Brilliant things I didn't say

In my reading I collect quotes I like, especially quotes that illuminate issues I'm precoccupied with: the class system, religion, politics, reason. I keep them in my Facebook profile, where I doubt anyone ever goes. I thought I'd put some of them here, another place they're sure not to upset the social order.

"Sacred books are as dangerous as snakes, but what makes them particularly poisonous is their sophistical methods of argument, and consequent abandonment of reason, their rejection of testing and debate, and their implicit disparagement of experience, since they, not life as lived, contain all that really needs to be known." -- William Gass

"No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in a Murdoch paper." -- Mike Royko

"You have made ample use of the times of ignorance, superstition, and infatuation, to strip us of our inheritances, and trample us under your feet, that you might fatten on the substance of the unfortunate. But tremble for fear that the day of reason will arrive!" -- Voltaire

"Imagine this place is not about us and never has been and never will be and that this is the history it teaches us and that this is what we must learn and never seem willing to study." -- Charles Bowden

"The relation of stupidity and evil has long been noted." -- Leonard Michaels

"The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The sure mark of an ideology, in science and philosophy as in politics, is the denying of obvious facts." -- Colin McGinn

"As for the view that God's eternal blessedness should be a comfort to the poor, it has always been held by the rich, but the poor are beginning to grow weary of it." -- Bertrand Russell

"If it is the purpose of the Cosmos to evolve mind, we must regard it as rather incompetent in having produced so little in such a long time." -- Bertrand Russell

"Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980. Madonna is like Nero; she marks the turning point.” -- Joni Mitchell

"One may say, broadly speaking, that Protestants like to be good and have invented theology in order to keep themselves so, whereas Catholics like to be bad and have invented theology in order to keep their neighbors good." -- Bertrand Russell

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." -- Thomas Jefferson

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”– Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781-82