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"Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us." - "But I don’t think of you." - Ellsworth Toohey and Howard Roark, The Fountainhead

“Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.” Ayn Rand

"Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits."
--Dan Barker, former evangelist

I am not afraid of the priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries, of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering, without being able to give me one moment of pain.
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio Gates Spafford, 1816

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must approve the homage of reason rather than of blind-folded fear. Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences.... If it end in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others it will procure for you.
-- Thomas Jefferson, to Peter Carr, 10 Aug. 1787

"We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight." - H.P. Lovecraft

"It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world — we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death — the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed." -- H.P. Lovecraft

"It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the darkness of medieval disbelief." -- H.P. Lovecraft

"There rose within him the tantalizing faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly at the back of his memory. It might be in the visible world, yet it might be only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held within his own half-explored brain that cryptic link which would awaken him to elder and future lives in forgotten dimensions; which would bind him to the stars, and to the infinities and eternities beyond them." - "The Descendant" H.P. Lovecraft