George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer
1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against.”
New York NY: Simon & Schuster, 1981, p. 88.
Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981)
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John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States
2000s, 2004, Speech at the Republican National Convention (2004)
Martin Heidegger book Being and Time
Introduction: The Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being (Stambaugh translation)
Being and Time (1927)
Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist
Touching Peace (1992), p. 1. Parallax Press ISBN 0-938077-57-0
Variant: The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.
Source: Touching Peace: Practicing the Art of Mindful Living
Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist
Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 423
Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker
Source: The Alex Jones Show, June 2010 https://www.salon.com/2013/06/27/that_time_alex_jones_said_the_government_is_turning_people_gay/.
Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States
Quotes, The Assault on Reason (2007)
Context: History will surely judge America's decision to invade and occupy a fragile and unstable nation that did not attack us and posed no threat to us as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, to be sure, but not one who posed an imminent danger to us. It is a decision that could have been made only at a moment in time when reason was playing a sharply diminished role in our national deliberations.
“There’s an unspoken law that you should never start to cry if you have too many reasons to do so.”
Herta Müller book The Hunger Angel
Source: The Hunger Angel (2012), p. 68
Ursula K. Le Guin book Four Ways to Forgiveness
"A Man of the People", p. 107
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
Rome, or Reason? A Reply to Cardinal Manning. Part I. The North American Review (1888)
Context: Among the “some two hundred and fifty-eight” Vicars of Christ there were probably some good men. This would have happened even if the intention had been to get all bad men, for the reason that man reaches perfection neither in good nor in evil; but if they were selected by Christ himself, if they were selected by a church with a divine origin and under divine guidance, then there is no way to account for the selection of a bad one. If one hypocrite was duly elected pope—one murderer, one strangler, one starver—this demonstrates that all the popes were selected by men, and by men only, and that the claim of divine guidance is born of zeal and uttered without knowledge.