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All Quotes by Topic |
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| There are 108 Quote(s) | |||||
| Topic | Quote | Author | Source | Year | Qualifications |
| When law and morality contradict one another the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his sence of morality or losing his respect for the law [or both]." | Frederic Bastiat | The Law | |||
| When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. | Frederic Bastiat | The Law | |||
| Life, liberty and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
— Frederic Bastiat, The Law |
Frederic Bastiat | The Law | |||
| Atheism is socialism and socialism is atheism. | Leon Trotski | 1921 | |||
| Brethren, our preaching will bear its legitimate fruits. If immorality prevails in the land, the fault is ours in a great degree. If there is a decay of conscience, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the public press lacks moral discrimination, the pulpit is responsible for it.
If the Church is degenerate and worldly, the pulpit is responsible for it. If the world loses its interest in religion, the pulpit is responsible for it.
If Satan rules in our halls of legislation, the pulpit is responsible for it. If our politics becomes so corrupt that the very foundations of our government are ready to fall away, the pulpit is responsible for it. Let us not ignore this fact, my dear brethren; but let us lay it to heart, and be thoroughly awake to our responsibility in respect to the morals of this nation. |
Charles Finney | 1825 | |||
| It is our duty, as far as lies in our power, immediately to organize human society and all its institutions and organs upon a distinctively Christian basis. Indifference or impartiality here between the law of the kingdom and the law of the world, or of its prince, the devil, is utter treason to the King of Righteousness. …If the national life in general is organized upon non-Christian principles, the churches which are embraced within the universal assimilating power of that nation will not long be able to preserve their integrity. |
A. A. Hodge | Evangelical Theology: Lectures on Doctrine (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: The Banner of Truth Trust, [1890] 1990), p. 283-84. |
1890 | ||
| Bend or Break! We cannot permit that this authority, which is the authority of the German people, shall be attacked by any other power whatever. That applies also for all Churches. So long as they concern themselves with their religious problems the State does not concern itself with them. But so soon as the attempt by any means whatsoever - by letters, Encyclica, or otherwise - to arrogate themselves rights which belong to the state alone we shall force them back into their proper spiritual, pastoral activity. They have no title to criticize the morals of a State when they have more than enough reason to concern themselves with their own morals. For the morals of the German State and the German people the leaders of the German State will be responsible - of that we can assure all anxious folk both within and without Germany. | Adolf Hitler | In response the Church's objection to State policies.- May 1, 1937 | 1937 | ||
| The extent of the control over all life that economic control confers is nowhere better illustrated than in the field of foreign exchanges. Nothing would at first seem to affect private life less than a state control of the dealings in foreign exchange, and most people will regard its introduction with complete indifference. Yet the experience of most Continental countries has taught thoughtful people to regard this step as the decisive
advance on the path to totalitarianism and the suppression of individual liberty. It is, in fact, the complete delivery of the individual to the
tyranny of the state, the final suppression of all means of escape - not merely for the rich but for everybody. |
Friedrich Hayek | The Road to Serfdom | 1944 | ||
| That's what laws are for, Mr. Rearden. If the right people don't break 'em they are of no use whatsoever. | Dr. Farris | State Science Institute, Atlas Shrugged II | 2012 | ||
| Abrupt Appearance | Reconstructing the ancestry of a clan like the pterodactyls remains an especially difficult challenge. Flying dragons seem to burst into the world like Athena from the mind of Zeus, fully formed. Even the earliest skeletons of pterodactyls already display fully developed wings and the specialized torso and hips so characteristic of the entire order. Cases like this in paleontology- and there are many more-persuade many scholars that evolution doesn't work slowly and continuously at one even pace. Instead, there appear to be times when evolution speeds up and suddenly produces totally new adaptive configurations. Pterodactyls must have emerged in one of these creative spurts of the evolutionary process. As of today, no fossils have been discovered to show how the pterodactyl's forelimbs became transformed into wings. But the S-shaped neck, the simplified shoulder structure, and the bird-type ankle are excellent clues to the ultimate ancestry of the dragons-the quick and agile early dinosaurs of the Triassic Period. | Bakker, Robert T. | The Dinosaur Heresies: New theories unlocking the mystery of the dinosaur and their extinction. New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc. pp. 296-297. | 1986 | |
| Belief | There is a terrible lot of us who don't think that we come from a monkey, but if there are some people who think that they do, why, it's not our business to rob them of what little pleasure they might get out of imagining it. | Rogers, Will | Will Rogers from ICR | ||
| Belief | Big Bang cosmology is probably as widely believed as has been any theory of the universe in the history of Western civilization. It rests, however, on many untested, and in in some cases untestable, assumptions. Indeed, Big Bang cosmology has become a bandwagon of thought that reflects faith as much as objective truth. | Burbage, G. | Why Only One Big Bang?, Scientific American, 226 (2):96. | 1992 | |
| Belief, Faith, Dating Fossils, Fossil Record, Circularity | Scientists determine when fossils were formed by finding out the age of the rocks in which they lie. | Welles, Dr. S. P. | Article on "Fossils", World Book Enclyclopedia, Vol 7 p364 | 1978 | |
| Belief, Faith, Dating Rocks, Fossil Record, Fossils | Any sequence in which an older fossil is deposited above a younger one is stratigraphically disordered. Scales of stratigraphic disorder may be from millimeters to many meters. Stratigraphic disorder is produced by the physical or biogenic mixing of fossiliferous sediments and the reworking of older prevoiusly deposited sediments. These processes occur to an extent in virtually all sedimentary systems. Stratigraphic disorder at some scale is probably a common feature of the fossil record. | Cutler, Dr Allen H. & Plessa, Karl W. | Palaios, 6/90, p227 | 1990 | |
| Belief, Faith, Dating Rocks, Fossil Record, Fossils, Circularity | Paleontology (the study of fossils) is important in the study of geology. The age of rocks may be determined by the fossils found in them. | Welles, Dr. S. P. | Article on "Paleontology", World Book Enclyclopedia, Vol 15 p5 | 1978 | |
| Belief, Faith, Science | We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. | Lewontin, Richard C. | Billions and Billions of Demons, New York Review (Jan 9, 1997): p.31 | 1997 | |
| Bias | "Creation," in the ordinary sense of the word, is perfectly conceivable. I find no difficulty in conceiving that, at some former period, this universe was not in existence; and that it made its appearance in six days or instantaneously, if that is preferred, in consequence of the volition of some pre-existing Being. Then, as now, the so-called a priori arguments against Theism, and, given a Deity, against the possibility of creative acts, appeared to me to be devoid of reasonable foundation. | Huxley, Thomas H. | Life and Letters by Thomas Henry Huxley. Vol. 1. Edited by Leonard Huxley. New York: Macmillan and Co, Inc. p. 241. | 1903 | Darwin's Bulldog and promoter |
| Bigotry | The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman - whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman. | Darwin, Charles | Descent of Man, p.586 | ||
| Bigotry, Discrimination | An Iowa professor said professors should be able "fail any student, no matter what the grade records indicate, if the professor discovers the student is a creationist. Furthermore, the students department should have the right of retracting grades and possibly even degrees if the student becomes a creationist later." | Frazier, Kendrick | Skeptical Inquirer, Fall, 1983 | ||
| Birds Dinosaurs | The theory linking dinosaurs to birds is a pleasant fantasy that some scientists like because it provides a direct entry into a past that we otherwise can only guess about. But unless more convi ncing evidence is uncovered, we must reject it and move forward to the next better idea. Duck and flamingo fossils have been found in dinosaur strata. How can dinos be their ancestors? ~MPH |
Martin, Larry D. | Sunday World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska), Jan. 19,1992, sec. B, P. 17. | 1992 | professor of systematics and ecology at the University of Kansas and head of the vertebrate paleontology division in the university's museum of natural history |
| Censorship | Geophysicist J. Marvin Herndon’s theory that the earth’s core is a fission reactor.
His theory is not so much refuted as ignored. "The data just doesn’t demand it. What he is doing sounds like a line of reasoning, not a proof" Bruce Buffett, U. of British Columbia "Many paradigms that we follow today don’t have as much backing as he has put together for this." Hatten Yoder, Carnegie Institution So Herdon’s story, … , may not be just a debate over what’s happening in the Earth’s core but a tale of how revolutionary theories can be frozen out of scientific debate. "Scientists depending on funding , and they become frightened of anything controversial." J. Marvin Herndon, Geophysicist "He has a hard time getting attention," adds J. Freeman Gilbert. "This should not be a society of censorship." "But it became clear to me that if I stayed in the academic community, I would have to toe the line and work on other people’s models." J. Marvin Herndon |
Discover Magazine | Nuclear Planet, Discover Magazine, August 2002, Pg 38 | 2002 | |
| Church-State | "And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever." | Thomas Jefferson | |||
| Church-State | "I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proof I see of the truth - that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings, that 'except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.' I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without this concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Government by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war and conquest. I therefore beg leave to move - that henceforth prayers imploring the audience of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service." | Benjamin Franklin | Constitutional Convention June 28, 1787 | 1787 | One of America's founding fathers |
| Church-State | "This is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation ..... These are not individual sayings, declarations of private persons: they are organic utterances, they speak the voice of the entire people .... These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation." | US Supreme Court | US Supreme Court - Church of the Holy Trinity vs US, 1892 | 1892 | |
| Church-State | We have explored the temple of royalty and found that the idol we have bowed down to has eyes which see not and ears that hear not our prayers, and a heart like the nether millstone. We have this day restored the Soveriegn to whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in Heaven and with a propitious eye beholds His subjects assuming that freedom of thought and dignity of self direction which He bestowed on them. From the rising to the setting sun, may His Kingdom come. |
Adams, Samuel | Speech, August 1, 1776 | 1776 | Father of the American Revolution, Custitution signed Aug 2 |
| Circular Reasoning, Dating Fossils, Dating Rocks | The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. | O’Rourke, J. E. | American Journal of Science, 1976, 276:51 | 1976 | |
| Creation, Evolution, Worldviews | Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from preexisting species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence for no natural process could possibly form inanimate molecules into an elephant or a redwood tree in one step. | Futuyma, Douglas J. | Science on Trial: The case for evolution. New York: Pantheon Books. P. 197. | 1983 | |
| Darwinism, Tree of Life, Evolution, Dogma | In the world of Darwin man has no special status other than his definition as a distinct species of animal. He is in the fullest sense sense a part of nature and not apart from it. He is kin, not figuratively but literally, to every living thing, be it an ameba, a tapeworm, a flee, a seaweed, an oak tree, or a monkey . . . | Simpson, George Gaylord | "The World into Which Darwin Led Us", Science 131 (1960), p.970 | 1960 | |
| Education, Bigotry | Every child who enters school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with allegiance toward our elected officials, founding fathers, institutions, government, patriotism, nationalism, sovereignty, All these prove the child is sick, because the well individual is one who has rejected all those things and is what I call the true international child of the future. | Pierce, Dr. | Harvard University, 1973 | ||
| Education, Bigotry | Fundamentalist parents have no right to indoctrinate their children in their beliefs. We are preparing their children for the year 2000 and life in a GLOBAL ONE-WORLD SOCIETY , and those children will not fit in. | Hoagland, Peter | 1983 radio address | 1983 | Former Nebraska Senator, humanist member of Neb. board of education |
| Education, Bigotry | Any child who believes in God is mentally ill. | Brandwein, Paul | The Social Sciences, HBJ, 1970 p. 110 | 1970 | |
| Education, Discrimination | As a matter of fact, creationism should be discriminated against, no advocate of such propaganda should be trusted to teach science classes or administer science programs anywhere or under any circumstances. Moreover if they are now doing so they should be dismissed. | Patterson, John | Journal of the National Center for Science Education, Fall, 1983 p. 1 | 1983 | |
| Education, Faith, Morality | There is no God and no soul. Hence, there are no needs for props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable (unchangeable) truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or permanent absolutes. | Dewey, John | 1920 | Father of Progressive Education | |
| Education, Gradualism, Government | The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next. | Lincoln, Abraham | Encyclopedia of Quotations, 1994, p391 | 1994 | |
| Education, Humanism | Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is 16 tends toward the elimination of religious superstition. | Blanshard, Paul | Three Cheers for our Secular State, Humanist Magazine, Mar/Apr 1976, p17 | 1976 | |
| Education, Humanism | I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level | Dunphy, John | Humanist Magazine, Jan/Feb 1983, p26 | 1983 | |
| Education, Humanism | The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith... (that will replace) the rotting corpse of Christianity. | Dunphy, John | The Humanist Jan. 1983 p. 26 | 1983 | |
| Evolution, Incompatibility | The great body of work deriving from Charles Darwin's revolutionary 1859 book, "On the Origin of Species," is under increasing attack-and not just from the creationists. Richard Lewontin of Harvard, a biologist of impeccably secular views, accuses Darwinists of telling 'Just So' stories when they try to show how natural selection explains such novelties as long-necked giraffes. Like creationism, Darwinian evolution "can equally well explain any evolutionary history," says ichthyologist Donn Rosen of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in a recent book. So heated is the debate that one Darwinian says there are times when he thinks about going into a field with more intellectual honesty: the used car business. | Begley, Sharon | Science contra Darwin. Newsweek, 8 April. P. 80. | 1985 | |
| Evolution, Thermodymanics | Evolution in the extended sense can be defined as a directional and essentially irreversible process occurring in time, which in its course gives rise to an increase of variety and an increasingly high level of organization in its products. Our present knowledge indeed forces us to the view that the whole of reality is evolution, a single process of self-transformation. | Huxley, Julian | Evolution and genetics. In What Is Science?: Twelve eminent scientists and philosophers explain their various fields to the layman. Edited by James R. Newman. New York: Simon and Schuster. P. 278. | 1955 | The first director-general of UNESCO and grandson of Thomas H. Huxley. |
| Faith, Belief, Education, Worldviews, Philosophy | Belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people. One can have a religious view that is compatable with evolution only if that religious view is indistinguishable from atheism. | Provine, William | ‘No free will’ in Catching up with the Vision, Margaret W Rossiter (Ed.), Chicago University Press, p. S123, 1999. | 1999 | Cornell University Professor, Atheistic Evangelist |
| Faith, Belief, Education, Worldviews, Philosophy | Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and is true of evolution still today | Ruse, Dr. Michael | National Post, May 13, 2000 | 2000 | Philosopher of Science |
| Faith, Belief, Education, Worldviews, Philosophy, Ethics | …there are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either. | Provine, Dr. William | Origins Research 16(1), p.9, 1994 | 1994 | Cornell University Professor, Atheistic Evangelist |
| Faith, Belief, Education, Worldviews, Philosophy, Misc | I think that this poll represents our first introduction to the British public's views on this [creation/evolution] issue. Most people would have expected the public to go for evolution theory, but it seems there are lots of people who appear to believe in an alternative theory for life's origins. | BBC News | BBC News, 1/26/06 from ICR 12/06 | 2006 | |
| Faith, Belief, Molecular Biology | … but we must concede that that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. (p. 205) The origin of life appears to me as incomprehensible as ever, a matter for wonder but not for explication. (p. 251) The bedrock premise of this book is that life is a material phenomenon, grounded in chemistry and physics … The findings of biologists … compel us to admit that we humans, like all other organisms, are transient constellations of jostling molecules, brought forth by a mindless game of chance devoid of plan or intent. (p. 254-255) |
Harold, Franklin M. | “The Way of The Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life”, Oxford University Press, NY | 2001 | |
| Flying Insects | The fossil record does not give any information on the origin of insects. | Encyclopedia Britannica | The New Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th ed. 19:804 | 1986 | |
| Flying Insects | Today two-thirds of all species on the earth are flying insects, and their ways of life and ecological niches are almost incomprehensibly diverse. (p. 26) Certain modern species are reasonably similar, in their anatomy, to fossils of winged insects dating back 325 million years. The problem is, wings appear in the fossil record already fully formed. (p. 27) So miraculous a thing is insect flight that nearly all insect biologists believe it could have evolved only once. (p. 28) |
Marden, James H. | How insects learned to fly. The Sciences, 35 (November/December): 26-28 | 1995 | |
| Flying Insects | What could be more familiar than the hover and dart of a fruit fly, going about its business? And what could be more mysterious? Thirty-odd muscle pairs, in coordinated motion, flap the wings up and down 200 times a second-rapidly enough to sing a baritone G below middle C. Biologists have tried for decades to sort out the complexities of insect flight. The wing hinge, where the wing joins the thorax of the insect is, in the words of Michael H. Dickenson, a neuroethologist at the University of Chicago, "the most morphologically complex joint in the animal kingdom." | Aberlin, Mary Beth | Air power. The Sciences 35 (November/December): 13 | 1995 | |
| Fossil Record | As it turns out, all one can learn about the history of life is learned from systematics, from the groupings one finds in nature. The rest of it is story telling of one sort or another. We have access to the tips of the tree; the tree itself is theory, and people who pretend to know about the tree and to describe what went on it-how the branches came off and the twigs came off-are, I think, telling stories. | Patterson, Dr. Colin. | Interview by Brian Leith. The Listener 106:390. | 1981 | |
| Fossil Record | At the higher level of evolutionary transition between basic morphological designs, gradualism has always been in trouble, though it remains the "official" position of most Western evolutionists. Smooth intermediates between bauplane are almost impossible to construct, even in thought experiments; there is certainly no evidence for them in the fossil record (curious mosaics like Archaeopteryx do not count). | Gould, Stephen J., and Niles Eldredge | Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered. Paleobiology 3 (Spring): 147 | 1977 | |
| Fossil Record | The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and "fully formed." I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism. I wish only to point out that it has never been seen in the rocks. |
Gould, Stephen J. | Evolutions erratic pace. Natural History, 86 (May 1977): 14 | 1977 | |
| Genocide | In order to stabilize world population we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. | Cousteau, Jacques | Demanding Accountability, United Nations Development Fund for Women.1994 p. 84-85 | 1994 | |
| Geologic Column | Radiometric dating would not have been feasible if the geologic column had not been erected first. | O’Rourke, J. E. | Pragmatism versus Materialism in Stratigraphy, American Journal of Science, vol. 276 (January 1976), p. 54 | ||
| Geology | The hurricane, the flood or the tsunami may do more in an hour or a day than the ordinary processes of nature have achieved in a thousand years. The history of any one part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror. |
Ager, Dr. Derek | The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, p107 | 1981 | |
| Government, History, Church-State | No person who shall deny the being of God, or the truth of the Protestant religion, or the divine authority of the Old or New Testaments, or who shall hold religious principles incompatible with the freedom and safety of the State, shall be capable of holding any office or place of trust in the civil department within this State. | N. Carolina Constitution | North Carolina Constitution | 1876 | |
| Government, History, Church-State | The Congress ... desirous ... to have people of all ranks and degrees duly impressed with a solemn sense of God's superintending providence, and of their duty, devoutly to rely ... on His aid and direction ... Do earnestly recommend ... a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer; that we may, with united hearts, confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and, by a sincere repentance and ammendment of life ... and through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain His pardon and forgiveness. | Continental Congress | Continental Congress - May 16, 1776 | 1776 | |
| Government, History, Church-State | This is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation ..... These are not individual sayings, declarations of private persons: they are organic utterances, they speak the voice of the entire people .... These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation. | US Supreme Court | US Supreme Court - Church of the Holy Trinity vs US | 1892 | |
| Government, History, Church-State | Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty as well as the privilege of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers. | Jay, John | First Chief Justice, US Supreme Court | ||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | The real object of the First Ammendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mohammedanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which would give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. We are not to attribute this prohibition of a national religious establishment [in the First Ammendment] to an indifference to religion in general, and especially to Christianity, which none could hold in more reverence than the framers of the Constitution .... Probably, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and of the Ammendments to it ... the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State. |
Story, Judge Joseph | 19th Century Supreme Court Justice | ||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason people of other faiths have been afforded asylums, prosperitity and freedom of worship here. | Henry, Patrick | |||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers' let it be impressed upon your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers just men who will rule in the fear of God. The preservation of a republican government depends upon the faithful discharge of this duty; if the citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted ... If a republican government fails ... it must be because the citizens neglect the divine commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the laws. | Webster, Noah | |||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | Chistianity must be considered as the foundation upon which the whole structure rests. Laws will not have not permanence or power without the sanction of
religious sentitment, without a firm belief that there is a Power above us that will reward our virtues and punish our vices. In this age there will be no substitute for Christianity: that, in its general principles, is the great conservative element on which we must rely for the purity and permanence of free institutions. That was the religion of the founders of the Republic, and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants. There is a great and very prevalent error on this subject in the opinion that those who organized this Government did not legislate on religion. The great vital and conservative element in our system is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and divine truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ. |
House Judiciary | House Judiciary Report in 1854 | 1854 | |
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | Religion in America . . . Must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political instituions of that country . . . I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This position is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation, and to every rank of society . . .
Christianity, therefore, reigns without any obstacle, by universal consent. Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspects of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically oppposed to each other; but in America I found that they were truely united, and that they reigned in common over the same country. |
de Tocqueville, Alexis | |||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | No free government now exists in the world unless where Christianity is acknowledged and is the religion of the country ... Its foundations are broad and strong, and deep ... It is the purest system of morality, the firmest auxialry, and the only stable support of all human laws. Christianity, general Christianity, is and always has been a part of the common law ... Thus this wise legislature framed this great body of laws, for a Christian country and Christian people ... No society can tolerate a willful and despiteful attempt to subvert its religion, no more than it would to break down it laws - a general, malicious and deliberate attempt to overthrow Christianity, general Christianity. |
PA Supreme Court | Supreme Court of Pennsylvania - Updegraph vs The Commonwealth 1824 | 1824 | |
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | It is when people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. | Henry, Patrick | Founding Father | ||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proof I see of the truth - that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings, that 'except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.' I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without this concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Government by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war and conquest. I therefore beg leave to move - that henceforth prayers imploring the audience of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service. | Franklin, Benjamin | Constitutional Convention June 28, 1787 | 1787 | |
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. | Jefferson, Thomas | |||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | The Bible ... is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life, the nature of God and spiritual nature and need of men. It is the only guide of life which really leads the spirit in the way of peace and salvation ... America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of the Holy Scripture. | Wilson, Woodrow | |||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if the faith in their teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country. | Coolidge, Calvin | |||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency ... We ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a Nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained. | Washington, George | Inaugural Speech to Congress April 30, 1789 | 1789 | First President of the United States |
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | It is the duty of nations as well as men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history: that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. All the good from the Saviour of the World is communicated through this Book; but for the Book we could not know right from wrong. All the things desirable to man are contained in it. |
Lincoln, Abraham | |||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith | We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion ... Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. | Adams, John | |||
| Government, History, Church-State, Faith, Duty | The Church must take right ground in regard to politics ... The time has come that Christians must vote for honest men, and take consistent ground in politics or the Lord will curse them ... God cannot sustain this free and blessed country, which we love and pray for, unless the Church will take the right ground. Politics are a part of religion, in such a country as this, and Christians must do their duty to their country as a part of their duty to God. | Finney, Charles | 19th Century Minister and Lawyer | ||
| Gun Control, Socialism, Population Control | Our task of creating a totally Socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist have been totally disarmed. | Brady, Sarah | The National Educator Jan. 1994, p. 3 | 1994 | Chairman, Handgun Control Inc. |
| Homology | It would appear that the title of de Beer's 1971 essay -Homology, An Unsolved Problem- remains an accurate description. (P. 1) In general, there is no necessary simple congruence between genetic, developmental, and evolutionary pathways. (p. 13) The relationships between processes at genetic, developmental, gross phenotypic, and evolutionary levels remain a black box. (p. 16) | Roth, V Louise | The biological basis of homology. In Ontogeny and Systematics. Edited by C. J. Humphries. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 1, 13, and 16. | 1988 | |
| Humanism, Education, Public School | What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching? Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. | Potter, Charles Francis | Humanism, A New Religion, 1935 | 1935 | Follower of John Dewey |
| Incompatibility | The conclusion I have come to is this: the law of Christ is incompatible with the law of evolution ... Nay, the two laws are at war with each other. | Keith, Sir Arthur | Evolution & Ethics, 1947 | 1947 | Keith wrote the forward to Darwin’s book for the 1959- 100 year anniversary reprint. |
| Incompatibility | If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing. | Bozarth, G. Richard | The Meaning of Evolution, Journal of American Atheists, Feb 1978 | 1978 | |
| Incompatibility, Warfare, Worldviews | The great conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face. | Reich, Robert B. | "The Last Word – Bush’s God", The American Prospect, Inside the Crack-Up, July 2004 | 2004 | Former US Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, wrote book "Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America." |
| Justice, Truth, Scripture | 14 So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter. 15 Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey. The LORD looked and was displeased that there was no justice. | Isaiah 59 | Isaiah 59:14-15 (NIV) | ||
| Misc | The German Fuhrer (Adolph Hitler), as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consistently sought to make the the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution . | Keith, Sir Arthur | Evolution and Ethics | 1947 | Anthropologist, wrote the forward the the centenial edition of Origin of Species in 1959 |
| Molecular Biology | Despite the fact that no convincing explanation of how random evolutionary processes could have resulted in such an ordered pattern of diversity, the idea of uniform rates of evolution is presented in the literature as if it were an empirical discovery. The hold of the evolutionary paradigm is so powerful that an idea which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth-century scientific theory has become a reality for evolutionary biologists. | Denton, Michael | Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. London: Burnett Books. P. 306. | 1985 | |
| Natural Selection | Kenneth Hsu, chairman of earth sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, says that "we were victims of a cruel social ideology that assumes that competition among individuals, classes, nations or races is the natural condition of life, and that it is also natural for the superior to dispossess the inferior ... The law of natural selection is not, I will maintain, science. It is an ideology, and a wicked one. . ." | Hsu, Kenneth | Earthwatch. 1989. March, p. 17. | 1989 | |
| Nature | Nature is endlessly fascinating, but offers no 'natural' way of life for humans to copy. Even in evolution, there is no 'natural' tendency toward 'progress', 'perfection', or 'ascent'. Most of the time, we don't even know what is going on in nature. | Milner, R. | Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), pp. 79, 124, 317 | 1990 | |
| Philosophy, Ethics, Behavior | Every ethic is founded in a philosophy of man, and every philosophy of man points to ethical behavior. | Drane, J. | "A Philosophy of Man and Higher Education", Main Current in Modern Thought, (1927), p.98. | 1927 | |
| Populations, History | According to Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., between 50,000 B.C. and A.D. 2002, about 106 billion people were born. Earth's population is currently around 6.3 billion. Of the approximately 100 billion people born before us, every one has died. I have just one question - Where are all the bodies? MPH |
Shermer, Michael | Remember the Six Billion: One hundred and six billion arguments against immortality, Scientific American, October, 2003, p43 | 2003 | Professional Skeptic |
| Propaganda, Education, Worldviews, Philosophy, Science | I use…trust to effectively brainwash them [students] …our teaching methods are primarily those of propaganda. We only introduce arguments and evidence that supports the currently accepted theories and omit or gloss over any evidence to the contrary. | Singham, Mark | “Teaching and Propaganda,” Physics Today, (vol. 53, June 2000), p. 54 | 2000 | Educator, Author |
| Racism | The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world. | Darwin, Charles | A letter to W. Graham, July 3, 1881 | 1881 | |
| Racism | At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. | Darwin, Charles | The Descent of Man | ||
| Racism | The German Fuhrer ... has consistently sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution. | Keith, Sir Arthur | Evolution and Ethics, 1947, p. 230 | 1947 | |
| Science | Charles Lyell was a lawyer by profession, and his book is one of the most brilliant briefs published by an advocate... Lyell relied upon true bits of cunning to establish his uniformitarian views as the only true geology. First, he set up a straw man to demolish. In fact, the catastrophists were much more empirically minded than Lyell. The geologic record does seem to require catastrophes: rocks are fractured and contorted; whole faunas are wiped out. To circumvent this literal appearance, Lyell imposed his imagination upon the evidence. The geologic record, he argued, is extremely imperfect and we must interpolate into it what we can reasonably infer but cannot see. The catastrophists were the hard-nosed empiricists of their day, not the blinded theological apologists. | Gould, Stephen J. | Natural History (Feb 1975): p.16 | 1975 | |
| Science | Our theory of evolution has become ... one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus "outside of empirical science" but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas, either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems, have attained currency far beyond their validity. They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training. | Ehrlich, Paul R., and L. C. Birch. | Evolutionary history and population biology. Nature 214 (22 April): 349-352. | 1967 | |
| Science | Our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective 'scientific method' with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots is self-serving mythology. | Gould, Stephen J. | Natural History 103(2):14, 1994 | 1994 | |
| Science | ...science is not as empirical as many scientists seem to think it is. No observed and even unobservable entities play an important part in it. Science is not just the making of observations: it is the making of inferences on the basis of observations within the framework of a theory. | Hull, David | The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy- Two Thousand Years of Stasis (II), British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 16(61):1-18, 1965 | 1965 | |
| Science | Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic. | Todd, Dr. Scott | Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423 (Sept 30, 1999) | 1999 | An immunologist at Kansas State University |
| Science | We are not able to make cosmological models without some admixture of ideology. | Hawking, Stephen & Ellis | The Large Scale Structure of Space Time | ||
| Science | Thus conceived, science is not a quest for certainty; it is rather a quest which is successful only to the degree that it is continuous. | Conant, James | Science and Understanding, Yale, 1951, 25-25 | 1951 | |
| Science | Difficult for the layman to understand is that the scientist’s criterion for a 'good' theory does not depend upon whether it is true or not | Booth, Verne H. | Physical Science, 1962, 147-48 | 1962 | |
| Science, Bias | A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism - it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms. | Rennie, John | Scientific American, July 2002, p84 | 2002 | Editor in Chief of Scientific American |
| Scripture | In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. | God through Moses | Genesis 1:1 | ||
| Thermodymanics | The simple expenditure of energy is not sufficient to develop and maintain order. A bull in a china shop performs work, but he neither creates nor maintains organization. The work needed is particular work; it must follow specifications; it requires information on how to proceed. | Simpson, George G., and William Beck | Life: An Introduction to Biology. 2d ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World Pub. Co. P. 466. | 1965 | |