Leslee Unruh
National Abstinence Clearinghouse; South Dakota’s Alpha Center

I've had conversations with [then President-elect George W] Bush myself, and he did agree that he would be giving us equal time to the Planned Parenthood message of safe sex. We know that abstinence education will grow under his administration. We have his word on this.
-- Leslee Unruh, revealing Bush's close ties with the Radical Religious Right, Washington Times, December, 2000, quoted in AANEWS #861 (December 24, 2000). Did Planned Parenthood obtain -- or even need -- a bully session with the President in order to stump for its very successful program?

There is no freedom after abortion. You carry an empty crib in your heart forever.
-- Leslee Unruh, on the PBS NOW series program, "No Right to Choose?" (broadcast April 14, 2006). Unruh runs South Dakota’s Alpha Center and is easily the person most responsible for South Dakota's having the most draconian restrictions on both abortion access as well as prevention education. (The prevention education is almost exclusively the "abstinence-only" variety, and at least some of South Dakota's restrictions are probably illegal). One of Unruh's clients has taken Unruh's extremist ideology to a frightening extreme, saying, "Taking a life is considered murder ... sometimes I think I should take myself down to jail." Being an agenda-honoring political machine rather than a science- and human-honoring health clinic, we can expect truth -- and ultimately people -- to come out the losers. What Unruh's clinic didn't (and would never) tell a client is that not all taking of life is considered murder, even in her own Bible. (Cities of Refuge, anyone?) Hey, even if one is to grant that a zygote is "a life" not all "parting of the fetus" is murder -- or even manslaughter. Even Unruh's own Bible stresses this; however, such information was prevented (by Unruh) from comforting the client. You see, Unruh need only bank on the very high likelihood that anybody in trouble with pregnancy hasn't studied the Christian Bible with much if any dilligence. All this is done in the name of garnering political power for a large group that itself preys upon religionists such as Unruh and her victims.

Emperor Valerian
Roman Emperor (CE 253-260)

We will that all our subjects … believe the one divinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, of majesty co-equal, in the holy Trinity. We will that all those who embrace this creed be called Catholic Christians. We brand all the senseless followers of other religions by the infamous name of heretics, and forbid their conventicles to assume the name of churches.
-- Valerian, making law the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, quoted in Henry Wilder Foote, Thomas Jefferson: Champion of Religious Freedom, Advocate of Christian Morals (1947)

Rev Jerry Vines
Former president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1988-1990), America's second-largest Christian denomination

They would have us believe that Islam is just as good as Christianity. Christianity was founded by the virgin-born son of God, Jesus Christ. Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, the last one of which was a nine-year-old girl.
-- Rev Jerry Vines, inviting trouble of the gravest kind upon his fellow Americans, Rev Vines continued to aggravate interfaith relations by directly connecting even mainstream Islam with terrorism, in a statement made at the 2002 Southern Baptist Convention, defended the next day by the newly elected Convention president, Rev Jack Graham, quoted from just about everywhere, and swiftly denounced by Positive Atheism Magazine plus just about everybody with a voice or keyboard who is not an Evangelical Christian of the bigoted variety

And I will tell you Allah is not Jehovah, either. Jehovah's not going to turn you into a terrorist.
-- Rev Jerry Vines, forgetting not only Christian history and Judaism's self-proclaimed history (which may not be pure fiction) but his own Bible's commandments to kill unbelievers, in a statement made at the 2002 Southern Baptist Convention, defended the next day by the newly elected Convention president, Rev Jack Graham, quoted from Salim Muwakkil, "The Islamists and Their Unlikely Allies" (Chicago Tribune: August 19, 2002)

My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.
-- James Watt, The Washington Post, May 24, 1981

I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns.
-- James Watt, to a Congressional committee in 1981, quoted from "A Brief History of the Apocalypse"

We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand.
-- James Watt, (attributed: source unknown)

I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.
-- James Watt, describing his staff to the US Chamber of Commerce on September 21, 1983; this comment led directly to his forced resignation; quoted from Bartlett's Online

Evelyn Waugh (Arthur St John) (1903-1966)
England's leading satirical novelist in the 1930s

• Check out Evelyn Waugh's More Reasonable Sayings

Woman: Mr. Waugh, you say such horrible things to people, I cannot believe you are really religious. How can you behave as you do, and still remain a Christian?
Waugh: Madam, I may be all the things you say. But believe me, were it not for my religion, I would scarcely be a human being.
-- Evelyn Waugh, perpetuating the myth that religion makes people moral in addition to making them feel forgiven, quoted from Paul Johnson, The Necessity for Christianity (1999)

John Wesley (1703-1791)
English evangelist

Giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible.
-- John Wesley, clinging to the spirit of the Inquisition in the face of the rise of Rationalism, from his Journal (1768)

Paul Weyrich
Founder and president of the Free Congress Foundation

We are talking about Christianizing America. We are talking about the Gospel in a political context.
-- Paul Weyrich, quoted from Political Amazon

Christ was crucified by the Jews who had wanted a temporal ruler to rescue them from the oppressive Roman authorities. Instead God sent them a spiritual leader to rescue them from their sins.... He was not what the Jews had expected so they considered Him a threat. Thus He was put to death.
-- Paul Weyrich, repeating the "Jews killed Christ" libel which has fanned the flames of Christian anti-Semitism from Constantine through Hitler, in "Indeed He Is Risen!" Weyrich's April 13, 2001 message, quoted from Jeff Jacoby, "The Christian right's double shocker," The Boston Globe (April 26, 2001)

Samuel Wilberforce (d. 1873)
Bishop of Oxford

The principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God. [It] contradicts the revealed relations of creation to its Creator.
-- Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, from Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom (1896), quoted from Victor J Stenger, Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001)

Barbara Wilcox
Retired real estate broker who belongs to Tampa, Florida's 8,000-plus member Idlewild Baptist Church, and whose faith and hope lies in the re-election of George W Bush

We need to elect someone who will keep God in front of the people.
-- Barbara Wilcox, advocating religious bigotry in the voting booth by telling people to place their vote solely on the basis of religious affiliation, and working hard at spreading ideas that are the thoughts of people other than herself in an attempt to see the Christian religion get lots of free advertising at the expense of everybody else's Religious Liberty, quoted in Brian E Crowley, "Christian Leaders Put Faith in Elections" (Palm Beach Post: June 21, 2004)

"[Tyranny is] to compel men ... to express thoughts that are not their own."
-- Milovan Djilas, The New Class (1957)

Rev Donald E Wildmon
President, American Family Association

Such a movement would cause the ACLU to go bananas!
-- Rev Donald E Wildmon, revealing his motive for wanting to post a sign saying "In God We Trust" in every public classroom, "AFA Activism Action Alert -- May 16, 2001 'In God We Trust' -- Every Classroom In America"

Edward Young (1683-1765)
English poet

By night an atheist half believes in God.
-- Edward Young, in a colorful expression of one of the more popular slanders against atheists, portraying us as secretly believeing, "deep down inside," that the god-claim of the Christians is true, that their horrific ogre-god is really real (and really an ogre!), thus aggravating the stigma against us by portraying all atheists as essentially dishonest -- "deep down inside" -- from The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, "Night," v., Line 177 (1742-1745). quoted from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (see a counter to this notion)

Unknown

     • Check our Big List of Unknown and Anonymous Quotations

Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith.
-- (sign on a church)

Overcoming reason through faith.
-- (sign on a church)

Your best thinking got you here.
-- Twelve Step slogan, meaning that the best thinking you were capable of doing served only to get you into so much trouble that you had to join the fµcking Twelve Step program, so do yourself a favor and stop thinking for yourself (no sh¡t! That's what they're saying!!); instead, let the Twelve Step Program do your thinking for you!

One day they have raised their eyes to an adorable face. A horrible diadem of interlaced branches binds the august forehead; rubies of blood roll slowly upon the livid pallor of the cheeks; the mouth has forgotten how to smile. It is a man of sorrows. They have looked upon him and found him more beautiful, more noble, more loyal than any spouse. They have felt a stronger heart-beat in his divine breast; they have understood that death no more dare touch his emaciated figure, and that his conjugal fidelity is eternal.
    Captivated, ravished, enamoured, enraptured, they have loved him. Rendered insensible by love, they have trampled cruelly upon the broken hearts of fathers and desolate mothers; they have listened, tearless, to the woeful beseechings of those who desire them for companions; they have followed to Carmel the unique lover, the immortal husband.
      -- Unknown Carmelite Nun, quoted in John E Remsberg, The Christ, p. 385

The Subtle Fulmination of the Encircled Sea

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