The Last Templar

...you can't let something that'll probably never happen ruin your life. You're only helping to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy

...maybe we don't need a heavenly bribe or the fear of hell and damnation to make us behave decently. Maybe it would be healthier if people started believing in themselves instead.

We're still dancing to tunes created by men who thought that a thunderstorm was a sig of God's anger.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? Here we are, two thousand years later, with everything we’ve accomplished, everything we know, and yet this little talisman still rules the way billions of people live…and die.

religion has always been the fuel that keeps the furnaces of intolerance and hatred burning.

Làm cái ghề như tôi thì khó có vợ lắm" "Chà, hẳn rồi, nếu cái nghề đó cho phép anh nhảy lên máy bay với các cô gái chỉ mới quen biết. Tôi cũng hẳn chẳng muốn chồng mình làm điều đó hằng ngày

Bế quan tỏa cảng với thế giới còn lại

Ai trong chúng ta thực sự biết điều gì sẽ xảy ra với mình? Anh chỉ cần sống cuộc sống của mình và hi vọng vào những điều tốt đẹp nhất

What did it matter if it was based on a story that embellished the truth?

...beneath it all, religion has always been the fuel that keeps the furnaces of intolerance and hatred burning. And it holds us back from better things, but mostly from coming to terms with the truth about who we've become, from embracing everything science has taught us and continues to teach us, from forcing us to make ourselves accountable for our own actions.

At the time, any science, as it was then called, was thought to be a challenge to the authority of the Church; a science that promised spiritual purification was a direct threat to the Church.

Over a billion people out there, worshipping these writings, accepting every word as God’s own wisdom, slaughtering each other over them, and all of it without having the vaguest notion of where these scriptures really come from.

And it holds us back from better things, but mostly from coming to terms with the truth about who we’ve become, from embracing everything science has taught us and continues to teach us, from forcing us to make ourselves accountable for our own actions.

most expeditions lacked something Vance had at his disposal: the astrolabe,