Rene > Rene's Quotes

“Time is what we want most,but what we use worst.”
― William Penn

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.”
― Walt Whitman

“No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare”
― Kingsley Amis

“The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.”
― John Burroughs

“This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child

“The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

“And why does this same God tell me how to raise my children when he had to drown his?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“Deny people something they want, over a longish period, and they naturally start disagreeing about precisely what it is they do want.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Some Christian lawyers—some eminent and stupid judges—have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law.

Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given there were codes of laws in India and Egypt—laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society; as old as the love of life; as old as industry; as the idea of prosperity; as old as human love.

All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old; all that were new are foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said: 'Thou shalt not enslave thy fellow-men.' He would have omitted the one about swearing, and said: 'The man shall have but one wife, and the woman but one husband.' He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said: 'Thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheathe the sword except in self-defence.'

If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been.

All that we call progress—the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.”
― Robert G Ingersoll, About The Holy Bible

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie

“I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart — the best brain.”
― Robert Ingersoll, The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

“What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“I do not see how it is possible for a man to die worth fifty million of dollars, or ten million of dollars, in a city full of want, when he meets almost every day the withered hand of beggary and the white lips of famine. How a man can withstand all that, and hold in the clutch of his greed twenty or thirty million of dollars, is past my comprehension. I do not see how he can do it. I should not think he could do it any more than he could keep a pile of lumber on the beach, where hundreds and thousands of men were drowning in the sea.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child

“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“If the bible be true, God commanded his chosen people to destroy men simply for the crime of defending their native land. They were not allowed to spare trembling and white-haired age, nor dimpled babes clasped in the mothers' arms. They were ordered to kill women, and to pierce, with the sword of war, the unborn child. 'Our heavenly Father' commanded the Hebrews to kill the men and women, the fathers, sons and brothers, but to preserve the girls alive. Why were not the maidens also killed? Why were they spared? Read the thirty-first chapter of Numbers, and you will find that the maidens were given to the soldiers and the priests. Is there, in all the history of war, a more infamous thing than this? Is it possible that God permitted the violets of modesty, that grow and shed their perfume in the maiden's heart, to be trampled beneath the brutal feet of lust? If this was the order of God, what, under the same circumstances, would have been the command of a devil? When, in this age of the world, a woman, a wife, a mother, reads this record, she should, with scorn and loathing, throw the book away. A general, who now should make such an order, giving over to massacre and rapine a conquered people, would be held in execration by the whole civilized world. Yet, if the bible be true, the supreme and infinite God was once a savage.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“What can't be cured must be endured.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“I regard the Bible, especially the Old Testament, the same as I do most other ancient books, in which there is some truth, a great deal of error, considerable barbarism and a most plentiful lack of good sense.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll

“Civilised man does not discover gods, he discards them.”
― Chapman Cohen, Theism or Atheism The Great Alternative

“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.”
― Voltaire

“You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.”
― Rosa Parks

“Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”
― Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

“What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
― Voltaire

“The need to be right - the sign of a vulgar mind.”
― Albert Camus

“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”
― Voltaire, Candide

“The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.”
― Albert Camus