Quote from Aldous Huxley

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Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

—Confucius
The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.

—Herbert Sebastian Agar
The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has.

—Isaac Asimov
It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a FACT, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution.

—R. C. Lewontin
Get the facts first. You can distort them later.

—Mark Twain
The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents.

—Stephen Jay Gould
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

—Philip K. Dick
You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.

—Daniel Patrick Moynihan
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

—Abraham Lincoln
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

—Stephen Jay Gould
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

—Aldous Huxley
All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race — before it had learned the obligation to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications.

—Friedrich Nietzsche
But I try not to think with my gut. Really it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

—Carl Sagan
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

—Rene Descartes
The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start (examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science--or of any honest intellectual inquiry.

—Stephen Jay Gould
I believe that sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it.

—Garrison Keillor
The only truly new ideas [the right] has come up with in the last twenty years are (1) supply side economics, which is a way of redistributing the wealth upward toward those who already have more than they know what to do with, and (2) creationism, which is a parallel idea for redistributing ignorance out from its fundamentalist strongholds to those who know more than they need to.

—Barbara Ehrenreich
A conjecture can be dressed up as a dead certainty with enough rhetoric and protected against dissent with enough threatening language, but finally it has to meet the only test of science, which is that any theory must fit the facts, and the facts can't be altered to suit the theory.

—Clive James (23/10/2009)
Facts are stubborn things.

—Ronald Reagan
Religions make certain claims about reality, for example, that there is a god, there is an afterlife, and natural disasters constitute divine punishment. Believers assert these claims and in many cases try to persuade others to accept them. These claims should be subject to examination and criticism, just like any other claims about reality. In other words, there is no principled reason for placing religion off-limits. Religious claims and religious beliefs should be treated the same as claims and beliefs relating to physics, politics, or pottery. If we maintain that a religious belief is mistaken, unsupported, or vague to the point of being incomprehensible, we should feel free to say so. If the expression of our views offends a religious person, that person has no more right to tell us to keep quiet than a Democrat offended by criticism of President Barack Obama, a physicist offended by criticism of string theory, or a potter offended by criticism of the clay mixture in his or her earthenware.

Our first duty is to the truth, and if well-grounded facts or logic contradict the beliefs of a religious person, we should be able to express our criticism of those religious beliefs without regard to whether the religious person will be offended by our criticism.

—Ronald A. Lindsay

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