Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.
-Carl Gustav Jung
At the heart of science is an essential tension... [A]n openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counter intuitive they may be, and the most ruthless, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.
-Carl Sagan
Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing...
It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different... There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
-Sherlock Holmes
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men...
-Clarence Darrow, 1925
The truth is imperishable, eternal and immortal and needs no human agency to support it...
-Dudley Malone
...this most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being... I find more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history whatsoever.
-Isaac Newton
Creationists and evolutionists are alike in their foolish arrogance. As the Lord asked Job,
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
-The Stranger
It is my nature to think where others read; to ask less whether the world agrees with me than whether I agree with the truth.
-Thomas Sydenham
Most families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed ancestors.
-Niles Eldredge
There are many levels of life which we cannot see and know, yet which certainly exist...
-Manly P. Hall
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or
a magician with the
same delight.
-CS Lewis
Sins carry their punishment with them by the order of nature and by virtue of the mechanical structure of things itself; and in the same way, noble actions will attract their rewards by ways which are mechanical as far as bodies are concerned...
-Gottfried Leibniz
We may acknowledge a central and surprising fact of life's history, marked decrease in disparity followed by an outstanding increase in diversity within the few surviving designs.
-Stephen Jay Gould
It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn... If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions, how are they going to believe in the matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life and the kingdom of heaven?
-St. Augustine
Liberty cannot be established without morality... It depends upon ourselves whether the principle is to lead to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.
-Alexis de Toqueville
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