'Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing.

It was here first.' - Mark Twain

"Just consider for a moment what their [the devout's] heaven looks like. Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea." - Christopher Hitchens

"The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite." Richard Dawkins

"Who are we? We find that we inhabit an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." - Carl Sagan

"I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." - Mark Twain

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

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara." - Richard Dawkins

"You're only educated when you realize how ignorant you are" - Christopher Hitchens quoting Socrates

'If when griefs are accumulating, one manages to cling to the belief that the best things in human life are still deeply valuable and worth pursuing, that is what it is to be morally courageous' - AC Grayling

'The meditation of the wise man is a meditation not on death, but on life' Spinoza

'Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance' - AC Grayling

'To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy' - David Brooks

'I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it' - Edith Sitwell

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

'History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again' - Carl Sagan

'Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?' - Carl Sagan

'Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home' - Carl Sagan

'For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring' - Carl Sagan

'I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.' - Stephen Fry

'I would wish people to live without superstition, to govern their lives with reason, and to conduct their relationships on reflective principles about what we owe one another as fellow voyagers through the human predicament with kindness and generosity wherever possible, and justice always' - AC Grayling

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

'To remain ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain always a child.' - Cicero

'I'm a vegetarian, but I wear leather shoes. Some people say that's a contradiction; I say I'm doing my best.' - AC Grayling

'Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends' - AC Grayling

'Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.' - Oscar Wilde

'A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. ' - Oscar Wilde

'A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.' - Oscar Wilde

'By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.' - Confucius

"There is only one you for all time. Fearlessly be yourself" - Anthony Rapp

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. - Albert Einstein

"Live well, learn plenty, laugh often, love much." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Love well, seek the good in all things, harm no others, think for yourself, take responsibility, respect nature, do your utmost, be informed, be kind, be courageous." - AC Grayling

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." - Isaac Asimov

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be". Isaac Asimov

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." - Isaac Asimov

'If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you're just a Catholic' - Sam Harris

'Knowledge is freedom, freedom from ignorance and its offspring fear; knowledge is light and liberation, Knowledge that the world contains itself, and its origins, and the mind of man,From which comes more knowledge again. Dare to know: that is the motto of the enlightenment.' - AC Grayling

"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead." - Thomas Paine

'For to love and to strive, to seek to know, to attend to the best that has been thought, said and done in the world, and to learn from it, is wisdom' AC Grayling

The probability that God inspired the Bible is inversely proportional to the probability that it developed in ways indistinguishable from a purely human process (i.e., the more probable it looks like a purely human process then the less probable it has God as an author), and there is overwhelming evidence that it looks indistinguishable from a purely human process. -- John W. Loftus

"I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator." -- David Attenborough

"You won't question your beliefs. You cannot. I must." - Hypatia from 'Agora'

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Bertrand Russell

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

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. Bertrand Russell

'All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.' - Hypatia

'Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.' - Hypatia

'Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.' - Hypatia

"Be as you wish to seem." - Socrates

"We should toss Christianityand hellinto historys landfill. - Keith Parsons