Famous thoughts...

**__Richard Dawkins__**

*-A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

*-But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

*-By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

*-Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

*-Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

*-For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

*-God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

*-I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

*-Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

*-It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

*-Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

*-Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

*-One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

*-Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

*-Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

*-The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

*- The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

*-The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

*-The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

*-The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

**__Thomas Huxley__**

*-All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

*-Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

*-Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

*-Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.

*-Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

*-Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.

*- History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

*- I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.

*-I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young. I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

*-I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.

*-I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men.

*-I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.

*-If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

*-If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.

*-In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.

*-In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

*-Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

*-It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.

*-It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

*-A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.

**__James Lovelock__**

*-A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.

*-All the modelling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it.

*-An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

*-China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution.

*-Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

*-Climatologists are all agreed that we'd be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.

*-Esso has been the main one in America spreading the disinformation that there is no global warming problem.

*-Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

*-Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.

*-For each of our actions there are only consequences.

*-Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.

*-I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn't surprise me at all.

*-I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.

*-I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.

*-I'm not a pessimist, even though I do think awful things are going to happen.

*-I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

*-If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

*-If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

*-If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

**__Abraham Lincoln__**

*-A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.

*-A house divided against itself cannot stand.

*-A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

*-All I am, or can be, I owe to my angel mother.

*-All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind.

*-All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

*-Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

*-Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.

*-Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?

*-America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

*-Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.

*-As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

*-Avoid popularity if you would have peace.

*-Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.

*-Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.

*-Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

*-Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.

*-Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

*-Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

**__Elisabeth Kubler-Ross__**

*-Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.

*-For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.

*-I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

*-I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers.

*-I say to people who care for people who are dying, if you really love that person and want to help them, be with them when their end comes close. Sit with them - you don't even have to talk. You don't have to do anything but really be there with them.

*-I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.

*-It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.

*-It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.

*-It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

*-Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.

*-Live, so you do not have to look back and say: 'God, how I have wasted my life.'

*-People are like stained - glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

*-Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.

*-The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.

*-There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.

*-Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.

*-Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.

*-We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.