The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have my demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same lack of humour, charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.
Robert Anton WilsonAmerican author, futurist, and agnostic mystic1932 - 2007
Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati
A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right; someone who is willing to learn from others - not by simply taking over another's opinions, but by gladly allowing others to criticise his ideas and by gladly criticising the ideas of others.
Karl PopperAustrian-British philosopher of science and social and política e falsificationism and for criticism of Plato, Hegel and Marx as totalitarian opponents of open society1902 - 1994
Harris, S. (2014). Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Bantam Press.
Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.
Yuri GagarinSoviet pilot and cosmonaut, first human in space1934 - 1968
Reportedly spoken after his flight (1961) and quoted in Wayne Lee, To Rise from Earth (1996); its authenticity is disputed.
Sometimes quoted as ‘I see no god up here’.
Reportedly spoken after his flight (1961) and quoted in Wayne Lee, To Rise from Earth (1996); its authenticity is disputed.
Sometimes quoted as ‘I see no god up here’.
In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference.
Douglas HofstadterAmerican physicist, computer scientist and professor of cognitive scienceborn 1945
Aristotle first used the phrase ‘chief good’, concluding that it is in the fulfilling of one’s own destiny which brings happiness. :
The hardships and sufferings to which our nation is to be subjected hereafter will be certainly great. We are keenly aware of the inmost feelings of all of you, our subjects. However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable.
Emperor ShōwaEmperor of Japan from 1926 to 19891901 - 1989
Excerpt from the Jewel Voice Broadcast (translated). The broadcast announcing to the Japanese people the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military at the end of World War II.
Excerpt from the Jewel Voice Broadcast (translated). The broadcast announcing to the Japanese people the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military at the end of World War II.
It's very interesting that when religions get organised, they very frequently move away from these [psychedelic] experiences. And you know, in today's churches you just go there and you hear stories about what happened to people two thousand years ago, but if someone in today's church would have a really full blown experience of the kind that inspired the religion, your average priest would call the ambulance, and the person would be taken to a psychiatrist and put on tranquilisers.
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’
Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalise the free play of ideas.
H. L. MenckenAmerican journalist and writer1880 - 1956
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
Alan WattsBritish American author and lecturer1915 - 1973
Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.