Here’s this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes amusing and thoughtful. There’s a somewhat philosophical theme this month …
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.
[Penn Jillette]
Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance.  It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.  A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
[Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865]
When you try to form an institution around such a loose set of non-beliefs [Zen Buddhism], and around that kind of idea of what spiritual authority means, you’re going to have some difficulties. How do you get all sorts of people on the same page about something when one of your core ideas is that no two people are ever on the same page about anything?
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/more-buddhist-scandals/5464]
One should never immediately attribute bad intent to a person holding a position one disagrees with.
[Ben Shapiro]
Those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children.
[Cicero]
Brexit. The undefined being negotiated by the unprepared in order to get the unspecified for the uninformed.
[unknown]
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
Beware of purity workers [who are] ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of their fellow creatures in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force.
[Josephine Butler, 1828-1906]
Naturism brings confidence, positivity and better health for body and mind. After all, we are born this way. We are part of Nature.
Most people have some means of filling up the gap between perception and reality, and, after all, in those circumstances there are far worse things than gin.
[Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time]
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.
[Douglas Adams]