this would have been like killing every man, woman and child in:

Oklahoma,
Mississippi,
Kansas,
West Virginia,
Arkansas,
Oregon,
Colorado,
Nebraska,
Arizona,
Maine,
New Mexico,
Utah,
Rhode Island,
South Dakota,
Montana,
Idaho,
Hawaii,
North Dakota,
New Hampshire,
Delaware,
Vermont,
Wyoming,
Nevada,
Alaska,
District of Columbia,
Puerto Rico,
Northern Mariana Islands,
US Virgin Islands,
Guam,
Midway Islands,
and Wake Island.

Does not include Cambodians, Laotians and the multi-million Khmer Rouge genocide.

How'd That Vietnam Thing Work Out?trends

All men are created equal. The Creator has given us certain inviolable Rights: the right to Life, the right to be Free, and the right to achieve Happiness.
~ Hồ Chí Minh, 1945, as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was created

If there has to be a blood bath, let's get it over with.
~ Ronald Reagan, Vietnam

It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.
~ Unnamed U.S. Major about the decision to bomb Bến Tre regardless of civilian casualties

You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
~ Hồ Chí Minh

Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.
~ Dalton Trumbo

If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too.
~ Katherine Anne Porter

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
~ George Bernard Shaw

I spent thirty-three years in the marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.
~ General Smedley Butler, Marine

Those who hate and fight must stop themselves; otherwise it is not stopped.
~ Spock, Day of the Dove

I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong ... No Vietcong ever called me nigger.
~ Muhammad Ali, stripped of boxing title, convicted of a felony for refusing to serve during the Vietnam War

Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.
~ Duke of Wellington

I can envision a small cottage somewhere, with a lot of writing paper, and a dog, and a fireplace and maybe enough money to give myself some Irish coffee now and then and entertain my two friends.
~ Richard Van de Geer, last name on the Vietnam War Memorial

I did not know how to say goodbye. It was harder still, when I refused to say it.
~ Native American saying

Slow Burn -

2009-09-10T19:04:00.000-07:00

So the discussion came up about using thermite to cause the demolition of buildings. Was it really feasible?

A quick search of a combination of some of the terms and up popped a site; www.militarynewbie.com. It might be a military site, so you might not want to click it.

The following is cut and paste from United States Military Field Manual FM 5-250;

Explosives and Demolitions,

June 1992:

Page 86

3-6. Steel-Cutting Charges.
(d) Nickel-molybdenum steel. This type of steel cannot be cut easily by conventional steel-cutting charges. The jet from a shaped charge will penetrate it, but cutting requires multiple charges or linear-shaped charges. Nickel-molybdenum steel shafts can be cut with a diamond charge. However, the saddle charge will not cut nickel-molybdenum shafts. Therefore, use some method other than explosives to cut nickel-molybdenum steel, such as thermite or acetylene or electrical cutting tools.

FM 5-250 @ www.militarynewbie.com (careful)

It appears that thermite has been standard operating procedure to bring down hardened vertical structures for the military since 1992.

That pretty much ended that discussion.

Any evidence of thermite type material at the WTC?

See photos above.

The guys at Hight3ch burned through a car engine and say that thermite burns through just about anything at 2500 degrees.

How hot is that?

Everyone says that there are substances that burn much hotter than thermite, such as thermate, super-thermite or nano-thermite.

A quick google and up pops this patent:

Patent Number: 4,799,829

Filed: January 24, 1989

Method and apparatus for removing submerged platforms.

Excerpt:

“The cutting of the piling is performed by a series of tubes radially deployed in the cutter on a common plane. Each tube is filled with what is, in essence, a solid fuel similar to thermite or magnesium. Thus, the cut is performed through the use of a series of solid fuel torches. The preferred solid fuel is Pyronol.RTM. Pyronol.RTM. is manufactured by Goex, Inc. and the material itself is the subject of U.S. Pat. No. 3,695,951. Pyronol.RTM., once ignited, will attain temperatures between six and twelve thousand degrees Fahrenheit. These temperatures are sufficient to burn through steel and concrete.”

Okay thermite at 2500 degrees can burn through a car engine.

What can you do with 12,000 degrees?

United States Patent 3,695,951 - Pyronol.

Patented Oct 3, 1972

Assignors to the United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Navy.

Well, that pretty much ended that discussion.

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology. ~ Michael Parenti

The propaganda system allows the U.S. leadership to commit crimes without limit and with no suggestion of misbehavior or criminality; in fact, major war criminals like Henry Kissinger appear regularly on TV to comment on the crimes of the derivative butchers. ~ Edward Herman

Pics From Planet Earth

2009-07-06T00:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cnnKFz7VOA&feature=colike

Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. ~ Unknown

Oh For Christ’s Sake, Quit Blaming Everything on the Jews!

2008-11-19T02:32:00.000-08:00

I just heard someone go off about how it's all the Jews' fault. No, the world is not threatened by the Jews. I know a lot of Jews, they are friendly, humorous, progressive and generous. Jews aren't the problem, extreme right wing Jewish whackos are the problem.

Just like extreme right wing Christian whackos, extreme right wing Muslim whackos, extreme right wing satanists whackos, extreme right wing atheist whackos, extreme right wing Russian whackos, extreme right wing Chinese whackos, extreme right wing German whackos, extreme right wing British whackos, extreme right wing USA whackos, extreme right wing black whackos, extreme right wing white whackos, extreme right wing yellow whackos, extreme right wing green whackos and extreme right wing brown whackos are the problem. Every country, race and religion have extreme right wing whackos, they are the problem, not the group they belong to.

It is pretty easy to see the kind of people that are doing harm to planet earth and its inhabitants. Looking at the bad guys, they all do the same sort of thing. Here's a list of some of their notable qualities.

They kill a lot of people.
They restrict freedoms and disdain human rights.
They are bigoted.
They are sexist.
They are controlling.
They lust over others property.
They are extreme nationalists.
They are extreme in their religious views (atheists included).
They mix religion and government.
They support strong autocratic or dictatorial control.
They support strong military and police state supremacy.
They are obsessed with national security.
They create an enemy to use as a unifying cause.
They control the mass media.
They protect corporate power.
They suppress labor and the workforce.
They lie and use propaganda for their ends.
They suppress intellectuals and the arts.
They obsess about crime and punishment.
They manipulate elections.

All shining qualities of extreme right wing whackos.

Think back to all those famous bad guys in history that did the above. They all had different names describing them; communists, socialists, Nazis, barbarians, terrorists, religions, empires, etc.

The names don't matter, their actions describe what they are.

We know that. They all do the same thing. It doesn't matter what you call them. You can call Hitler a fascist, a socialist, a liberal or a saint. That doesn't change what he was; an extreme right wing whacko. Same with Stalin, Pol Pot or Genghis Khan. Bad things are done by some people in all religions, races, nations and people in general.

We know that. Just add up the number of dead people throughout history and who was responsible for their deaths and you can see the proof yourself.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
~ Thomas Jefferson

What do the nationalists say about killers punishing murderers and thieves sentencing looters?
~ Kahlil Gibran

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.
~ Elbert Hubbard

Knowledge, idea, belief stands in the way of wisdom.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Smiley : *)

2008-11-10T16:29:00.000-08:00

Smiley was the smartest dog I ever knew. He would look you right in your eyes and expect you to treat him like a human. And the funny thing was, you'd treat him like a human.

I moved into a new place
and before long a little girl,
maybe five or six,
made friends with him.

Smiley loved chasing playing with frisbees.
I'd have to buy a new one every month or two,
because he would destroy them
by chewing them and tugging them
in games of tug of war.

One day the little girl brought a special frisbee.
It was white, and she had painted on its back.
It was a stick figure picture of Smiley
and the little girl playing frisbee on a lawn.

It was beautiful.

She gave it a big toss and Smiley chased after it.
He picked it up, carried it to his water bowl
and dropped it nearby.

She called for Smiley to bring it
but he refused and just picked another
older beat up one and brought it over to her.

She ran to the new frisbee and threw it again. but Smiley didn't chase it. He just let it sit where it fell; then ran to get an old one.

They spent the rest of the day
playing with the old ones.

The next day I noticed the painted frisbee
sitting right next to his bowl.

And there it sat.

They didn't play catch or chase or tug of war with it.
He would poke it, push it, roll it with his paw.

Months turned to years and the painted frisbee
lived next to Smiley's water bowl undisturbed.

Then it was time to move again.
The little girl was older now,
and Smiley and her were best friends.

When it was time for us to leave,
the little girl came to visit one last time.
Smiley picked up the perfect frisbee right away
and brought it over to her.

He pushed it towards her
with his nose and paw.
But when she tried to pick it up
he would grab it and run away.

She asked me what he was doing.

I said I thought Smiley
wanted her to have it back.
It would make her so happy
and make him happy too;
he'd had it all these years.

She gave Smiley a hug
and cuddled up to him,
He laid his head on her shoulder,
and she cried for awhile.

That was the last we ever saw the girl,
as she walked away
with the painted frisbee in one hand
a wave in the other;
and a smile splashed across her face.

It wasn't too much later
I bought another white frisbee
and painted a stick picture on it,
of the little girl and smiley
playing frisbee on a lawn.

I brought it to him
and threw it as far as I could.
He ran and picked it up;
and carried it back to his bowl.

And there it sat, undisturbed,
until the day he died.

Food For Thought

2008-10-06T00:04:00.001-07:00

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
~ H. L. Mencken

Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
~ Michel de Montaigne

Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
~ Ambrose Bierce

If you can conceive of morality without god, why can you not conceive of society without government?
~ Peter Saint-André

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
~ George Bernard Shaw

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
~ Denis Diderot

Knowledge, idea, belief stands in the way of wisdom.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

All Bibles are man-made.
~ Thomas Edison

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
~ Bertrand Russell

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
~ Voltaire

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
~ Mohandas Gandhi

The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scale.
~ Aesop

The corporation is a true Frankenstein's monster, an artificial person run amok, responsible only to its own soulless self.
~ William Dugger

It is a government of the people by the people for the people no longer; it is a government of corporations by corporations for corporations.
~ Rutherford B. Hayes

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
~ Thomas Jefferson

I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
~ James Buchanan

In order to learn, one must change one's mind.
~ Orson Scott Card

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
~ Albert Einstein

It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that just isn't so.
~ Satchel Paige

All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
~ Thomas Paine

It is hard to free fools from chains they revere.
~ Voltaire

. . . the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion . . .
~ George Washington Administration, Treaty of Tripoli

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Religion, comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.
~ Sigmund Freud

I am amazed how many people on this planet are happy and free and never even saw the US constitution.
~ Reason

The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.
~ Ivan Illich

There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth.
~ Chinese proverb

Prohibition goes beyond reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite through legislation. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles this country was founded upon.
~ Abraham Lincoln

Religion is the end of love and honesty, the beginning of confusion; faith is a colorful hope or fear, the origin of folly.
~ Tao Te Ching

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.
~ Elbert Hubbard

When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist.
~ Archbishop Helder Camara

Git yer guns, the liberal folks are gonna let the coloreds vote!
~ Unknown

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
~ Carl Sagan

The greatest artists of this world are never puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
~ H. L. Mencken

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.
~ Steven Weinberg

Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
~ John Morley

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
~ Steve Allen

If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it, you are deemed fit to govern the country.
~ Jonathan Meades

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
~ Oscar Wilde

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
~ Henry David Thoreau

No one rules if no one obeys.
~ TaoDo

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
~ Galileo Galilei

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
~ Albert Einstein

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
~ Thomas Paine

The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.
~ Jean de la Bruyère

The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.
~ Whitney Young

Cast aside those who liken godliness to whimsy and who try to combine their greed for wealth with their desire for a happy afterlife.
~ Kahlil Gibran

There must be more to life than having everything.
~ Maurice Sendak

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.
~ Japanese Proverb

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

I saw a human skull the other day. There was an inscription below it: ‘Look long and hard at me, for I was once as you are and you will soon be as I am.
~ Unknown

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.
~ Scottish proverb

Life is too short to waste in critical peep or cynic bark, quarrel or reprimand: It will soon be dark.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We will be known by the tracks we leave behind.
~ Dakota proverb

Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.
~ Satchel Paige

Your every decision conspires to make this moment happen.
~ Christi Philpott

Everyone's values are defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others.
~ William Greider

The modern conservative is engaged in one man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
~ John K. Galbraith

May your fondest wish be granted.
~ Traditional Chinese curse

Just as a picture is drawn by an artist, surroundings are created by the activities of the mind.
~ Buddha

I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good and it would spread a lively terror.
~ Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after World War I

Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.
~ St. Augustine

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but can’t afford an air force.
~ William Blum

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way; stop participating in it.
~ Noam Chomsky

Once you have seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.
~ Arundhati Roy

Stopping terrorism is simple. Just quit screwing around with other people's countries and the terrorists will go home. But the government of the United States wants to go on screwing around with other people's countries, refuses to stop, indeed views it as Manifest Destiny for the United States Government to persist in screwing around with other people's countries, and views the inconvenience, increased tax burden, loss of civil liberties, and even deaths among the American people as just another cost of doing business.
~ Michael Rivero

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
~ Andre Gide

Everyone laughs and cries in the same language.
~ dreamslaughter

To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.
~ Confucius

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
~ Samuel Johnson

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
~ Thomas Huxley

When encountering a new philosophy or religion, do not convert, but rather assimilate.
~ Shawn Mikula

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.
~ Martin Luther

If the doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
~ Isaac Asimov

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
~ Abraham Lincoln

Peace is over rated. Any slave can have peace. Just pick the cotton.
~ TheSong

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
~ Frederick Douglass, escaped slave

Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
~ Anacharsis

You simply cannot hang a millionaire in America.
~ Bourke Cockran

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?
~ Mark Twain

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
~ Tao Te Ching

The first clergyman was the first rascal who met the first fool.
~ Voltaire

I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
~ Robert Frost

The state has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he may desire.
~ Pope Pius IX

I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
~ Philip K. Dick

You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do.
~ [Usenet]

If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
~ Thomas Szasz

One man's magic is another man's engineering. Supernatural is a null word.
~ Robert Heinlein

Insanity in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
~ Nietzsche

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
~ Henry David Thoreau

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.
~ Harold Pinter

The truth is more important than the facts.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.
~ Lucy Parsons

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
~ Napoleon

The Pope!?! How many divisions has he got?
~ Joseph Stalin

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
~ Jean Rostand

I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
~ Mohandas Gandhi (disputed)

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Take only memories; leave nothing but footprints.
~ Chief Seattle

The wise man will love; all others will desire.
~ Afranius

When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
~ Jack Gurney - "The Ruling Class"

Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
~ Arthur C. Clarke

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
~ Stephen Roberts

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
~ Denis Diderot

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
~ Anatole France

Civil disobedience, that’s not our problem. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.
~ Howard Zinn

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

If child molestation is actually your concern, how come we don't see Bradley tanks knocking down Catholic churches?
~ Bill Hicks, 1993, referencing the Waco siege

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith ... we need believing people.
~ Adolf Hitler

Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
~ Nietzsche

I have examined all of the known superstitions of the world and I do not find in our superstitions of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all founded on fables and mythology. Christianity has made one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.
~ Unknown (Thomas Jefferson disputed)

Do you see now that your self-righteousness was nothing more than breeding and years of privilege? You know, we are one nation under a god. Yes, you were right. An angry, crack slinging god who decorates with bullets and spent condoms, a blind god whose eyes are just like yours.
~ Solipsist by Henry Rollins

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Unless Americans come to realize that they are not stronger in the world because they have the bomb but weaker because of their vulnerability to atomic attack, they are not likely to conduct their policy, in a spirit that furthers the arrival at an understanding.
~ Albert Einstein

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
~ John Maynard Keynes

The same people that wrote the bible thought the world was flat.
~ Unknown - (disputed)

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
~ Joseph Heller

The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.
~ Prophet Muhammad

I'm ineffably tired of pro-war ideologues moaning about how the anti-war folk are just 'complaining' without 'offering solutions' to global dilemmas. Peace doesn't need a freekin moral, ethical, economical, or political qualification; war does. Peace doesn't ravage, plunder, rape, or kill; war does. Peace does not need justification, war does.
~ <|OnAir|>

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
~ Orson Scott Card

I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.
~ Harry S Truman, 1961

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
~ Aleister Crowley

Laurel and Hardy, that's John and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot.
~ John Lennon

If I could find a way to get [Saddam Hussein] out of there, even putting a contract out on him, … ahh … if the CIA still did that sort of thing, . . . ahh . . . assuming it ever did . . . . . . . I would be for it.
~ Richard Nixon

Does anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was? . . . And do you know how far away he was? . . . Two hundred and fifty feet. He was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. He got off three shots with a bolt action rifle in six seconds, and got two hits, including a head shot. Do you know where those men learned to shoot like that? . . . In the Marines! Outstanding! Those individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do! And before you ladies leave my island, you will be able to do the same thing!
~ Full Metal Jacket

I love talking about the Kennedy assassination. The reason I do is because I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated that our government could lie to us so blatantly, so obviously for so long, and we do absolutely nothing about it.
~ Bill Hicks

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
~ George Orwell

Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.
~ Voltaire

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear, kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor, with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
~ General Douglas MacArthur

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
~ Albert Einstein

If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe.
~ A church sign in Northern Ireland

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
~ Kahlil Gibran

My humble friend, we know not how to live this life which is so short yet seek one that never ends.
~ Anatole France

It makes no difference as to the name of the God, since love is the real God of all in the world.
~ Apache

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
~ John Updike

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
~ Virginia Woolf

God favors no group. Only religions do that.
~ Bumper Sticker

Guns make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
~ Nazi Hermann Göring

Everyone likes to say Hitler did this and Hitler did that. But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class asshole, but the evil actually done, from the death camps to World War Two, was all done by citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.
~ Michael Rivero

... The CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over twenty countries.
~ John Stockwell, former CIA official

Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.
~ Mark Twain

All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
~ Ho Chi Minh, 1945, as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was created

If there has to be a blood bath, let's get it over with.
~Ronald Reagan, Vietnam

You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
~ Ho Chi Minh

I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong ... No Vietcong ever called me nigger.
~ Muhammad Ali, stripped of boxing title, convicted of a felony for refusing to serve during the Vietnam War

I can envision a small cottage somewhere, with a lot of writing paper, and a dog, and a fireplace and maybe enough money to give myself some Irish coffee now and then and entertain my two friends.
~ Richard Van de Geer, letter, 1975, last American to die in Vietnam War, Time, 1985

If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too.
~ Katherine Anne Porter

Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.
~ Dalton Trumbo

Vietnamese deaths during the Vietnam war were up to 4,000,000 people. The approximate population of Vietnam was 35 million in 1960. This means that the war killed 11 percent of the total population of Vietnam. The population of the United States is 308,000,000. Proportionately, 11 percent of this is 34,000,000. That would be like killing every man, woman and child in Iowa, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming and District of Columbia.

Those who hate and fight must stop themselves; otherwise it is not stopped.
~ Spock, Day of the Dove

I spent thirty-three years in the marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.
~ General Smedley Butler, Marine

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.
~ Duke of Wellington

I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse; because that's the memory that haunts.
~ Bob Kerry told to The New York Times

I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.
~ Richard Cohen

Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or disappeared, at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame.
~ Amnesty International, in its annual report on U.S. Military aid and human rights, 1996

It is not so much the suffering as the senselessness of it that is unendurable.
~ Nietzsche

They made a wasteland and called it peace.
~ Tacitus

We, on our side, are praying to Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, too, for victory, believing they are right. What must He think of us?
~ Abraham Lincoln

Pity the warrior that kills all his foe.
~ Seyetik and Sisko, citing a fragment of G'Trok's Fall of Kang

I am tired of fighting, our chiefs are killed...it is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death...hear me, my chiefs, I am tired: my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands...I will fight no more forever...
~ Chief Joseph

I did not know how to say goodbye. It was harder still, when I refused to say it.
~ Native American saying

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
~ Malcolm X

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
~ Eugene V. Debs

The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll Quoting Ferdinand Magellan - no citation

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
~ Nietzsche

In all the disputes, which have excited Christians against each other, Rome has invariably decided in favor of that opinion which tended most towards the suppression of the human intellect and the annihilation of the reasoning powers.
~ Voltaire

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
~ Tom Robbins

Fascism is capitalism in decay.
~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
~ P. J. O'Rourke

The police are not here to create disorder. They're here to preserve disorder.
~ Ex-Chicago Mayor Daley during the 1968 riots

Pain is certain, suffering is optional.
~ Buddha

We need a common enemy to unite us.
~ Condoleezza Rice, March 2000

I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
~ President George Bush, August 27, 1988

You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
~ Malcolm X

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
~ Ron Patterson

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
~ Stanley Kubrick

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
~ Jeff Burroughs

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
~ Albert Einstein

I'm so sick of arming the world, then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms; you know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of them. We're like the bullies of the world, y'know. We're like Jack Palance in the movie Shane, throwing the pistol at the sheepherder's feet. ‘Pick it up.’ ‘I don't wanna pick it up, mister, you'll shoot me.’ ‘Pick up the gun.’ ‘Mister, I don't want no trouble, I just came downtown here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don't even know what gingham is, but she goes through about ten rolls a week of that stuff. I ain't looking for no trouble, Mister.’ ‘Pick up the gun.’ The sheepherder picks up the gun, three shots ring out. ‘You all saw him, he had a gun.’
~ Bill Hicks

I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work.
~ Adolf Hitler

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
~ General Douglas MacArthur

Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.
~ Norman Vincent Peale

The most heinous and the cruelest crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’
~ Annie Dillard

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

Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.
~ Charles Dickens

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
~ Oscar Wilde

Now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.
~ Voltaire, deathbed, when asked to renounce Satan

If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for them Mexicans.
~ Texas politician, Spanish as a second language

Probably no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and education.
~ Braham Flexner

The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
~ Woodrow Wilson

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
~ Louis Brandeis

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
~ Thomas Jefferson

In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

No Nazi woman will ever be motivated to work for money. Serving men is our only wish.
~ Gertrud Scholtz-Klink

We always obeyed the law. Isn't that what you do in America? Even if you don't agree with a law personally, you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos.
~ Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, explaining Nazi policy

I hit him to get his attention. I shot him to calm him down. I killed him to reason with him.
~ Henry Rollins

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy!
~ Nietzsche

How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.
~ Emma Goldman

My final point about alcohol, about drugs, about pornography; what business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, fuck or take into my body as long as I don't harm another human being whilst on this planet? And for those of you having a little moral dilemma on how to answer this, I'll answer for you. None of your fucking business! Take that to the bank, cash it and take it on a vacation outta my fucking life.
~ Bill Hicks

If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because, man, they're gone.
~ Jack Handey

You get what anyone gets; you get a lifetime.
~ Death, Neil Gaiman Comic Sandman

Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
~ Steve Eley

All our lauded technological progress, our very civilization, is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
~ Albert Einstein

I don’t really miss God, but I sure miss Santa Claus!
~ Courtney Love

Part Two

You Can Take Your Governments and Your Religions and - FAIL

2008-10-05T18:41:00.000-07:00

In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
~ Sophocles

Jehovah was not a moral god. He had all the vices and he lacked all the virtues. He generally carried out all his threats, but he never faithfully kept a promise.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?
~ Blaise Pascal

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
~ Leonardo da Vinci

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.
~ Albert Einstein

Form no covetous desire, so that the demon of greediness may not deceive thee, and the treasure of the world may not be tasteless to thee.
~ Zoroaster

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
~ Thomas Huxley

If fifty million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
~ Anatole France

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
~ Thomas Hardy

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
~ Arthur C. Clarke

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. For if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
~ Nietzsche

If one acknowledges a group or a nation willing to commit atrocities, then one must also acknowledges the existence of a nation willing to commit atrocities to blame on the first nation.
~ Michael Rivero

Before you speak, ask yourself is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?
~ Sai Baba of Shirdi

Humanity without religion is like a serial killer without a chainsaw.
~ Unknown

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be ... surer of the noose than a private homicide.
~ H. G. Wells

There is enough for man's need but not for man's greed.
~Mohandas Gandhi

When you philosophically oppose an entire power elite, you cannot help but sound like a conspiracy theorist. Social power is by nature a conspiracy.
~ Tom N

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
~ Nietzsche

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong you cannot be too conservative.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil. Suddenly the light broke through to me and I saw a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty. Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?
~ H. G. Wells

Faith is belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
~ Ambrose Bierce

if you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten.
~ Jim Rohn

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
~ Albert Einstein

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
~ George Orwell

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.
~ Elbert Hubbard

Statistically one hundred percent of the shots you don't take don't go in.
~ Wayne Gretsky

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
~ Pablo Picasso

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Beware the man of one book.
~ Saint Thomas Aquinas

It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.
~ Mother Teresa

History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
~ Ambrose Bierce

Christianity exceeds all other faiths in its power to deform and finally invert the mental process.
~ Ida White

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst stage, an intolerable one.
~ Thomas Paine

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
~ Sun tzu

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.
~ Lao tzu

The fascist state is the corporate state.
~ Benito Mussolini

If god created us in his image we have certainly returned the compliment.
~ Voltaire

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
~ Aesop

In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy.
~ David Korten

Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?
~ Thomas Carlyle

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own; a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms…
~ Albert Einstein, obituary

Authoritarian government required to speak, is silent. Representative government required to speak, lies with impunity.
~ Napoleon

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world, in the field of advertising, and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency. Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious. I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours and we tend to disbelieve ours.
~ A U.S. based Soviet correspondent

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
~ Jean Paul Sartre

If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If you speak the truth, have one foot in the stirrup.
~ Turkish proverb

... Somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor.
~ John Foster Dulles

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
~ Abraham Lincoln

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
~ Vladimir Nabokov

As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I became civilized.
~ Ohiyesa, Sioux

The target suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad.
~ CIA officer at US Senate hearing on 1963 overthrow of Iraqi Prime Minister Kassem

I was asked to memorize what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.
~ Aleister Crowley

There is no real wealth but the labor of man. Where the mountains are of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; not one comfort would be added to the human race.
~ Percy B. Shelley

You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
~ Native Proverb

Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country.
~ Johnny Hart, BC Comic Strip

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
~ Nietzsche

Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion, several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.
~ Mark Twain

The world is divided into people who think they are right.
~ Unknown

My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
~ Ashleigh Brilliant

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
~ Samuel Johnson, English lexicographer, to which Ambrose Bierce replied: ‘I beg to submit that it is the first.

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
~ Lenny Bruce

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.
~ David Hume

A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
~ Plato

Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires.
~ Lao tzu

War is an instrument entirely insufficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
~ Thomas Jefferson

Christianity makes suffering contagious.
~ Nietzsche

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.
~ Mark Twain

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.
~ Lao Tzu

The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
~ Hungarian Proverb

I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.
~ Persian proverb

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
~ George Orwell

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
~ Nazi Hermann Göring

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
~ Niccolo Machiavelli

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
~ Bertrand Russell

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.
~ Attributed to Charles Austin Beard

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.
~ Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
~ Andre Gide

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
~ Allen Ginsberg

We have a political system that awards office to the most ruthless, cunning, and selfish of mortals, then act surprised when those willing to do anything to win power are equally willing to do anything with it.
~ Michael Rivero

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
~ Edmund Burke

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
~ Elwyn B. White

The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.
~ Mark Twain

Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.
~ Juvenal

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
~ Nietzsche

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
~ John Stuart Mill

Every anarchist is a baffled dictator.
~ Benito Mussolini

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
~ Oscar Wilde

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
~ Thomas Jefferson

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
~ General Omar N. Bradley

The rights of women are sacred. See that women are maintained in the rights attributed to them.
~ Muhammed

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.
~ Lao tzu

The world is too dangerous to live in, not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen.
~ Albert Einstein

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.
~ Peter Ustinov

The way to find what the mainstream will do tomorrow is to associate with the lunatic fringe today.
~ Jean-Louis Gassee

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
~ Joseph Campbell

Oh, how bitter a thing is to look through another man's eye.
~ William Shakespeare

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
~ Sir Richard Francis Burton

We are ensnared by the wisdom of the serpent; we are set free by the foolishness of God.
~ Saint Augustine

We live in our desires rather than in our achievements.
~ George Moore

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality, for one very rich man; there must be at least five hundred poor.
~ Adam Smith

When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.
~ Montesquieu

The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.
~ Andrew Dickson White

Know all and you will pardon all.
~ Thomas à Kempis

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing everything.
~ Vladimir Nabokov

They that die by famine die by inches.
~ Matthew Henry

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.
~ John Lennon

The biggest conspiracy of all is the claim that there are no conspiracies!
~ Michael Rivero

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
~ Immanuel Kant

When the president does it that means it is not illegal.
~ Richard Nixon

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.
~ Albert Einstein

Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
~ Rene Descartes

War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peacetime.
~ Ian Hay

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
~ Bertrand Russell

The priests of the different religious sects…dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.
~ Thomas Jefferson

All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it ... Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
~ Adolf Hitler

If there was a god, he wouldn't let a guy walk right up and shoot you in the face now would he? That's right, now you get the picture. Truth burns doesn't it?
~ Henry Rollins

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
~ John A. Locke

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.
~ Abraham Lincoln

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
~ Dr. Strangelove

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
~ Henry David Thoreau

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.
~ Aleister Crowley

...as hollow as the o in god...
~ Marilyn Manson

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
~ Karl Kraus

The right things to do are those that keep our violence in abeyance; the wrong things are those that bring it to the fore.
~ Robert J. Sawyer

I consider Christian theology to be one of the greatest disasters of the human race.
~ Alfred North Whitehead

Truth is living, it is not static, and the mind that would discover truth must also be living, not burdened with knowledge or experience.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.
~ Voltaire

Before we blame, we should first see if we can excuse.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg

It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.
~ Bertrand Russell

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
~ Henry David Thoreau

I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless.
~ Peter Walker

Ignorance is always afraid of change.
~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence.
~ Spanish proverb

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.
~ William R. Inge

You must ask your neighbor if you shall live in peace.
~ John Clark

It is true that liberty, so precious, must be rationed.
~ Nikolai Lenin

If we do not like the world the way it is, then it is because we are not okay the way we are.
~ deeshan

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
~ James Branch Cabell

Peace is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things which cannot be shared.
~ Julien Benda

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
~ Margaret Mead

Yes, my friends, I too am prepared to die for a cause, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.
~Mohandas Gandhi

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.
~Vernon Saunders Law

It is your business, when the wall next door catches fire.
~ Horace

Everybody sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Translate ‘Allah’.
~ Bumper Sticker

When you meet a worthy person, focus on reaching his level. When you meet an unworthy person, take a good look inside yourself.
~ Confucius

Would you like to liberate yourself from the lower realms of life? Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness.
~ Lao tzu

Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
~ Mark Twain

If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.
~ Aleister Crowley

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.
~ Lenny Bruce

The United States is not nearly so concerned that its acts be kept secret from its intended victims as it is that the American people not know of them.
~ Ramsey Clark

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.
~ Aleister Crowley

They said I was the greatest pitcher they ever saw; I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t give me no justice.
~ Satchel Paige

A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.
~ Benjamin Disraeli

Philosophers have merely interpreted the world. The point is to change it.
~ Karl Marx

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

Think my friends! You adulate a stone as Vishnu but you cannot see God in a fellow man.
~ Sankaracharya

The total absence of humor in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
~ Alfred North Whitehead

All I know is that I am not a Marxist.
~ Karl Marx

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
~ Napoleon

Living is change; Growth is optional.
~ Juan Wa Chang

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
~ Alfred North Whitehead

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
~Saint Augustine

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

Truth is for the minority.
~ Baltasar Gracián

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
~ F. H. Bradley

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
~ Aldous Huxley

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
~ Ambrose Bierce

The color of the skin makes no difference. What is good and just for one is good and just for the other. And the Great Spirit made all men brothers.
~ White Shield, Arikara

The reasonable man adjusts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Never was anything great achieved without danger.
~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Those who see and feel beyond illusion have acquired a far greater gift than could ever be derived from studying scripture and philosophy books, for these were meant only to guide the blind.
~ Shawn Mikula

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.
~ Robert Heinlein

While the word is yet unspoken, you are master of it; when once it is spoken, it is master of you.
~ Arab proverb

This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, porno-therapy, pollution, poisoning and proliferation of crimes of all types.
~ Judge Braswell Dean

We've got to pause and ask ourselves, how much clean air do we need?
~ Lee Iacocca

I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.
~ Thomas Edison

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
~ Mark Twain

Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.
~ Polybius

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
~ Albert Einstein

The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
~ James Thurber

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
~ Franz Kafka

Don't join the book burners.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

To date, despite the efforts of millions of true believers to support this myth, there is no more evidence for the Judeo-Christian god than any of the gods on Mount Olympus.
~ Joseph Daleiden

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
~ Bertrand Russell

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
~ Kurt Vonnegut

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?
~ Epicurus

In all affairs, it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
~ Bertrand Russell

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses; it's the cyanide.
~ Tom Robbins

Nothing overshadows truth so much as authority.
~ Leon Battista Alberti

In Christianity, neither morality nor religion comes into contact with reality at any point.
~ Nietzsche

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
~ Max Weinreich

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
~ Voltaire

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
~ George Bernard Shaw

The biggest detractors of communism and socialism always seem to want to embrace the worst excesses of both.
~ Skullhunter

Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church's opposition to every advance in every field of science.
~ Upton Sinclair

Don't try to teach a pig to sing, it can't be done and it only ticks off the pig.
~ Robert Heinlein

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.
~ Lao Tsu

People with virtue must speak out; People who speak are not all virtuous.
~ Confucius

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
~ Josef Stalin

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default, it can never be recovered.
~ Dorothy Thompson

We can often do more for other men by trying to correct our own faults than by trying to correct theirs.
~ François Fénelon

News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.
~ Ex-NBC news president Rubin Frank

When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country.
~ Elayne Boosler

The establishment of Christianity arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years.
~ Andrew Dickson White

It is right noble to fight with wickedness and wrong; the mistake is in supposing that spiritual evil can be overcome by physical means.
~ Lydia Maria Child

All warfare is based on deception.
~ Sun tzu

Nothing brings people together more, than mutual hatred.
~ Henry Rollins

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
~ Oscar Wilde

The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.
~ Albert Einstein

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
~ Havelock Ellis

Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.
~ Marion Barry, former mayor Washington D.C.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?’
~ Quentin Crisp

Whatever the natural cause, sin is the true cause of all earthquakes.
~ John Wesley

Anyone who has two shirts when someone has none is not a Christian.
~ Lenny Bruce

Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you need more than I do.
~ Kahlil Gibran

You exist only in what you do.
~ Federico Fellini

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

Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.
~ Theodore Isaac Rubin

You can't say civilizations don't advance, because they kill you in a new way in each war.
~ Will Rogers

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.
~ Albert Einstein

The church tries to save sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.
~ Elbert Hubbard

I can't embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages; and that persecution still goes on today, all over the world.
~ Amanda Donohoe

Pontius Pilate was the first great censor, and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship.
~ Ben Lindsay

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
~ Buddha

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
~ Voltaire

Contraction of theological influence has at once been the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual advance.
~ William H. Lecky

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Oh Mortal Man, is there nothing you cannot be made to believe?
~ Adam Weishaupt, Co-founder New World Order

People only see what they are prepared to see.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lying is done with words and also with silence.
~ Adrienne Rich

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

The man who accumulates, whether money or knowledge, can never be free.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

There is a tragic clash between truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.
~ Nikolay Berdyayev

Just drive down that road, until you get blown up.
~ General George Patton, reconnaissance troops

I never advocated war except as a means of peace.
~ Ulysses S. Grant

Spiritual maturity is a lifelong process of replacing lies with truth.
~ Kurt D. Bruner

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
~ Albert Einstein

I was under medication when I made the decision to burn the tapes.
~ Richard Nixon

That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude.
~ Alexander Haig

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given, freedom is something people take.
~ James Baldwin

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
~ Oscar Wilde

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
~ Albert Einstein

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.
~ Gary Zukav

How can you make a revolution without executions?
~ Lenin on hearing that the death penalty had been abolished by the Soviet

True and false are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood.
~ Thomas Hobbes

Do you love your Creator? Love your fellow beings first.
~ Muhammed

Laws are silent in time of war.
~ Cicero

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Never go to sleep when your meat is on the fire.
~ Pueblo

A treatise upon human nature: It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
~ David Hume

You can't step twice into the same river.
~ Heraclitus

You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
~ Henrik Ibsen

Necessity never made a good bargain.
~ Ben Franklin

You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man's bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs.
~ Dante Alighieri

This is very true; for my words are my own, and my actions are my ministers.
~ Charles II of England

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
~ Mao Zedong

Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.
~ Native American saying

One-tenth of the folks run the world. One-tenth watch them run it, and the other eighty percent don't know what the hell's going on.
~ Jake Simmons

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.
~ Albert Einstein

Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?
~ Holly Near

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
~ Cardinal Richelieu

Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.
~ African proverb

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of another. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.
~ Immanuel Kant

There is no sport in hate when all the rage is on one side.
~ Percy B. Shelley

Except as its clown and jester, society does not encourage individuality, and the State abhors it.
~ Bernard Berenson

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
~ Susan B. Anthony

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it.
~ Duke Ellington

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself.
~ Mark Twain

Know thy enemy and know thy self and you will win a hundred battles.
~ Sun tzu

Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.
~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
~ Josh Billings

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
~ Xenocrates

He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
~ William Drummond

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
~ George Orwell

Truth always lags behind, limping along on the arm of Time.
~ Baltasar Gracián

Nothing unites the English like war. Nothing divides them like Picasso.
~ Hugh Mills

It is better to be generous than just. It is sometimes better to sympathize instead of trying to understand.
~ Pierre Lecomte du Noüy

The more you own, the more it owns you.
~ Henry Rollins

Money often costs too much.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
~ John Steinbeck

We are condemned to kill time: thus we die bit by bit.
~ Octavio Paz

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.
~ Basho

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity; another man's, I mean.
~ Mark Twain

Give to every other human being every right you claim for yourself.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
~ H. Jackson Brown

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
~ Samuel Clemens

I would have made a good pope.
~ Richard Nixon

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.
~ Napoleon

The purpose of law is to prevent the strong from always having their way.
~ Ovid

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
~ Hector Berlioz

A man who is afraid will do anything.
~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Each of us is confined to a world of our own making.
~ Shawn Mikula

Democracy used to be a good thing, but now it has gotten into the wrong hands.
~ Jesse Helms

If a person is to get to the meaning of life, he must learn to like the facts about himself, ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity, before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.
~ Eugene O'Neill

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
~ Sir Frederick G. Banting

Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
~ General William Westmoreland

Strange is our situation here upon Earth.
~ Albert Einstein

Until the infallibility of human judgment shall have been proved to me, I shall persist in demanding the abolition of the death penalty.
~ Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.
~ Ancient Chinese Proverb

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
~ Sun tzu

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
~ Confucius

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
~ Albert Einstein

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves; it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
~ Agnes Repplier

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
~ George Bernard Shaw

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
~ Steven Wright

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
~ Robert Frost

Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.
~ Richard Salent, Former President CBS News

You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.
~ Sacha Guitry

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
~ Anne Frank, holocaust victim

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
~ Bertrand Russell

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
~ Lao tzu

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.
~ Henry Kissinger

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
~ Adolf Hitler

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
~ Ursula K. LeGuin

Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
~ Niels Bohr

When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.
~ Lao tzu

Most people drive thru life with the parking brake on.
~ Lance Bradley

Can you sympathize with an exploding star?
~ Shawn Mikula

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.
~ Fidel Castro

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
~ Leonardo da Vinci

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
~ Stendhal

To use the term blind faith, is to use an adjective needlessly.
~ Julian Ruck

Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.
~ Mother Teresa

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.
~ Margaret Mitchell

The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people's lives for personal gains.
~ Michael Rivero

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion, the religion which based on experience, which refuses dogma.
~ Albert Einstein

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
~ Henry James

When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
~ Anatole France

Even if truth destroys the whole universe, still it is truth; stand by it.
~ Swami Vivekananda

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
~ John Locke

Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.
~ Voltaire

Time wounds all heels.
~ Jane Ace

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
~ Henry David Thoreau

When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
~ Otto von Bismarck

A man's character is his fate.
~ Heraclitus

Quarrels would not last long if only one side was wrong.
~ Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.
~ Fidel Castro

When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.
~ Henry Ward Beecher

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
~ Adam Smith

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
~ Thomas Szasz

Never explain, your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
~ Elbert Hubbard

The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
~ Aleister Crowley

Once all struggle is grasped, miracles are possible.
~ Mao Zedong

If a scholar aspires to the Way but is ashamed of bad clothes and bad food, he isn't ready to join the discussion yet.
~ Confucius

...so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible, across the board.
~ Robert W. McChesney

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
~ William Kingdon Clifford

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
~ Napoleon

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.
~ Nelson Mandela

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.
~ Albert Einstein

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
~ Emma Goldman

It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
~ Molière

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
~ Rod Serling

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
~ John Morley

Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
~ Henry van Dyke

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
~ Helen Hayes, age 83

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
~ Jean Paul Sartre

The vast majority of mankind is trapped within perceptual prisons.
~ Shawn Mikula

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.
~ Seneca the Elder

America ... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
~ Hunter S. Thompson

The government of the United States does not, in its policies, express the decency of its people.
~ Jerry Fresia

Grasshopper, look beyond the game, as you look beneath the surface of the pool to see its depths.
~ Master Po

Write injuries in sand, kindnesses in marble.
~ French proverb

Kindness is a mark of faith, and whoever has not kindness has not faith.
~ Muhammed

It is not impossible to govern Italians. It is merely useless.
~ Benito Mussolini

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
~ Albert Einstein

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind it only the slime of bureaucracy.
~ Franz Kafka

Always remember you are a totally unique individual; just like everyone else.
~ Unknown

Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.
~ Joseph Campbell

Christian is a VERB not a noun.
~ Meria Heller

Someday man will imprison the power of the sun, release atomic power, and harness the rise and fall of the tides. I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
~ Thomas Edison

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
~ Noam Chomsky

The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.
~ Henry Miller

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
~ Democritus

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders, a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts. The less you know, the hotter you get.
~ Bertrand Russell

Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans! No more merciful beheadings! And call off Christmas!
~ The Sheriff of Nottingham

Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
~ Plato

Part One

Drugs

2008-10-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

Prisons have a problem with drugs in their populations. They can't stop drugs in a place where prisoners are locked in a room, can be searched at any time and contact with the outside is monitored.

If they can't stop it in prisons, how are they going to stop it across the country? Even if they put everyone in prison, it won't work, please see first sentence.

My final point about alcohol, about drugs, about pornography; what business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, fuck or take into my body as long as I don't harm another human being whilst on this planet? And for those of you having a little moral dilemma on how to answer this, I'll answer for you. None of your fucking business! Take that to the bank, cash it and take it on a vacation outta my fucking life. ~ Bill Hicks

Is it Possible That 4chan as a Group has the Best Grasp of Objective Reality than any Other Group on Earth?

2008-09-30T19:02:00.000-07:00

Anyone that has spent some time with the information based web sites understands how this technology is the process for change. The ability to bring stories of interest so quickly to a page makes things easy. The fact checking is superb. The sarcasm is funny, relevant and usually dead on the issue. The cynicism is skeptical but knows that the biggest conspiracy of all is that there are no conspiracies, and all the while it is a laugh riot.

With so many people analyzing worldwide culture and events, it may be that a few of these groups have a better insight into what objective reality really is. These groups have access to more untainted and scrutinized information than any other comparable groups on Earth.

The case was made that this group would be 4chan, but I instinctively feel that there is something missing in 4chan, I think it has to do with intuition and emotion. I would like to think that Reddit is that group, since I am such a fan, but this reality eludes me. I would like to think this is true, but it is also possible that we are completely misinformed and have been manipulated by our own desires.

“Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.” ~ Jean Paul Sartre

So the question is, who has the clearest grasp of reality?

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. ~ Philip K. Dick

Top Fifteen Things That - WTF - OMFG - Run for Your Lives!!!

2008-08-24T18:39:00.000-07:00

How bad do things have to get before it is time to head for the hills, move to another country or build a bomb shelter? I doubt that any one thing in the list should make someone change there life.

But there is a point where if enough of these things started happening, it would be time to head for the hills. Time to go into full survival mode. I'm sure most people would consider changing if all the things on the list started happening.

So the question is how many of these things would have to happen in a month for you head for the hills.

1 ~ Your Papers Please! Random and Frequent.

2 ~ Interruptions in Public Utilities.

3 ~ Your Govt Invades Another Country or Another Invades Yours.

4 ~ Looting, Rioting.

5 ~ You See Trucks Full of Civilians Going Places.

6 ~ Stock Market Falls More Than Fifteen Percent in a Month.

7 ~ Govt Requires Everyone to Turn in Their Guns.

8 ~ Public Announcements for Everyone to Stay Indoors.

9 ~ Food Rationing.

10 ~ RFID and DNA Samples for Everybody.

11 ~ They Start Telling you How to Survive Atomic Explosions in Public Service Announcements again.

12 ~ Religious Figures Start Committing Suicide in Public.

13 ~ Your Bank Closes.

14 ~ The Internet Stops Working.

15 ~ Everyone Starts Feeling Like They are Being Followed, and They Are.

How Many Things in a Month Would it Take for You to Head for the Hills ( polls)

Civil disobedience, that’s not our problem. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem. ~ Howard Zinn

Did Jesus Christ Commit Suicide?

2008-08-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

Looking at what different religions say about suicide, the gamut runs from eternal damnation to accepted as the ultimate act of faith. This deals with the Jesus story and his death.

Merriam-Webster
Main Entry: sui·cide
Pronunciation: \ˈsü-ə-ˌsīd\
Date: 1643
1 a: the act or an instance of taking one's own life voluntarily and intentionally especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind.

On the face of it, it would seem that Jesus did not commit suicide. He did not take his own life.

One can argue that if you can prevent your death and you do not make an effort to live, that would also be suicide. If you are standing on railroad tracks and a train comes along, and you do not get off the tracks on purpose, that would be suicide.

Now if Jesus knew he was going to be killed and he was god, he could easily have gotten off the cross and stopped his murder, he could have escaped; is that suicide?

Of course, the story says he died for our sins, but that just means he had a good enough reason to commit suicide. Everyone that commits suicide thinks they have a good reason to commit suicide, but that doesn’t get you off the hook about it being suicide.

I suppose that god the father could have temporarily taken away Jesus’ super powers, but I know of no reference to this. And of course it is not up to humans to decide what happens, it’s up to God.

No self-respecting god would send a soldier to hell for throwing himself on a hand grenade to save his buddies. Therefore, suicide is wrong unless you have a good enough reason.

In a case where you have been accused of a capital punishment crime that you know you are innocent, is it your responsibility to try to escape? And if you don’t try, is that suicide?

So it would appear that Jesus did commit suicide, but was allowed to.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind. ~ J. Krishnamurthi

Do Photons Go Faster Than the Speed of Light When Pulled by a Strong Gravitational Field?

2008-08-12T17:01:00.000-07:00

I don’t know. Is there any physical reason that would resist a photon from speeding up. It has been demonstrated that photons can travel slower than the speed of light, doesn’t this possibly indicate that light can also speed up.

The results of Arthur Stanley Eddington's 1919 solar eclipse experiment showed that massive gravity changes the direction of photons. Doesn’t this mean that as a photon approaches a mass, it is pulled faster by the warped timespace?

Are the only things that restrain a photon from traveling faster than the speed of light some hundred year old flawed theories?

Remember, those theories were made my scientists that thought the galaxy was the Universe.

I hope someone who knows more about this than me can answer this question, without relying solely on theory. I'm sure someone has looked into this, but I sure can't find it.

Do Photons Go Faster Than the Speed of Light When Approaching a Mass? ( polls)

An upstart astrologer ... This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth. ~ Martin Luther on Copernicus

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. ~ Galileo Galilei

All great truths begin as blasphemies. ~ George Bernard Shaw

If Photons Have No Mass, Why Does Gravity Change Their Direction?

2008-08-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

It appears that the accepted answer is that photons do not have mass and gravity does not affect photons; instead, gravity warps space-time causing a change in what the straight line is, the path of least resistance, which causes the change in direction.

If this is true, then everything works out as long as you accept this distortion was not proved or accepted at the time.

If this was an unknown phenomenon, discovered when starlight was observed passing an eclipsed sun to show light changes direction due to the sun’s gravity warping time and space. there would have had forces that were not accounted for in classical Newtonian physics. Instead they used this new phenomenon to account for the change in direction of the massless photon.

This seems a bit disingenuous, where is the missing affect that this warped time space would have had on objects that have mass. If they had the instruments good enough to measure the change of the starlight around the sun, their measurements would have showed that there was missing force on objects with mass before the discovery?

To think that science has answered all the questions correctly at this point in history is unrealistic. For example science has no clue about how gravity works. It has no idea about what the size of the Universe is. The Big Bang has so many holes in it you could shove galaxies through them. It also seems that current scientists have misinterpreted what Einstein said about certain parts of his theory of relativity.

If you have the chance, I encourage you to read what Einstein said about relativity in layman terms. ‘Evolution of Physics’ by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, it is very educational.

http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Physics-Albert-Einstein/dp/0671201565

Here are some links to the current theory of mass changing space time to produce a change in direction of the massless photon:

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/961102.html
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=2898
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/2542

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness. ~ Aleister Crowley

We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance. ~ Warren Weaver

Wait a Minute, We’re Kicking Who Out of the Country?

2008-08-02T23:35:00.000-07:00

What are we thinking. Don’t kick the illegal immigrants out of the country, kick the un-American wingnut warmongers out of the country!

I just heard someone ranting about how they should track down and kick all the illegal immigrants out of the country. Something bothered me about their tone. Illegal immigrants don’t destroy the constitution, start illegal immoral unjust wars. They don't warmonger. They don't restrict freedoms. They don’t censor, fight scientific advancement, encourage the destruction of the environment.

When I deal with Spanish speaking people, they don’t piss me off. They work hard. They are generous, funny, gracious, honest and polite. Illegal immigrants haven’t exceeded the level of moral responsibility to take action against them.

But there is a group of un-American warmongers that have exceeded the level of moral responsibility that could be kicked out. How about we kick out those that embrace the attitudes America used to deplore about Russia, China and Genghis Khan.

Next time someone starts mouthing off about 'kicking them out of the country', agree that there may be some that deserve being kicked out of the USA.

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them. ~ Elbert G Hubbard

They Hate Us For Our Freedom . . . To Kill and Steal

2008-07-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

Recently had a discussion about Iraq rising to the level of a holocaust.

hol·o·caust /ˈhɒləˌkɔst –noun

4. any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/holocaust

Watch for the little children running around the people front and right of crowd. (Oldie)

Encarta
1. - destruction of human life: wholesale or mass destruction, especially of human life: a nuclear holocaust

Cambridge
1. - a very large amount of destruction, especially by fire or heat, or the killing of very large numbers of people.

Bartleby
1. - b. A massive slaughter: “an important document in the so-far sketchy annals of the Cambodian holocaust”

Infoplease
hol·o·caust -
4. any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.

Holocaust?

News Report about This Incident, Better Quality
YouTube Source I
YouTube Source II

Do the events in Iraq fit the definition of holocaust? ( surveys)

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but can’t afford an air force. ~ William Blum

Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor. ~ St. Augustine

Watch Who Lands on Your Webpages in Real Time

2008-07-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

I was looking for some tracking software to see what was up with my websites. I came across some programs that let you watch who lands on your web pages in real time and instantly chat with them.

Chat4Support is a software that tracks who lands on your website in real time plus it lets you open a chat box with whoever that is. How cool is that? There is an invisible setting that removes the chat invite box. I randomly tried to connect and chat with a few people that came here, but it was pretty obvious that it was too unusual. I think most people freak out when their space is invaded so blatantly. I want to sent the simple message "This is the dreamslaughter artificial intelligence bot, ready to answer all your questions." and hope somebody bites.

Do not be afraid. The ability to chat with people around the world that end up on your website is fraught with possibilities and if the online community ever get used to this, it opens up a whole new can of worms or box of candy, depending on your point of view.

Don’t use the chat aspect and you have a really fun, real time tracking tool. It generates js that you put on your webpages. You can use the standard version free for six months and then they say you can use the free edition. Chat4Support is much more business support orientated and has a much more complex system than it's little sister U5Me.

Woopra does the same and it is totally free. It's a bit more gaudy and webish while Chat4Support is more business orientated. It will be tough for Chat4Support's free version to keep up with Woopra.

There are a lot of tracking and support chat going on in business, but these make it pretty easy for the little guy to have some fun.

Totally worth a look.

http://www.chat4support.com/

http://u5me.com/download.asp/

http://www.woopra.com/

If a Website owner asked to chat with you would you freak out or answer the request? ( polls)

Should Americans that Vote Republican in 2008 be Prosecuted for War Crimes?

2008-07-23T15:53:00.000-07:00

I wonder if there is some law somewhere that would allow the prosecution of people that vote republican in 2008. If the republicans engage in a policy that includes war crimes, why shouldn’t the people that vote for that policy be held morally, civilly and criminally responsible for those crimes?

I can’t see that people who vote democratic in 2008 should be held responsible for the war crimes. However, they can be held responsible for being deceived into thinking voting can actually affect change. Ignorance of the charade does not rise to moral depravity, if you make the correct although ineffective moral choice.

I suppose that there are those that have been programmed so well that they are technically incompetent, but once they realize that they are supporting war crimes, they deserve the civil, moral and criminal consequences.

The war crimes debate is over, at least in the world, enough investigators have shown torture and war crimes happened. No one is denying this except the guilty. Believe what they say, not your lying eyes.

The Iraq holocaust is a war crime in itself.

Should Americans that Vote Republican in 2008 be Prosecuted for War Crimes? ( polls)

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis. ~ Dante

Why Angels, Aliens and Gods Do Not Exist

2008-07-22T18:35:00.000-07:00

I feel the same way about extraterrestrial aliens visiting Earth as I do about angels and gods. If they exist and are good guys, they would be helping us. If they exist and are bad guys they would be screwing with us.

It could be that they are just observing us, in which case, screw them, they are bad guys. If they are paying attention to what’s going on on planet earth, they are a sorry race for not helping. Come on, give us a bone here.

It could be that they are screwing with us on a monstrous scale and we are not aware of it. If this were true, there would not be such an anarchistic society and Earth would be living by the alien plan. If they could control the planet, they would control the planet. Maximum production would depend on a stable united society.

It could be that we are some sort of grand planetary societal experiment, in which case, screw them, they are bad guys. Their experiment sucks and is putting unnecessary and cruel hardship on sapient creatures. It is not possible for an advanced society to let a planet exist in such misery, sheesh, even some lowly humans have recognized the ethical treatment of creatures of lesser intelligence.

Of course it could be that there are no angels, aliens or gods. This would go a long way explaining the situation we find ourselves in, here on planet Earth.

As you can see, the inaction in every scenario significantly indicates that angels, aliens and gods do not exist.

Unfortunately, this also means that if there are angels, aliens and gods, they are the bad guys.

When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself. ~ Peter O'Toole, 'The Ruling Class'

Asshole Anyone?

2008-07-12T14:51:00.000-07:00

There comes a time in history where a choice is very clear. This time around there will be a vote that supports torture, restriction of freedom, failed economic planning and a hundred year government sanctioned holocaust in living color.

Whoever votes for this is a contemptible asshole, no matter how they act at work, the bar or church bake sale.

One is an asshole. Ten is a maximum asshole.

How Much of an A$$hole do you have to be to Vote Republican in 2008? ( polls)

Without wisdom, knowledge is more stupid than ignorance. ~ Unknown