Atheists From The United States

"The values of Western civilization are not just different, they're better. I know a whole generation has been raised on the notion of multiculturalism, that all civilizations are just different. No, not always. Sometimes things are better. Rule of law is better than autocracy and theocracy. Equality of the sexes, better. Protection of minorities, better. Free speech, better. Free elections, better."

"How does a country get away with keeping half its population in beekeeper suits? I'll tell you how. They say the magic word: religion. It's their religion. You say religion, you can get away with anything. The Catholics got away with fucking kids, for crying out loud!"

"The one that's easy to say now is, "I Support The Troops". Doesn't cost ya anything. But I've got a question for you: can you really support the troops if you also support these massive tax cuts for the very rich? Because the people we say are our heroes are paid by tax dollars. And we hear about, teachers have to buy their own school supplies, soldiers in this country are on food stamps...couldn't somebody in congress stand up and say, "Why don't we take half of that big tax cut and give it to our heroes?" Or is that why they're our heroes, because they work cheap?"

"The republicans are always so much better at that word-game. I remember when they made the announcement that Dick Cheney was going to be the vice-president candidate, they purposely went back to the heartland home of his; back to Casper, Wyoming...and they went back to Dick Cheney's high school, where he'd been the captain of the football team. Folks, this is when I knew I would never be mainstream. ...I would never go back to my high school; I hated my high school. I hated the captain of the football team! ...And then, the piece de resistance, they bring out his wife, who of course had been his high school sweetheart. And again, this so doesn't work on me. That you married the first chick to give you a handjob?"

"We used to have a tax in this country called the Estate Tax, which was very popular, because it's a tax on very, very, very rich fucks who die. And people thought, "That's a good person to tax." And that is a good person to tax! Because rich fucks who die should give away their money, or else they give it to their ne'er-do-well kid who becomes Uday Hussein."

"The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs."

"I'm a libertarian, which means I'm against the government doing almost anything. But citizens having arsenals? No, that is the kind of rough stuff I would like the government to get involved in....It just seems the debate, — you know, they will not give an inch. There are many attempts to pass a law in states just requesting a limit of buying one gun a month, and it doesn't pass. People are like, "What about Christmas?" I mean, one gun a month. If you started when you were 18, by the time you were 60 that's over a thousand guns. I don't care how small your penis is, that should be enough guns."

"Charlton Heston...recently was re-elected president of the NRA for the third term. And they made an exception, because their charter, their constitution, says you can only have two terms, but they changed it. Ah. So constitutions can change. Interesting. Because it is called the Second Amendment. The word "amendment" itself means, "We had another thought! We re-thought something!""

"We're so inconsistent about what we let kill ya. "Smoking? Must be eradicated. Marijuana? Zero tolerance." But there's lots of ways to kill yourself. You know what I think kills you? Stress, and being a workaholic, and never getting laid, and, uh, McDonalds, and staying mad at people, and lying for a living, and three-martini lunches, and the all-American breakfast, and whatever the fuck Elvis was doing. That's what kills you."

"I'll clue you in on a secret: death is not the worst thing that could happen to you. I know we think that; we are the first society ever to think that. It's not worse than dishonor; it's not worse than losing your freedom; its not worse than losing a sense of personal responsibility."

"If ketchup had 1/20th of the carcinogens in a cigarette they'd rip it off the shelves tomorrow, so the government is full of shit when they tell you that they care about you."

"Please stop assuming that longevity and perfect health is always the correct option. No. Sometimes fun costs ya. It just does, you know? And that's OK, you're willing to make that purchase. Sammy Davis, Jr. was 64 when he died. Give me 64 Sammy-years, I'll be happy."

"The Partnership for a Drug Free America? Please, make me laugh and gag at the same time with that title. They're a lobbying arm for the liquor and prescription drug industries. They don't want a drug-free America, they want an America free of the drugs that are their competition. Prozac doesn't want to go up against marijuana, it will lose."

"I am so tired of rearranging my life around what the stupidest people might do."

"The thing I don't understand about homosexuals is, how do they decide which one is the one who's supposed to pretend they don't want it?"

"We don't like mystery. You like mystery, 'cause it's not a mystery to you; you know when you're gonna get laid."

"Sex is too easy for women to get, and too hard for men. I mean, honestly, for a man to walk into someplace and have every woman ready to take him home, he'd have to rule the world. A woman would have to do her hair."

"[About 6 January 2020:] It's not what [Donald Trump] said on that day. It wasn't like he got up there and said 'Go and take over the capital!' – kind of (laughing) totally – it was that up until that moment he still hadn't conceded. It was not one moment. It was like his hole view that he was telling his people."

"America really has no Left party. We have a center-right party -- which I would call what the Democrats are now -- and then we have the Republicans, a party that drove the Crazy Bus straight into Nut Town."

"There's only one faith, for example, that kills you or wants to kill you if you draw a bad cartoon of the prophet. There's only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith... obviously, most Muslim people are not terrorists. But ask most Muslim people in the world, if you insult the prophet, do you have what's coming to you? It's more than just a fringe element."

"Dealing w/ Hamas is like dealing w/ a crazy woman who's trying to kill u - u can only hold her wrists so long before you have to slap her"

"Is it really a sport if you have all the equipment and your opponent doesn't know a game is going on?"

"I don't know how it all began, no one does. But I am pretty sure it's not that God had a son. [laughs] You know he's this orb of perfect energy, this powerful beyond imagination, but he's got kids. That would drive him fucking nuts, let me tell you. So you know we don't know the answers but the answer to that is not to make up stories. If you don't know something, just say, I don't know. That's your gospel right there. The gospel of "I don't know." I combined apathy and atheist, and I came up with apatheist. I don't know what happens when I die, and I don't care."

"Selling pot allowed me to get through college and make enough money to start off in comedy."

"I want to thank some very special people without whom I would not be here today. George Bush, Sarah Palin and the Pope. When I came to Hollywood in 1983, I had one dream— to sleep with Jodie Foster. That didn't work out, but this is nice, too."

"It's very sad how in the information age you cannot get information into people's heads. As long as you write something on the internet and do not add LOL — it is true. "I'm not sure he's a Christian" — I'm not sure he's a mammal, Jay. He could be a werewolf."

"If I thought the Lord was speaking to me I'd check myself into Bellevue, and I think you should too."

"Government — they used to teach it in college. It's actually something you should study and learn and know how to do. The Republicans always run on the idea that government isn't very effective. Well, not the way you do it. But it can be effective."

"Let's make a law that gay people can have birthdays, but straight people get more cake — you know, to send the right message to kids."

"I think we need to change that old saying, "I don't need a building to fall on me." Because two did and we still don't get it. I think we all stick our head in the sand as a deep human impulse."

"We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, that's not cowardly. Stupid maybe, but not cowardly."

"Jesus is great — is there a better role model? No. It's religion, it's the people who get in between — the bureaucracy, you know. ... It's the way people abuse Jesus. Was there ever a greater victim of name dropping?"

"Work in the fields? Senator, I'm a house nigga."

"It's disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals... You take a conventional man of action, and he's satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn't want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there's soul-raping going on."

"America meant freedom and what is freedom? To Hoffer it is the capacity to feel like oneself. He felt like Eric Hoffer; sometimes like Eric Hoffer, working man. It could be said, I believe, that he is the first important American writer, working class born, who remained working class — in his habits, associations, environment. I cannot think of another. Therefore, he was a national resource. The only one of its kind in the nation's possession."

"In all my life I never competed for fortune, for a woman, or for fame. I learned to write in total isolation. My first work was also my best, and the first thing published. I never belonged to a circle or clique. I did not know I was writing a book until it was written. When my first book was published there was no one near me, an acquaintance let alone a friend, to congratulate me. I have never savored triumph, never won a race."

"I could never figure out — or probably did not take the trouble to figure out — what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff, make a noble living out of it, and they conspire with one another to keep it alive."

"Disraeli felt that "nothing could compensate his obscure youth, not even a glorious old age." Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences — nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon."

"Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing."

"As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an idea in a few dozen words — two hundred at most. Elaboration and expansion are for me hard going. An article of several thousand words becomes inevitably a mosaic of ideas — a series of ideas stuck together."

"A good sentence is a key. It unlocks the mind of the reader."

"Originality is not something continuous but something intermittent — a flash of the briefest duration. One must have the time and be watchful (be attuned) to catch the flash and fix it. One must know how to catch and preserve these scant flakes of gold sluiced out of the sand and rocks of everyday life. Originality does not come nugget-size."

"What counts most is holding on. The growth of a train of thought is not a direct forward flow. There is a succession of spurts separated by intervals of stagnation, frustration, and discouragement. If you hold on, there is bound to come a certain clarification. The unessential components drop off and a coherent, lucid whole begins to take shape."

"Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things — have even discovered them over and over again — and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways."

"Flaubert and Nietzsche have emphasized the importance of standing up and walking in the process of thinking. The peripatetics were perhaps motivated by the same awareness. Yet purposeful walking — what we call marching — is an enemy of thought and is used as a powerful instrument for the suppression of independent thought and the inculcation of unquestioned obedience."

"How rare it is to come across a piece of writing that is unambiguous, unqualified, and also unblurred by understatements or subtleties, and yet at the same time urbane and tolerant. It is a vice of the scientific method when applied to human affairs that it fosters hemming and hawing and a scrupulousness that easily degenerates into obscurity and meaninglessness."

"I have never felt that I had a thought too profound for others to understand. On the contrary, it always seemed to me axiomatic that what was clear to me should be clear and easy to everyone else. This despite the fact that it often took me years to grope my way to an idea.... I can spend days and even months on a single sentence. I do not know how to skip. To think and write with me is like putting brick on brick."

"Good writing, like gold, combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints."

"To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (ourselves and others) than in overestimating."

"It is apparently vital that we should be in the dark about ourselves — not to be clear about our intentions, fears, and hopes. There is a stubborn effort in us to set up a compact screen between consciousness and the self."