Bernard Baruch

Making a success of the job at hand is the best step toward the kind you want.

Richard Carrier

It offends me that an invisible god is given credit for every good thing that happens in the world, while every evil is blamed on humanity. There is much evil in the world that is not the fault of human beings, such as ignorance and disease and droughts, and most of the things that are good are entirely the product of human love, effort or genius, such as friendship and vaccines and even irrigation pipes.

When a doctor saves someone's life, we truly owe our thanks to the doctor, and the society that made her education possible. It is insulting to both when a god is thanked for something that he could have done himself but didn't. If a loving god really existed, we would not need doctors in the first place.

Sam Harris

Technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences -- and hence our religious beliefs -- antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore that billions of our neighbours believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millenia -- because our neighbours are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal", or they will unmake our world.

Swami Vivekananda

Toleration? Toleration means that, I think that you are wrong and I am just allowing you to live. Is it not a blasphemy to think that you and I are allowing others to live? Our watchword, then, will be acceptance, and not exclusion. Not only toleration, for so called toleration is often blasphemy, and I do not believe in it. I believe in acceptance.