“Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”
“Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.”
“It s what you choose to believe that makes you the person you are.”
“It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.”
“Man is what he believes.”
“The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.”
“You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.”
“That s the thing about magic; you ve got to know it s still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.”
“I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!”
“For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don t believe, no proof is possible.”
“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”
“It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I m worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.”
“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
“What do I believe that I deserve in this life?”
“Faith in faith he answered himself. It isn t necessary to have something to believe in. It s only necessary to believe that somewhere there s something worthy of belief.”
“I m convinced that most men don t know what they believe, rather, they only know what they wish to believe. How many people blame God for man s atrocities, but wouldn t dream of imprisoning a mother for her son s crime?”