Madalyn Murray O'Hair Quotes

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.

Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

I have always been on the side of the heretics, against those who burned them, because the heretics so often turned out to be right....Dead, but right.

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels

The essence of an individual’s freedom is the opportunity to deviate from traditional ways of thinking and of doing things.

We've always been a nation of heretics.

Some people just don't subscribe to labels.

I think, my entire life, I was a bit different. And I didn't think I was different; I just kinda always stuck out.

I do so hate to be forced to be anything than other than what I am.

Embrace what makes you unique, even if it makes others uncomfortable.

In corporation [corporate] religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right.

When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity.

Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle.

And then certainly, whatsoever you do - your character, your behaviour - is yours, authentically yours. It has your signature on it. Then you are not a carbon copy, you are original. The Zen people call it finding the original face.

I think, now, younger generations do take that for granted in a lot of ways. I don't think that takes away from the struggle of identity and what that is. But the struggle for identity is everybody's struggle. No matter what it is.

I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'

I have a hard time isolating what it is in myself that makes me so fascinated with the theme of identity, because I came from a normal upper middle-class family. And yet, as I look back at my books, the uses of power, issues of identity, they have - it's recurrent. It happens again and again.

You spend so much time wondering who you are, don't you think? You flounder about, searching for your identity, when most of the time it is plain as the nose on your face. You struggle with questions of purpose and need, and forget that the answers are found mostly inside yourselves.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

That truth which you swallow from others will not be yours...you have to realize truth and work it our for yourself according to your own nature...All must struggle to be individuals-strong, standing on your own feet, thinking your own thoughts, realizing you own Self. No use swallowing doctrines others pass on-standing up together like soldiers in jail, sitting down together, all eating the same food, all nodding their heads at the same time. Variation is the sign of life. Sameness is the sign of death.

What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.

If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him.