Quotes on religion
An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
- Madalyn Murray O'Hair, from the famous “School prayer” court case in 1963: Murray v. Curlett, 374 U.S. 203, 83 S. Ct. 1560, 10 L.Ed.2d (MD, 1963)
Never trust anybody with only one book.
- Billy Connelly
Toleration ought in reality to be merely a transitory mood. It must lead to recognition. To tolerate is to affront.
- Goethe
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?
- Mahatma Gandhi
The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.
- The Treaty of Tripoli
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
- Voltaire
Believe nothing,
No matter where you read it,
Or who has said it,
Not even if I have said it,
Unless it agrees with your own reason
And your own common sense.
- Buddha
Religion is for people who have never matured in their understanding of ethics. Religion teaches a child's view of ethics, that "being good" means "obeying your parent." It gives a moral blank check to those bold enough, dishonest enough, to claim to speak for God. Atheism means looking at ethical questions as an adult among other adults, considering ethics as a means of maintaining peace and cooperation among equals, so that all may pursue happiness within the limits that ethics defines."
- John B. Hodges
Quotes about travel
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
- Mark Twain
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
- Maya Angelou
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.
- St. Augustine
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
- Mark Twain
To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.
- Bill Bryson
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
- Paul Theroux
Travelling makes a man wiser, but less happy.
- Thomas Jefferson.
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
- Scott Cameron
Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you travelled.
- Mohammed
The wise man's home is the universe.
- Democrites
They say that travelling broadens your mind, but first you must have a mind.
A ship in a harbour is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.
- William Shedd
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.
- Cesare Pavese
Quotes on politics
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy
- President James Madison
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
- Theodore Roosevelt