Quote of the Day

The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents.
-- Stephen Jay Gould ("The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186)

Quote of the Day

I went into a clothes store and a lady came up to me and said "if you need anything, I'm Jill." I've never met anyone with a conditional identity before.
-- Demetri Martin

Quote of the Day

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

Quote of the Day

There comes a time in the affairs of a man when he has to take the bull by the tail and face the situation.
-- W. C. Fields

Quote of the Day

They say no man is an island. False! I am an island, and this island is volcanic, and it's about to erupt with the hot molten lava of strategy.
-- Dwight Kurt Schrute III

Quote of the Day

Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so.
-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack, 1743)

Quote of the Day

This is like deja vu all over again.
-- Yogi Berra

Quote of the Day

... we must counterpose the overwhelming judgment provided by consistent observations and inferences by the thousands. The earth is billions of years old and its living creatures are linked by ties of evolutionary descent. Scientists stand accused of promoting dogma by so stating, but do we brand people illiberal when they proclaim that the earth is neither flat nor at the center of the universe? Science *has* taught us some things with confidence! Evolution on an ancient earth is as well established as our planet's shape and position. Our continuing struggle to understand how evolution happens (the "theory of evolution") does not cast our documentation of its occurrence -- the "fact of evolution" -- into doubt.
-- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2.

Quote of the Day

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
-- Charles Mingus

Quote of the Day

I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment.
-- Gotama Buddha