29 quotes found
“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.”
“If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.”
“I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.”
“In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loy...”
“...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”
“Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.”
“People weren't just angry about it. They were still afraid. Fear is a powerful, often irrational emotion, and mass fear... has the power to shake any society to its core. As long as the world remem...”
“An Act of Dissent is simply a way of saying, 'No, I do not accept this and, as my silence may be construed as acquiescence, I would like to make a small gesture to indicate that you can all go fuck...”
“Today everybody is talking about the fact that we live in one world; because of globalization, we are all part of the same planet. They talk that way, but do they mean it? We should remind them tha...”
“What do you mean by sound government?'Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for ...”
“Whether for good or for bad, the Iran that ultimately rises out of the ashes of last summer's uprising will be unlike the Iran we know today, and for that we can thank the Green Movement, not anoth...”
“Evangelicals now stand among those who are on easiest terms with the world, for they have lost their capacity for dissent.”
“The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.”
“If you believe in your heart that you are right, then you must fight with all your might to do it your way. Only dead fish swim with the stream all the time.”
“If no one had ever challenged religious authority, thered be no democracy, no public schools, womens rights, improvements to science and medicine, evolution of slavery and no laws against child abu...”
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”
“There are many lay people and scholars alike, both with and without the Muslim community, who feel that the pure orthodox Islam of the fundamentalists could never survive outside the context of its...”
“Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.”
“Not long ago, having expressed some disagreements in print with an old comrade of long standing, I was sent a response that he had published in an obscure newspaper. This riposte referred to my opi...”
