On this page I’ll keep up with some quotes I like. Eventually maybe I’ll do one of those random quote thingies with them.

Fulke Greville, Mustapha:

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.

Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Einfalle:

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides.

Blaise Pascal, Pensees:

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces makes me afraid. (Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.)

Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason:

The world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes–like blasphemy–and where the totality of a child’s education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us.

The contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge and secular interests are restraining the most lethal improprieties of faith. It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity. (p. 224-225)

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call ’spiritual.’ No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this. (p. 227)

Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates:

In the U.S.A., we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues. That is why the “city on a hill” is the image from [John] Winthrop’s speech that stuck and not “members of the same body.” No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of “mourn together, suffer together.” City on a hill, though–that has a backbeat we can dance to. (p. 63)

Neither [Roger] Winthrop nor [John] Cotton will ever get over their arguments of 1633-1635. The two will spend the rest of their lives irking each other so much they would engage in the seventeenth-century New England version of a duel: pamphlet fight! (p. 112)

Yukio Mishima, “Death in Midsummer”:

It was the height of summer, and there was anger in the rays of the sun.