Atheists From The United States

"I have always found the presumptions of others to be the best possible disguise—haven’t you?"

"Time’s a river, Locke, and we’ve always drifted farther down it than we think."

"When you’re a priest, people tend to see the robe rather than the man."

"“Advice,” chuckled Doña Vorchenza. “The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one’s mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you’re a nag. Give it at seventy and you’re a sage.”"

"“This entire situation is insane.” Jean slammed his book shut in disgust. “It was insane before; now it’s become malicious.”"

"“Here's to charming losers, I suppose.“ “If only we knew where to find some.“"

"“Liquor does this? Even after you’re sober?” “A cruel joke, isn’t it? The gods put a price tag on everything, it seems.”"

"There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated."

"“‘Commonly thought,’ you say? Many things are commonly thought, but perhaps not commonly thought all the way through.”"

"“I sometimes think that ‘friend’ is just a word I use for all the people I haven't murdered yet.”"

"“Sure, kid. Look, there's a very old saying in my family: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is another wizard fucking with you.’”"

"You can’t help being young, but it’s past time that you stopped being stupid."

"You have confused me with someone who knows what’s going on."

"Enlightenment! When it comes, it comes like a brick to the head, doesn’t it?"

"“Better to say nothing and be thought a fool,” said Amarelle, “than to interfere in the business of wizards and remove all doubt.”"

"“What do you have to say to that?“ “Oh, very little, to be sure, Master Kosta. It’s so hard to think, overawed as I am with the sublime genius of your plan.“ “That bears some vague resemblance to sarcasm.“ “God forfend,“ said Jean. “You wound me! Your inexpressible criminal virtues have triumphed again, as inevitably as the tides come and go. I cast myself at your feet and beg for absolution. Yours is the genius that nourishes the heart of the world.“ “And now you’re—“ “If only there was a leper handy,“ interrupted Jean, "so you could lay your hands on and magically heal him.“"

"Our patron has always sort of danced upon the notion that austerity and piety go hand in hand; down here, we show our appreciation for things by appreciating, if you get me."

"“I suspect that drink has made you impulsive.“ “Drink makes me see funny; the gods made me impulsive.“"

"So, we’ve reached the state that George Will described. He said there’s a certain kind of liberal that wants diversity in everything, except thought. And so, we do need certain kinds of diversity. But the key to remember is that, diversity by its very nature is divisive, and so, what’s the function of your group? If your group needs cohesion, you don’t want diversity. If your group needs good, clear thinking and you want people to challenge your prejudices, then you need it. So in the academic world, we need that kind of diversity, and we don’t have it."

"I think we went through — in America, at least, we went through a period in the ’60s and ’70s when the education establishment became extremely liberal, and part of that is a flirtation with relativism. And a resistance — it’s horrible to think of — of adults telling kids what’s right and wrong. What a terrible thing. That’s oppression. And so we created these sort of value-free spaces, which conveys a value, which is that there’s no right or wrong, everyone decides for themselves. Uh, everyone’s opinion is equal. You should say your opinion and then you get a lot of incivility. What I would like to see is a revamped civics curriculum where we teach very explicitly the long tradition of left-right. Um, we teach what each side is. You can’t say right about it, that’s my language. But, um, you teach what each side is concerned about. You know, very much like the line here. Uh, both are essential. One without the other creates an unbalanced American civic order."

"Religions are moral s. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that […] influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass […] That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for —Durkheim's word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order. (It means, literally, "normlessness.") We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don't really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few)."

"Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say."

"And so, uh, uh, a wonderful book, um, American Grace by, uh, Putnam and Campbell, um, uh, is the ultimate authority on this. What they find is that, um, it doesn’t matter what religion you are, and it doesn’t matter what you believe, if you are part of a religious community, then on average, you’re a better citizen, you give more to charity. Religion does bring out the good in people. Now, secular people can be perfectly good, too, but on average, they give less and they give less of their time. So, I’d like to think that I simply, as a secular atheist scientist, followed the evidence, and it showed me that I was wrong in thinking that religion was evil."

"Egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se."

"I know this is the question period, but there’s a quote here which is just so relevant. I hope I can — I hope I can read it. It’s from an article by, uh, Yossi Klein Halevi on Pesach Jews versus Purim Jews. So he talks about these — there’s these two threads, these two strands among — among — among Jews in — actually, there’s more in Israel. But it’s here, too. So he — I just love this, and it fits so well with — with — with The Righteous Mind. He says, uh, Jewish history speaks to our generation in the voice of two Biblical commands to remember."

"Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don't."

"So now we have three models of the mind. Plato said that reason ought to be the master, even if philosophers are the only ones who can reach a high level of mastery. Hume said that reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions. And Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers, like the emperors of Rome, who divided the empire into eastern and western halves. Who is right?"

"Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that's right for you."

"Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason."

"If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you."

"First, kill all the math classes beyond algebra. Stop wasting so much of our students’ time learning math. It’s not useful, it’s not helpful."

"The lesson Buddha and Marcus Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: "Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it"."

"Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers' rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil. […] When I returned to America [from India], social conservatives no longer seemed so crazy."

"Gossip and reputation make sure that what comes around - a person who is cruel will find that the others are cruel back to him, and a person who is kind will find others are kind in return. Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life. As long as everyone plays tit-for-tat augmented by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully."

"The reason why we all feel we have to give our kid a smartphone by the time they're ten is because everyone else did. And your kid says, you know, dad, I'm the only one. I'm being left out. So we're all, you know, we're all doing that."

"We're over protecting our children offline and under protecting them online."

"Sports is to war as pornography is to sex."

"Nowadays, secular people often see the Enlightenment as a battle between two mortal enemies; on one side was science, with its principal weapon, reason, and on the other side was religion, with its ancient shield of superstition. Reason defeated superstition, light replaced darkness."

"The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose."

"Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger […]: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions."

"Nor must we forget the liberating force which sprang from the art of Isadora Duncan, whose heroic practice has done more than any precepts of philosophy to widen our ideas as to the intellectual and spiritual possibilities of the dance."

"Poetry personified. She is not the Tenth Muse but all Nine Muses in one — and painting and sculpture as well."

"Whenever you feel the evil influence of the middle class muddling your soul, you'll say these two words and you'll be a free spirit again: "Isadora Duncan.""

"When she read my first book Visions and Revisions, she sent me so many red roses that they filled the little flat, but I was too nervous to go and see her. She has been one of the most thrilling sensations — but that is a wretched word to express it — of my whole existence. She has danced for me alone — with a beauty that makes the most beautiful young girls' dancing seem mere child's play. It was as though Demeter herself, the mater dolorosa of the ancient earth, rose and danced. Well, she has gone — and I enclose to you the red rose she gave to me as she went."

"She suggested that the sculptor might probe the Greek spirit by studying modern dance. Antoine Bourdelle agreed. Capturing Duncan's appeal for a generation of sculptors, he likened the dancer to an "antique marble throbbing with eternity," who infused with life a classical sporty all but snuffed out by stale academicism."

"She was a flame sheath of flesh made for dancing. She believed she ran into storm, rain, sun and became part of them and they were afterward woven in her dances."

"Here was a great woman; a magnificent, generous, gallant, reckless, fated fool of a woman. There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible, slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead, where there were no paths."

"Her dances were hymns to freedom — of sensibility, of passion, of the transcendentally convinced and convincing Emersonian soul … Today it is hard to picture convincing interpretations of Joy, Hope, Immortality, the Soul. But at the turn of the century an American girl, incarnating these and more, coincided with historical promise."

"The revival of the dance is significant of the abiding, though much forgotten, need of the world for its arts, and a proof of the strange immortality of the arts themselves. A few years ago several great dancers came to summon the world, who must have prepared through long periods separately and without a common plan; yet with the effectiveness of premeditated simultaneity they appeared, as it were in a company. And the response of a world still hungering, somewhat dimly, for the arts, was the welcome we give to an advent long desired. Fortunate were those whose introduction to this momentous movement came by way of the greatest of its exponents, Isadora Duncan. It was one of the great hours, of which we have but three or four in a lifetime, when we first saw her. In that hour we sensed the manifold meanings and implications of the dance; its ecstasies, inspirations, and healing beneficences, and its possibly unimaginable importance to the modern world."

"The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am. Roses, lovers, money, children, came to her in her life dance from California to Russia. When her dancing days were not yet over but almost come to an end, she died in a swift ride with a flame red scarf enwrapping her neck tighter and tighter."