"I beg you to believe in the most ridiculous of all superstitions: that humanity is at the centre of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty. If you can believe that and make others believe it, human beings might stop treating each other like garbage."

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in a 1970 commencement address according to "Thought du Jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail June 11, 2003

"Know Thyself"

The inscription on the temple at Delphi "ascribed to Apollo himself" according to Juvenal

"an open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the foodpipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake."

Northrop Frye The Great Code

"Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, he [Ivan Karamazov] ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: 'What does that prove?'"

Camus "Absurd Creation" in The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

 "There is no significance to the sound and fury of his [man’s] life, as of a stage tragedy, unless something is being affirmed by the complete action."

Richard Weaver Ideas Have Consequences p. 20.

In the modern view "With the Enlightenment… World history was finally brought to its climax, its real new beginning, not in Jerusalem but in Western Europe and America, not in the first century but in the eighteenth. (We may perhaps be allowed a wry smile at the way in which post-Enlightenment thinkers to this day heap scorn upon the apparently ridiculous idea that world history reached its climax in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, while themselves holding a view we already know to be at least equally ridiculous.)"

N.T. Wright The Challenge of Jesus

"They are good people in the worst sense of the word."

Mark Twain on the religious right of his day, quoted by Jay Nordlinger in National Review April 19, 1999 [actually quoting Garrison Keillor quoting Twain].

"it is the only true object of existence to mean something"

G.K. Chesterton, "The Heraldic Lion," in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton