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Atheism Quote by John Dewey

“Religions have been universal in the sense that all the people we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless… The older apologists for Christianity seem to have been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor, as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment.”

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More by John Dewey

“The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.”

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“Empirically, things are poignant, tragic, beautiful, humorous, settled, disturbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh, consoling, splendid, fearful; are such immediately and in their own right and behalf… These traits stand in themselves on precisely the same level as colours, sounds, qualities of contact, taste and smell. Any criterion that finds the latter to be ultimate and "hard" data will, impartially applied,…

A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view…

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Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or information and…

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A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it sets store, are connected with fighting…

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The phrase "think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.

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Doctrine that eliminates or even obscures the function of choice of values and enlistment of desires and emotions in behalf of those chosen weakens…

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There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts…

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Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come…

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We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

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But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social…

Even the alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples…

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More Atheism quotes

From Augustine down, theologians have tried to compel people to accept their special interpretation of the Scripture, and the tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials of heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts…

Matilda Joslyn Gage

“What I have a problem with is not so much religion or god, but faith. When you say you believe something in your heart and therefore you can act on it, you have completely justified the 9/11 bombers. You have justified Charlie Manson. If it's true for you, why isn't it true for them? Why are you different? If you…

Philosopher is a dictator who modifies accepted standards with his thoughts.

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No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.

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Let me tell you that atheism has never painted a masterpiece. Atheism has never dispelled fear. Atheism has never healed a disease; faith in…

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Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make…

Thomas Jefferson

The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into…

Arthur Koestler

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God speaks through me.

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A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it…

Albert Einstein

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You cannot ... transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word "God" to be its grammatical subject.

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Many humanists have argued that happiness involves a combination of hedonism and creative moral development; that an exuberant life fuses excellence and enjoyment, meaning…

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If, with all the time at my disposal, with all the wealth of the resources of this vast universe, to do with as I…

Robert Green Ingersoll

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