Superstition Quotes
Alice Hoffman
There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.
4113 Arne Tiselius
We live in a world where unfortunately the distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by manipulation of facts, by exploitation of uncritical minds, and by the pollution of the language.
2084 Robert G. Ingersoll
Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!
3829 Amit Kalantri
In spite of being complicated people choose superstitions over common sense.
4346 Victor Hugo
There is in every village a torch- the schoolteacher; and an extinguisher: the priest.
2219 Groucho Marx
If a black cat crosses your path, it signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
4922 Michel De Montaigne
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
1453 Jostein Gaarder
If you believed in Christianity or Islam it was called 'faith', but if you believed in astrology or friday the thirteenth it was Superstition!
3199 Stefan Molyneux
The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.
1844 Abraham Maslow
We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.
1608 Stefan Molyneux
The greater the gap between self perception and reality, the more aggression is unleashed on those who point out the discrepancy.
4538 Jean Meslier
How I suffered when I had to preach to you those pious lies that I detest in my heart. What remorse your credulity caused me! A thousand times I was on the point of breaking out publicly and opening your eyes, but a fear stronger than myself held me back, and forced me to keep silence until my death.
1363 Mary Shelley
I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm.
4413 Benjamin Wood
My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition-broken mirrors and so forth-hope's not based on any kind of logic, it's just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control.
1722 Hippocrates
People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe
2792 John Arbuthnot
Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.
4638 Christopher Hitchens
What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
2922 Aldous Huxley
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
2297 Dan Barker
You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
2427 Albert Camus
Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.
2436 David Gibson
The problem is that one man's superstition is another man's religion, and vice versa. Many Protestants today still see Catholicism as being rife with superstition, ... while atheists and agnostics would see bien-pensant Protestants as worshiping an equally absurd form of the supernatural.
2244 Thomm Quackenbush
If superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far.
1935 W.E.B. Du Bois
[We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.
1952 Friedrich Nietzsche
A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.
3255 Sheri S. Tepper
Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts.
2529 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
There is a faculty in man that will acknowledge the unseen. He may scout and scare religion from him; but if he does, superstition perches near.
3095 Susan Neiman
You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.
1061 George Gaylord Simpson
The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]
2417 Stefan Molyneux
When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.
2606 Stefan Molyneux
Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.
3974 Ayn Rand
When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force.
4922 Adam Smith
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
3808 Steven Pinker
It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.
[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]
1196 Charles Darwin
We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
3875 Karl Jaspers
Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant.
1679 Robert Boyle
Those distinct substances, which concretes generally either afford, or are made up of, may, without very much inconvenience, be called the elements or principles of them.
4294 M.K. Bhutta
If a black black cat crosses your path, it suggests that the animal is going somewhere.
4796 Bertrand Russell
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
3526 Catherine Crowe
The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it.
3077 Luther Burbank
Science . . . has opened our eyes to the vastness of the universe and given us light, truth and freedom from fear where once was darkness, ignorance and superstition. There is no personal salvation, except through science.
1519 Polly Toynbee
The pens sharpen – Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same – Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for women's bodies.
3874 Adolf Harnack
That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and we shall never again believe.
4216 Galileo Galilei
I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.
1880 Stefan Molyneux
Tribalism is an addiction that is driven by false beliefs that need to be reflected back to be perceived as true.
2239 W.E.B. Du Bois
I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.
4026 Thomas Henry Huxley
History warns us ... that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
4885 Michael Shermer
As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.
2725 Gillian Flynn
We were born in the '70s, back when twins were rare, a bit magical: cousins of the unicorn, siblings of the elves.
3875 Isaac Asimov
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
1038 Larken Rose
Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotionalism and fear-mongering to dupe average people into accepting-or even demanding-their own enslavement.
2370 Stefan Molyneux
When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.
1707 Stefan Molyneux
Culture makes lies plausible through exposure to time. It makes prejudice seem like physics intergenerationally. It is therefore the most dangerous opponent of philosophy, because it feels the most credible to the average person.
3755 Stefan Molyneux
The vast majority of people are unthinking prejudice machines.
4032 Elizabeth Goudge
It seemed to them dreadfully dangerous to put it into words like that, for lately the things they didn't want to happen were the things that happened and the logic of this was that if you pretended not to want what you really wanted dreadfully you would be more likely to get it.
1492 Ludwig Von Mises
A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the
state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion,
of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the
fashionable idols!
1138 Nathaniel Branden
The idea of original sin-of guilt with no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives-inherently militates against self-esteem. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality. Sin is not original, it is originated-like virtue.
3891 John Tyndall
The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation.
1914