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Oliver Wendell Holmes

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You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them. It did n't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.

 
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries?

 
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Oh Muslims! Is my inheritance usurped? Oh son of Abu Quhafa (Abu Bakr), is it in the Book of Allah that you inherit your father and I do not inherit my father? Surely you have done a strange thing! Did you intendedly desert the Book of Allah and turned your back on it? Allah said: "And Solomon was David's heir." (27:16); and said about John son of Zechariah: "Grant me from Thyself an heir, who should inherit me and inherit from the children of Jacob." (19:5-6) and said: "And the possessors of relationships are nearer to each other in the ordinance of Allah." (8:75), and He said: "Allah enjoins you concerning your children: The male shall have the equal of the portion of two females." (4:11), and He said: "Bequest is prescribed for you when death approaches one of you, if he leaves behind wealth for parents and near relatives." (2:180). You claimed that I have no position, and no inheritance from my father, and there is no kinship between us. So did Allah distinguish you with a verse, from which He excluded my father? Or do you say: people of two religions do not inherit each other? Am I and my father not of one religion? Or are you more aware of the Qur’an than my father and my cousin? So, here it is before you! Take it with its noseband and saddle! It shall dispute with you on the Day of Punishment; what a fair judge Allah is, the master (of the inheritance) is Muhammad, and the appointment is the Day of Resurrection. At the time of the Hour the wrongdoers shall lose, and it shall not benefit you to regret then! For every Message, there is a time limit, and ye shall know to whom a punishment that will confound him comes, and upon whom a lasting doom will fall.

 
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