PZ Myers Quotes & Sayings

Common sense - so rare it's a god damn superpower — PZ Myers

Human beings are still fish. — PZ Myers

Rational people have better things to do than grant unwarranted credibility to every half-assed delusion. — PZ Myers

We shouldn't be gratuitously obnoxious; we should be purposefully obnoxious. — PZ Myers

Silence is an argument in favor of the status quo. A refusal to address an inequity is a strategy for maintaining that inequity. — PZ Myers

Many of the religious apologists out there are not stupid people, they are often brilliant. People working in the field of theology and philosophy smart people everywhere. What they are those religious apologists are smart poeple who can build these amazingly intricate rationalizations for whatever weird practice they favor. Whether it's ritual cannibalism, or praying to spirits, or treating women as chattel. And they always building this on terrible shaky foundation of false premises. — PZ Myers

Science is not infallible, but it has something religion lacks: a process of testing claims against real-world observations. — PZ Myers

The hypothesis of the supernatural and/or a supreme being is vague, unfounded, and inapplicable in any practical fashion — PZ Myers

Religion is an act of sedition against reason. Whatever religion is most seductive and likely to draw in victims to surrender their skepticism is the worst. — PZ Myers

Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don't ever wield the damned thing ever again. — PZ Myers

We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned. — PZ Myers

It's amazing how much detail Catholics will go into documenting why people shouldn't do the things that they all do anyway. — PZ Myers

And of course death can't be conquered ... but oh, the battle can be glorious. — PZ Myers

Very clever people are often very clever at creating rationalisations for insane beliefs. — PZ Myers

Science provides tangible evidence of its accuracy and importance. Religion makes excuses for its absence of the same. — PZ Myers

We godless lack that certainty, and we know the world is a complex place that requires compromise and is not ruled by a moral force - virtue is subject to negotiation, and is found in working together with others to find mutually satisfactory solutions. Good is not absolute, it is an emergent property that arises from successful networks of individuals. It is also something that is measured by evidence: we look at the good that people do, not the promises that they make and never keep, or the lies that dovetail nicely into dogma. Competence is a virtue. Intent is meaningless without action. — PZ Myers

FAITH. No one word personifies the absolute worst and most wicked properties of religion better than that. Faith is mind-rot. It's the poison that destroys critical thinking, undermines evidence, and leads people into lives dedicated to absurdity. It's a parasite regarded as a virtue. I speak as a representative of the scientific faction of atheism: it's one thing we simply cannot compromise on. Faith is wrong. — PZ Myers

Religion is to misogyny as disease is to misery - not the sole cause, but a significant contributor — PZ Myers

Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws- laws that apply everywhere and to everything, with no special exemptions or amplifications for your benefit- given variety by the input of chance. Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident. — PZ Myers

The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren't special. The universe does not revolve around you; this planet isn't privileged in any unique way; your country is not the perfect product of directed, intentional fate; and that tuna sandwich you had for lunch was not plotting to give you indigestion. — PZ Myers

We live our lives for our life's sake, rather than for illusions about rewards and satisfaction after we're dead. — PZ Myers