#superstition

"Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens."

"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!"

"Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition."

"We live in a world where unfortunately the distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by manipulation of facts, by exploitation of uncritical minds, and by the pollution of the language."

"It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]"

"Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant."

"We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise."

"Those distinct substances, which concretes generally either afford, or are made up of, may, without very much inconvenience, be called the elements or principles of them."

"People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe"

"What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition."

"There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can."

"We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act."

"My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition--broken mirrors and so forth--hope's not based on any kind of logic, it's just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control."

"If a black cat crosses your path, it signifies that the animal is going somewhere."

"Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition."

"If superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far."

"If you believed in Christianity or Islam it was called 'faith', but if you believed in astrology or friday the thirteenth it was Superstition!"

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."

"I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them."