Believe What You Will

Sunday, February 13, 2011 – Believe What You Will

The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren’t any space aliens. We can’t be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we’re not all there is. If so, we’re in big trouble. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms. ~ George Wald

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck. ~ George Carlin

Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. ~ Sigmund Freud

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. ~ H. L. Mencken

The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair. ~ Herbert Read

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Optimism – the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly. ~ Ambrose Bierce

The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome. ~ Jonathan Swift

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists. ~ Blaise Pascal

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. ~ Richard Dawkins

I confused things with their names: that is belief. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor. ~ Aldous Huxley

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief. ~ Immanuel Kant

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. ~ Edward Abbey

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. ~ Alan Watts

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. ~ Bertrand Russell

All money is a matter of belief. ~ Adam Smith

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy. ~ Samuel Johnson

No one has the right to destroy another person’s belief by demanding empirical evidence. ~ Ann Landers

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

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. ~ Joseph Conrad

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise. ~ Margaret Atwood

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them. ~ Henry James

Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means… airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash. ~ Cecil Beaton

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light. ~ David Hockney

The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief. ~ Jacques Ellul

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible. ~ Lillian Hellman

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent. ~ Arnold J. Toynbee

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction. ~ Christopher Lasch

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. ~ David Herbert Lawrence

Need is not quite belief. ~ Anne Sexton

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion. ~ Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1872

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right. ~ Laurens van der Post

Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. ~ Lewis Carroll

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness. ~ Louise Erdrich

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. ~ Bertrand Russell

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