The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.

You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

The citizen who sees his society's democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.

Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel.

The Christian Bible is a drug store. It´s contents have remained the same but the medical practice continues. For 1,800 years these changes were slight--scarcely noticeable... The dull and ignorant physician day and night, and all the days and all the nights, drenched his patient with vast and hideous doses of the most repulsive drugs to be found in the store´s stock. He kept him religion sick for eighteen centuries, and allowed him not a well day during all that time.

If you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward. You will never get her full confidence again.