"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."
Mark Twain
"The fight both for and against slavery in the United States was waged first along scriptural lines. . . . There was also the theory of the descent from Ham which attained great vogue and still does in certain quarters. . . . With the superseding of religion by science the battle of inequality shifted from a scriptural wording to a scientific one. Now it was no longer what "God had said" but what color, hair, and skull showed. . . . In other words, the pro-slavery faction and the antislavery one had entered the stage in new costumes. Underneath were the same bodies."
Joel Augustus Rogers
"Pointing to another world will never stop vice among us; shedding light over this world can alone help us."
Walt Whitman
"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."
Bertrand Russell
"It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science."