The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable...
Catalog
Quotes tagged ‘Superstition’
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then…
Maria Rossi: Have you ever witnessed a real exorcism, Father? Father Robert Gallo: Yeah! Right after he saw the Easter Bunny!
— William Brent Bell, Matthew Peterman, Maria Rossi, Suzan Crowley, imdb.com
Miss Webb, I have been to hundreds of houses, countless seances, and I have never yet seen something that can't be explained in rational terms. The people I've met all have one thing in common; pain.
— Timothy Prager, Lewis Gilbert, Bob Kellett, Prof. David Ash, Aidan Quinn, imdb.com
God’s path to your blessing may not always make sense.
To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting th…
Sometimes it’s the right guy, but the wrong time. God may need you and Him to go through a process first before He can bring you two into a successful relationship together.
U.S. policy has created a food system that excels at producing flour, sugar and oil but struggles to deliver nutrients at anywhere near the same scale.
A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter.
Every discovery in public health, no matter how significant, must compete with the traditions, assumptions and financial incentives of the society implementing it.
I was always afraid of my mum or dad dying when I was a child. I used to play this game where if I ran on the road and stepped on a cracked paving slab, it meant that something bad was going to happen to them.
It is, therefore, no argument against ceremonial magic to say that it is ‘absurd’ to try to raise a thunderstorm by beating a drum; it is not even fair to say that you have tried the experiment, found it would not work, and so perceived it to be ‘impossible.’ You might as well claim that, as you had…
It is true that they looked upon any little thing that I gave them as a wonder, and they held our arrival to be a great marvel, believing that we came from heaven.
We understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven. One old man came into the boat, and others cried out, in loud voices, to all the men and women, to come and see the men who had come from heaven, and to bring them to eat and drink. Many came, including women, each bringing something, givi…
The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has…
I hate astrology. What, everybody born in the same month is gonna have the same life?
— Judd Apatow, Paul Feig, Daniel Desario, James Franco, imdb.com
My college campus has a magic statue. It's a longstanding tradition for students to rub its nose for good luck. My freshman roommate really believed in the statue's power and insisted on visiting it to rub its nose before every exam....Studying might have been a better idea, she flunked out at sopho…
— James D. Parriott, Dr. Meredith Grey, Ellen Pompeo, imdb.com
As I see it, man is a product of his conditioning, and the social forces which mold his morality and conduct—including racial prejudice—are influenced more by material things like food and economic necessities than by the fear and awe and bigotry generated by the high priests of commercialized super…
I judge religions on the basis of what they do, and I'm afraid to say that the insidious power of religion has been with us for thousands of years. I do not respect irrationality, stupidity, or superstition, and much of religion is rooted in these.
Fearless flyers will laugh in the face of superstition today when they board the last ever Flight 666 to HEL on Friday the 13th. Travelling on the ‘unluckiest day of the year’ could save you some pounds, but a journey straight to HEL on the 13th hour of the superstitious date is one flight most woul…