understanding Quotes

That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.

Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.