What I want to happen to religion in the future is this: I want it to be like bowling. It’s a hobby, something some people will enjoy, that has some virtues to it, that will have its own institutions and its traditions and its own television programming, and that families will enjoy together. It’s not something I want to ban or that should affect hiring and firing decisions, or that interferes with public policy. It will be perfectly harmless as long as we don’t elect our politicians on the basis of their bowling score, or go to war with people who play nine-pin instead of ten-pin, or use folklore about backspin to make decrees about how biology works.
-- PZ Myers

Be ashamed to die before you do something for humanity
-- Horace Mann

Two great quotes today...

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
- William Hazlitt

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
- Sir Barnett Cocks

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. -- Paul Krugman

The central enemy of reliability is complexity.
-— Geer et al.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. -- Umberto Eco

"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."

- Bernard Berenson

"People do best what comes naturally."
- John F. Kennedy

No one displaying the Confederate flag gets to lecture any American about patriotism - ever
-- Jon Perr

No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers. -- J. Scott Armstrong