var mess = new Array('Rational apprehension of dangers is necessary; fear is not.
 

Bertrand Russell', 'Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
 

Mark Twain', 'What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch!
 

Allen Ginsberg, Howl', 'A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
 

Friedrich Nietzsche', 'All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
 

Friedrich Nietzsche', 'If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
 

Bertrand Russell', 'It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
 

Bertrand Russell', 'I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
 

Thomas Jefferson', 'A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.
 

Eric Hoffer', 'Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
 

Eric Hoffer', 'Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
 

Seneca', '[On Calvinism] According to that, the one great offence of man is Self-will. All the good of which humanity is capable, is comprised in Obedience. You have no choice; thus you must do, and no otherwise; "whatever is not a duty is a sin." Human nature being radically corrupt, there is no redemption for any one until human nature is killed within him. To one holding this theory of life, crushing out any of the human faculties, capacities, and susceptibilities, is no evil: man needs no capacity, but that of surrendering himself to the will of God: and if he uses any of his faculties for any other purpose but to do that supposed will more effectually, he is better without them.
 

John Stuart Mill', 'Religion is all bunk.
 

Thomas Edison', 'War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
 

John Stuart Mill', 'Over ones mind and over ones body the individual is sovereign.
 

John Stuart Mill', 'Fear is the mother of morality.
 

Friedrich Nietzsche', 'Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.
 

Friedrich Nietzsche', 'The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.
 

Friedrich Nietzsche', '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', 'Suppose someone were taught: There is a being who, if you do such and such or live thus and thus, will take you to a place of everlasting torment after you die; most people end up there, a few get to a place of everlasting happines. This being has selected in advance those who are to go to the good place and, since only those who have lived a certain sort of life go to the place of torment, he has also arranged in advance for the rest to live like that. What might be the effect of such a doctrine? Well, it does not mention punishment, but rather a sort of natural necessity. And if you were to present things to anyone in this light, he could only react with despair or incredulity to such a doctrine.
 

Ludwig Wittgenstein', 'Never take counsel of your fears.
 

Andrew Jackson', 'One man with courage makes a majority.
 

Andrew Jackson', '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', 'Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.
 

Bertrand Russell', 'I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.
 

Montaigne', 'Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.
 

Montaigne', 'As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
 

Gore Vidal', 'Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
 

Gore Vidal', 'And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.
 

James Madison', 'Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.
 

James Madison', 'Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
 

George Washington', 'History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.
 

Thomas Jefferson', 'Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
 

Bertrand Russell', 'Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
 

Bertrand Russell', 'Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
 

Bertrand Russell', 'The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.
 

John Stuart Mill', 'To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
 

Gustave Flaubert', 'Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
 

Thomas Jefferson', 'Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a mans spirit than when we win his heart.
 

Eric Hoffer', 'Plato was a bore.
 

Friedrich Nietzsche', 'Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation.
 

Friedrich Nietzsche', 'And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
 

Thomas Jefferson', 'If ever man worshipped a false god, he did [John Calvin]. The being described in his 5 points is not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.
 

Thomas Jefferson', 'A person who will not read has no advantage over one who cannot read.
 

Mark Twain', 'Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
 

Mark Twain', 'I could not believe that anyone who has read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly misinformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naivete?
 

Bishop John Shelby Spong', 'Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry. Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone.
 

Bishop John Shelby Spong', 'Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason that the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.
 

Montaigne', 'No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
 

Montaigne', 'The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
 

Sigmund Freud', 'What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
 

Sigmund Freud', 'The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a days time they will have turned it into a Hell.
 

Jeremy Bentham', 'The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
 

Jeremy Bentham', 'The great epochs of our life are at the points where we gain courage to rebaptise our badness as the best in us.
 

Friedrich Nietzsche', 'It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author — and that he did not learn it better.  
 

Friedrich Nietzsche', 'An intelligent mind acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.
 

Proverbs 18:15', 'A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
 

H.L. Mencken', 'A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldnt care to drink with, even if he drank.
 

H.L. Mencken', 'For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
 

H.L. Mencken', 'I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and do not want to meet them.
 

H.L. Mencken', 'Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
 

H.L. Mencken', 'Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.
 

H.L. Mencken', 'The best way to lose all is to cling with desperation to that which cannot possibly be sustained literally. Literalistic Christians will learn that a God or a faith system that has to be defended daily is finally no God or faith system at all. They will learn that any god who can be killed ought to be killed. Ultimately they will discover that all their claims to represent the historical, traditional, or biblical truth of Christianity cannot stop the advance of knowledge that will render every historic claim for a literal religious system questionable at best, null and void at worst.
 

Bishop John Shelby Spong', 'If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus resurrection, also is not believable.
 

Bishop John Shelby Spong', 'Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
 

Thomas Edison', 'Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.
 

Thomas Edison', 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
 

Upton Sinclair', 'Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence?
 

Upton Sinclair', 'If you are in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They are the only ones that will help - the only ones.
 

John Steinbeck', 'It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.
 

John Steinbeck', 'It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
 

William Faulkner', 'The past is not dead; it isnt even past.
 

William Faulker', 'The evidence of the heavenly witnesses — the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost — would now be rejected in any court of justice.
 

Edward Gibbon', 'When the world is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?
 

Lord Byron', 'Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
 

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

Bertrand Russell', 'Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.
 

John Locke', 'I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
 

John Locke', 'I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.
 

Albert Einstein', 'Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
 

Lord Alfred North Whitehead', 'It [Christianity] is essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established; who indeed are not to be actively obeyed when they command what religion forbids, but who are not to be resisted, far less rebelled against, for any amount of wrong to ourselves.
 

John Stuart Mill', 'If a man casts a spell on a man and does not justify his action, the man who is under the spell shall go to the sacred river and cast himself in, and if the river drowns him the caster of the spell shall take his house as his property. If the river does not drown him the caster of the spell shall be put to death, and the innocent man shall take his house.
 

Code of Hammurabi', 'A man and a woman caught in adultery shall be cast into the water, but the husband of the woman may save her, and the king may save the man.
 

Code of Hammurabi', 'Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
 

Ambrose Bierce', 'Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
 

Ambrose Bierce', 'His [Barack Obama] problem is being over-educated. He doesnt realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is.
 

Gore Vidal', 'Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
 

Ayn Rand', 'Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
 

Ayn Rand', 'If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
 

H.L. Mencken', 'Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.
 

H.L. Mencken', 'Both Faith and Terror are instruments for the elimination of individual self-respect. Terror crushes the autonomy of self-respect, while Faith obtains its more or less voluntary surrender. In both cases the result of the elimination of individual autonomy is -- automatism. Both Faith and Terror reduce the human entity to a formula that can be manipulated at will.
 

Eric Hoffer', 'To believe in frauds, it seems to me, is incompatible with any sort of dignity. It may be held, by the sorry standards which prevail in certain quarters, to be virtuous, but it is plainly not dignified. Is it a fact that the authors of the New Testament were inspired by God, and compiled a record that is innocent of error? It is not a fact: They were ignorant and credulous men, and they put together a narrative that is as discordant and preposterous, at least in material parts, as the testimony of six darkies in a police court.
 

H.L. Mencken', 'Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
 

David Hume', 'A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
 

David Hume', 'It has been a long time since any public figure has openly said anything useful, much less true, even in the relative privacy of the Oval Office. Up to a point, this is the nature of our society and kind of fun.
 

Gore Vidal', 'Engineers want to connect everything up and make sense. Politicians — and artists — realize that nothing really makes sense and nothing ever hooks up.
 

Gore Vidal', 'The Fundamentalist machine is one of revenge; there is no doubt about it.
 

Jeri Massi'); var max = mess.length; var num = Math.floor((Math.random() * max)); document.writeln(mess[num]);