Rabbi Daniel Lapin: Heres a really blunt question: would the world be — Penn Jillette

"My friend Richard Feynman said, "I dont know." I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bills Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts. "I dont know" is not an apology. Theres no shame. Its a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didnt know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didnt know, he said, "I dont know." I like to think I fit in somewhere between my friends Harold and Richard. I dont know. I try to remember to say "I dont know" just the way they both did, as a simple statement of fact. It doesnt always work, but I try."

"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. I dont want to do that. Right now, without any god, I dont want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you."

"And Ive always said, you know, that I dont respect people that dont proselytize. I dont respect that at all. If you believe that theres a heaven and hell, and people could be going to hell — or not getting eternal life, or whatever — and you think that, "Well, its not really worth tellin em this, because it would make it socially awkward", and atheists who think that people shouldnt proselytize, "Just leave me alone. Keep your religion to yourself"... How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believe, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you and you didnt believe it —that truck was bearing down on you — theres a certain point where I tackle you, and this is more important than that."

"Its amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness. People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if were compassionate well help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint."

"Believing theres no God means I cant really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. Thats good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around."

"Im saying, "This I believe: I believe there is no God." Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. Im not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but its everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family Im raising now is enough that I dont need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"