"All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science."
(Matthew Arnold / 1822-1888 / Literature and Dogma)
"Miracles do not happen."
(Matthew Arnold / 1822-1888 / Literature and Dogma)
"The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always."
(Willa Cather / 1873-1947 / Death Comes for the Archbishop / 1927)
"Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population."
(Noam Chomsky / born in 1928 / Interview 1994)
"There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change -- and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future."
(Noam Chomsky / born in 1928)
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
(Albert Einstein / 1879-1955)
"A miracle signifies nothing more than an event... the cause of which cannot be explained by another familiar instance, or.... which the narrator is unable to explain."
(Baruch Spinoza / 1632-1677)