William Rounseville Alger Quotes

If we reject science, we reject the common man.

In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural …. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

This is the great object held out by this association; and the means of attaining it is illumination, enlightening the understanding by the sun of reason which will dispell the clouds of superstition and of prejudice.

Faith is a poison that paralyzes the mind. In all the days of your life, seek knowledge!

The more people are exposed to science, the more we will move away from superstition.

This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission.

People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.

Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.

Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.

The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.

Science stands for rational thought, faith for superstition and unreason.

But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance.

We now know that if the crops fail, it was not caused by demons. Centuries of scientific dialogue has made a difference.

Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow-men.

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

Science has liberated the ideas of those that read and reflect ... Science is progressive.

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.