Robert G Ingersoll - Charles Darwin - Tony Benn - Simone Weil - Friedrich Nietzsche - Sigmund Freud - W V O Quine - Mahatma Gandhi - Theodore Roosevelt - Thomas Huxley - Thomas Babington Macaulay - Helena Blavatsky - Noam Chomsky - Richard Dawkins -
I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous – if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men. Robert G Ingersoll
This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself. Robert G Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tenant for the mind of an honest man. Any man who is afraid to have his doctrine investigated is not only a coward but a hypocrite. Robert G Ingersoll
The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called ‘faith’. Robert G Ingersoll, On the Gods and Other Essays
Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine. Charles Darwin, Autobiography
A faith is something you die for; a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world. Tony Benn
A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines. Simone Weil
Jesus died too soon: if he had lived to my age he would have repudiated the doctrine. Friedrich Nietzsche
I have found little that is good about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think. Sigmund Freud
On the doctrinal side, I do not see that we are farther along than where Hume left us. The Human predicament is the human predicament. W V O Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays 1969
I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality. Mahatma Gandhi
I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. Theodore Roosevelt
The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false. Thomas Huxley
To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked. Thomas Babington Macaulay
The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which History refuses to deal, and to which esoteric teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology. Helena Blavatsky
The doctrine that everything is fine as long as the population is quiet, that applies in the Middle East, applies in Central America, it applies in the United States. Noam Chomsky
I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our objectivity. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion p253