I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."

(Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, May 16, 1767)

Voltaire

Tags: humor religion satire prayers enmity ridicule social-justice social-life

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Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

[Preface to Brissot's Address to His Constituents (1794)]

Edmund Burke

Tags: truth knowledge judgment arrogance presumption ridicule omniscience pomposity preface-to-brissot-s-address

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[Responding to the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce's question whether he traced his descent from an ape on his mother's or his father's side]

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who … plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Tags: science inspirational purpose nature prejudice evolution scientific question ridicule discussion rhetoric ape aimless obstruction preference religious-prejudice

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The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them."

(The Decider, July 21, 2007)

Bill Maher

Tags: politics humour ideas ridicule idiocy folly dunning-kruger-effect

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The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.

Thomas Aquinas

Tags: science faith ridicule

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Ridicule is the best test of truth.

Philip Dormer Stanhope

Tags: truth ridicule

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Altho' I rarely waste time in reading on theological subjects, as mangled by our Pseudo-Christians, yet I can readily suppose Basanistos may be amusing. Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. If it could be understood it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the scuttlefish, thro' the element in which they move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy, and there they will skulk.

[Letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp on 30 July 1810 denouncing the Christian doctrine of the Trinity]

Thomas Jefferson

Tags: weapon superstition ridicule trinity christians priests abracadabra the-trinity

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Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Virginia Woolf

Tags: ridicule

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Millions cheer the warrior
spilling blood across the ring
while the one who stands for peace
is ridiculed and shamed.
Must hearts forever suffer
from ignorance and greed?
Can bombs heal our souls
or set our spirits free?

Aberjhani

Tags: freedom peace war fantasy suffering ignorance shame lyrics greed novel healing ridicule speculative-fiction bombs human-spirit world-suicide-prevention-day peacism police-reform police-shootings stop-killing-each-other waging-peace coexistence shunning alpha-males cheers human-soul paranormal-fiction songs-from-the-black-skylark zped-music-player

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I esteem myself happy to have as great an ally as you in my search for truth. I will read your work ... all the more willingly because I have for many years been a partisan of the Copernican view because it reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypothesis. To refute the latter I have collected many proofs, but I do not publish them, because I am deterred by the fate of our teacher Copernicus who, although he had won immortal fame with a few, was ridiculed and condemned by countless people (for very great is the number of the stupid).

{Letter to fellow revolutionary astronomer Johannes Kepelr}

Galileo Galilei

Tags: science truth science-vs-religion astronomy ridicule copernicus nicolaus-copernicus johannes-kepler kepler

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