"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.

Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship.

Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?"

-- Soren Kierkegaard

"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

-- Flannery O'Connor

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason."

-- John Cage

"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows."

-- David T. Wolf

"Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."

-- Blaise Pascal

"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities."

-- Aldous Huxley

"Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left."

-- David M. Ogilvy

"Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?"

--US Marine Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph "Dan" Daly

"I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am."

-- Joseph Baretti

"A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future."

-- Sidney J. Harris

"Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way."

-- P.J. O'Rourke, "The End of the Affair" in the Wall Street Journal

"The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another."

-- J. Frank Dobie

"You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it."

-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

"Push back against dubious claims that defy logic;
be on the lookout for misrepresentations;
question the lack of science when belief is the substitution;
be very skeptical when the denial of the laws of physics comes into play."

--- jpaik, quoted from Audio Karma

"Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything."

-- Frank Dane

"In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love."

-- Søren Kierkegaard

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

-- G.K. Chesterton

"Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest person, it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow."

--Edward Sandford Martin