Atheism Activists

"I've spent 3 decades on T.V. mocking Republicans who said climate change was just a theory and now I have to deal with people who say you know what else is just a theory, biology?"

"That's where it all went wrong for us. It's again the same principle as I was saying before about like the reverse of what liberalism really is. Liberalism is for the sake of humanity and compassion; can we get these people off the streets? And woke is, ‘How dare you ask them to move! This is their home...’ No, it's not!"

"And of course, they didn't like it. And it's just a good example of could everybody just stop the posturing? Don't pretend that you love migrants so much and then when we send them to you, you don't like them. You know, you're full of s--- and we can see that. Yeah, you liked them when it wasn't your problem because you're not a border state. And then when they show up in Chicago, in New York, you're like, What the f---? What are we going to do with these people?"

"You’re like liberals back when they were more reasonable before they became leftists. And now every liberal kind of has to be a leftist. If you want to be on the team, you’ve got to subscribe to the most fringe ideas that the team is promoting. You can be woke, with all the nonsense that that now implies, but don’t say that somehow it’s an extension of liberalism. Because it’s most often actually an undoing of liberalism. You can have your points of view and your positions on these things but don’t try and piggyback on what I always believe. I have always believed, as liberals do for example, in a colorblind society."

"The goal is to not see race at all, anywhere for any reason. That’s what liberals always believed all the way through Obama, going back [to] Kennedy, everybody, Martin Luther King. That’s not what the woke believe. They believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan. Again, you can have that position, but don’t say that’s a liberal position. You’re doing something very different."

"As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for the youth of America: Don’t go to college. And if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid."

"There are few if any positives to come out of what happened in Israel. But one is opening America’s eyes to how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideals, among them the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone is either an oppressor or oppressed, in the case of Israel, oppressors being babies and bubbles."

"The same students who will tell you that words are violence and silence is violence, were very supportive when Hamas terrorists went on a rape and murder rampage worthy of the Vikings. They knew where to point the finger, at the murdered, and then it was off to ethics class."

"They don’t know much of anything actually, but it doesn’t deter them from having an opinion. They’ve convinced themselves Israel is the most repressive regime in history because they have no knowledge of history or even a desire to know it. And actually, history doesn’t come up in their intersectionality of politics and genderqueer identities class."

"College life today is a day’s spa combined with a North Korean reeducation camp. It’s a daycare center with a meal plan, except the toddlers can fire the adults. The fact that college presidents, who usually love to speak out about anything, couldn’t find their voice to condemn the worst attack since the Holocaust. There is a lot about who really controls colleges and why its ignorance is a disease. Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market."

"But the reason why despising Israel became pretty much a requirement of the American left is colleges, elite colleges. The mouth of the river from which this and all manners of radical left illiberal, yes illiberal, nonsense flows. Supporting all-black, that is segregated dorms, segregated graduation ceremonies, and orientation programs, which occur on hundreds of colleges, is illiberal, so is the racism against Asian applicants. And chasing speakers off of campus… there is only one set of acceptable opinions on campus and it is policed hard."

"But there is a deep state, which is the bureaucratic class that justifies its existence by making up new rules and that’s my job. It’s the vast network of regulators, administrators, inspectors, contractor reviewers, project managers, fee accessors, special commissioners, zoning officers, and consultants, whose jobs seem to be to make sure that nothing ever happens and then charge you for it. The people who answer the phone, Permit office. ‘How may I hinder you.’"

"Last year, Wyoming began construction on the largest wind farm in North America that will power 2 million homes in Arizona, Nevada, and California. And to think, it only took 18 years—not to build it, to approve it. Eighteen backlogged, knuckle-dragging, pencil-pushing thumb-twaddling, ball-scratching years to finally get to ‘yes.’ When they started doing the paperwork, Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriend wasn't even born."

"How ironic, with all the talk about the urgency to switching to green energy, our deep state of petty tyrants wasted almost two decades over permitting and nitpicking over the environmental impacts and social effects of the very thing that would most positively impact the environment."

"Semafor estimates that if the red tape could be cut on everything that is currently stuck in the renewable queue, the United States would be 80% zero carbon in 7 years. The enemy of clean air isn't just Big Oil, it's Big Permitting. It's not that America isn't able to get anything done, it's that we're not allowed to. Of course, there should be consideration of the environment on everything we build but as so often happens on the left they seem to have no ability to recognize when they've taken a concept way too far and are in fact hurting their own cause."

"As Barack Obama once said, one of the biggest lessons he learned as president is there is no such thing as shovel-ready jobs. Environmental impact statements used to be a few pages long, now they’re thousands of pages of legalistic nonsense and take an average of 4 and a half years to complete with thousands of bureaucrats filling out millions of paper forms that kill hundreds of forests to answer the question is this good for the environment?"

"In San Francisco, the city is so nice you'll step in poop twice, there's an area where homeless people were urinating and defecating and it was starting to annoy the people breaking into cars. So, the city tried to build a public toilet last year but then gave up when the cost hit $1.7 million. Not $1.7 million for a public toilet system, $1.7 million for one toilet… So then a private company took pity on San Francisco and offered to build them their toilet for free. But after, quote… ‘project management, construction management, architecture and engineering fees, permits, civic design review, surveys, contract preparation, and cost estimation’, the free toilet was going to cost almost a million dollars."

"I don't fear A.I. anymore because it couldn't possibly be any more robotic than the humans who run things now."

"renewable installations present dramatically lower risks than either fossil fuels or nuclear energy to those who live and work next to them. As comedian Bill Maher once observed, "You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.""

""PC" has almost become a household word. In the 1991 Academy Awards pageant, a commentator joked that Dances with Wolves was "politically correct" (it shows Native Americans as decent and most of the white troops trying to exterminate them as bad guys). Since then, movie critics have sneered at films with anti-racist content, like Follow Me Home or Amistad, for their "PC" essence. The term has even inspired a major television show, Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" talkfest. Progressive people use the term without thinking twice about its reactionary function."

"When my dear brother Bill Maher calls, as he frequently does, I do my best to hop out to L.A. and work with him on Real Time. I revel in his comic brilliance and progressive politics even as I joyfully wrestle with his agnosticism."

"Politically Incorrect was the name of the show Bill Maher hosted in the 1990s. It's also an apt description of the man himself. Now host of ... HBO's hit show Real Time, I find Maher to be one of the sharpest observers of American politics and life in general out there. It doesn't mean I always agree with him. I always find him funny, though."

"Shame on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations."

"Lenin tried to get as close as he could to the masses and he was able to do so. Association with workers gave him a very great deal. It gave him a real understanding of the tasks of the struggle of the proletariat at every stage."

"The family or group clannishness so characteristic of the old days was alien to Ilyich. He never separated the personal from the social. With him it was all merged into one. He could never have loved a woman whose views differed from his own, who was not his comrade in work."

"Not everyone can learn from life, from other people. Ilyich knew how to. He never used artifice or diplomacy in dealing with people, never hoodwinked them, and people sensed his sincerity and candour."

"Lenin fought, he put questions sharply; in argument he introduced nothing personal but approached questions from the point of view of the matter in question, and, because of this, comrades were not usually offended at his sharp manner. He observed people closely, listened to what they had to say, tried to grasp the essential point, and so he was able, out of a number of insignificant points, to catch the nature of the person, he was able to approach people with remarkable sensitivity, to find in them all that was good and of value and could be put to the service of the common cause."

"Lenin was a revolutionary Marxist and collectivist to the depths of his being. All his life and work was devoted to one great goal--the struggle for the triumph of socialism. This left its imprint on all his thoughts and feelings. He had none of the pettiness, petty envy, anger, revengefulness and vanity so much to be found in small-property-minded individualists."

"Through the ages of world history thousands of leaders and scholars appeared who spoke eloquent words, but these remained but words. You, Lenin, were an exception. You not only spoke and taught us, but translated your words into deeds. You created a new country. You showed us the road of joint struggle. ... You, great man that you are, will live on in the memories of the oppressed peoples through the centuries."

"This most powerful machinist of the revolution... was irrevocably controlled by one and the same idea, the goal. He was probably the most extreme utilitarian whom the laboratory of history has produced. But his utilitarianism was of the broadest historical scope. His personality did not grow flat or poor thereby, but on the contrary developed and enriched itself in extent, as his experience of life and sphere of activity grew."

"Lenin taught us to be merciless towards the enemies of the revolution, and millions of people had to be eliminated in order to secure the victory of the October Revolution."

"It is hard to find a word of human sympathy or concern anywhere in his [Lenin's] collected works. But he was quick to exploit the misery of the nation, to create scapegoats to deflect popular anger from the regime."

"We never talked about men or clothes or inconsequential things we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution - real girls' talk."

"They [Lenin and Stalin] formed the world's first Marxist government, remained at the peak of the state for the rest of their days, sacrificed millions of lives at the pitiless altar of their utopian ideology, and ruled the imperium, between them, for the next thirty-six years."

"The State and Revolution permanently changed the discourse of left-wing politics. After 1917 no socialist group could formulate its ideas without taking Leninism into account, even if only to repudiate it. With endless recourse to the sacred texts of Marx and Engels, Lenin postulated that two historical stages had to be traversed after the overthrow of capitalist rule. The first stage was to be initiated by the dictatorship of the proletariat which would start by introducing radical social and economic reform while suppressing the rights of the middle classes and implementing the principle: from each according to his capacity, to each according to his work. People would be rewarded for what they contributed to the good of society. As the coercive requirements of the authorities diminished and the proletarian dictatorship became a distant memory, the second stage would start. This would be communism itself. Kitchen maids would do their share of administration. History would be coming to an end. Then the operational principle would at last be: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The prophetic vision of Marx and Engels would be fulfilled."

"My impression [of Lenin] was not so good as I'd rather thought it would be. I, of course, realised that he had immense strength of will, and integrity in the sense that I think all his public acts were dictated by something that he really believed to be for the public good. But his defects, as they struck me, were two. One, that he was very narrowly orthodox in his adherence to Marx. If he wanted to prove a point, he thought it enough to quote a text of Marx. No fundamentalist was ever more addicted to scripture than he was to Marx. And I thought that seemed to me rather narrow. The other thing I didn't like about him was that he was quite clearly rather cruel. In both these respects I thought he resembled Oliver Cromwell. In fact, I thought he might be a reincarnation of Oliver Cromwell."

"When I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of bigotry and Mongolian cruelty. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, "and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha! ha! ha!" His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold."

"Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures. When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Engels. A full-fledged Communist is not merely a man who believes that land and capital should be held in common, and their produce distributed as nearly equally as possible. He is a man who entertains a number of elaborate and dogmatic beliefs—such as philosophic materialism, for example—which may be true, but are not, to a scientific temper, capable of being known to be true with any certainty."

"Soon after my arrival in Moscow I had an hour's conversation with Lenin in English, which he speaks fairly well... I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance. He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim. He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of self-seeking, an embodied theory. The materialist conception of history, one feels, is his life-blood. He resembles a professor in his desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who misunderstand or disagree, as also in his love of expounding, I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat. ... He described the division between rich and poor peasants, and the Government propaganda among the latter against the former, leading to acts of violence which he seemed to find amusing. ... I think if I had met him without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith — religious faith in the Marxian gospel."

"Lenin, the greatest man of action in our century and at the same time the most selfless."

"Today in Korea—in Southeast Asia—in Latin America and the West Indies, in the Middle East—in Africa, one sees tens of millions of long oppressed colonial peoples surging toward freedom. What courage—what sacrifice—what determination never to rest until victory!...And arrayed against them, the combined powers of the so-called Free West, headed by the greedy, profit-hungry, war-minded industrialists and financial barons of our America. The illusion of an “American Century” blinds them for the immediate present to the clear fact that civilization has passed them by—that we now live in a people’s century—that the star shines brightly in the East of Europe and of the world. Colonial peoples today look to the Soviet Socialist Republics...One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—the shapers of humanity’s richest present and future."

"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."

"Here we see the possible significance of Lenin's book for the future working-class movement. The Communist Party, though it may lose ground among the workers, tries to form with the socialists and the intellectual class a united front, ready at the first major crisis of capitalism to take in its hands the power over and against the workers. Leninism and its philosophical textbook then will serve, under the name of Marxism, to overawe the workers and to impose upon the intellectuals, as the leading system of thought by which the reactionary spiritual powers are beaten, Thus the fighting working class, basing itself upon Marxism, will find Lenin's philosophical work a stumbling-block in its way, as the theory of a class that tries to perpetuate its serfdom."

"[If Lenin had lived after 1924] there is no strong reason for thinking that the main lines of development would have been very different. Well before 1923 the seeds of a totalitarian society were quite plainly there. Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely. Had he lived, it is probable that he would either have been thrown out, like Trotsky, or would have kept himself in power by methods as barbarous, or nearly as barbarous, as those of Stalin."

"We also read Lenin on housework, which is a very, very interesting essay. He uses the word "degrading," which I never felt, because you really see the results of what you've done. But the enormous amount of time it took! That was a factor in our not being as active. Of course, the men came home, and if we were working, we did not sit down like they did. It took a women's movement to change that."

"There was no doubt or vagueness in Lenin's mind. His were the penetrating eyes which detected the moods of the masses; the clear head which could apply and adapt well-thought-out principles to changing situations; the inflexible will which held on to the course he had mapped out, regardless of immediate consequences... It is not many years since he died, and already Lenin has become a mighty tradition, not only in his native Russia, but in the world at large. As time passes he grows greater; he has become one of the chosen company of the world's immortals. Petrograd has become Leningrad, and almost every house in Russia has a Lenin corner or a Lenin picture. But he lives, not in monuments or pictures, but in the mighty work he did, and in the hearts of hundreds of millions of workers today who find inspiration in his example and the hope of a better day."

"He (Lenin) lies asleep as it were and it is difficult to believe that he is dead. In life they say he was not beautiful to look at. He had too much of common clay in him and about him was the 'smell of the Russian soil'. But in death there is a strange beauty and his brow is peaceful and unclouded. On his lips there hovers a smile and there is a suggestion of pugnacity, of work done and success achieved. He has a uniform on and one of his hands is lightly clenched. Even in death he is the dictator. In India, he would certainly have been canonised, but saints are not held in repute in Soviet circles, and the people of Russia have done him the higher honour of loving him as one of themselves."

"Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities."

"[N]o one can doubt that Lenin was one of the greatest leaders of men ever thrown up in any epoch."

"In Lenin’s overanxious desire to establish the guardianship of an omniscient and omnipotent Central Committee in order to protect so promising and vigorous a labor movement against any misstep, we recognize the symptoms of the same subjectivism that has already played more than one trick on socialist thinking in Russia. It is amusing to note the strange somersaults that the respectable human “ego” has had to perform in recent Russian history. Knocked to the ground, almost reduced to dust, by Russian absolutism, the “ego” takes revenge by turning to revolutionary activity. In the shape of a committee of conspirators, in the name of a nonexistent Will of the People, it seats itself on a kind of throne and proclaims it is all-powerful. [The reference is to the conspiratorial circle which attacked tsarism from 1879 to 1883 by means of terrorist acts and finally assassinated Alexander II. – Ed.] But the “object” proves to be the stronger. The knout is triumphant, for tsarist might seems to be the “legitimate” expression of history. In time we see appear on the scene and even more “legitimate” child of history – the Russian labor movement. For the first time, bases for the formation of a real “people’s will” are laid in Russian soil. But here is the “ego” of the Russian revolutionary again! Pirouetting on its head, it once more proclaims itself to be the all-powerful director of history – this time with the title of His Excellency the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Russia. The nimble acrobat fails to perceive that the only “subject” which merits today the role of director is the collective “ego” of the working class. The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of history. Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."