“An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.”

There’s a famous quotation about atheists associated with the date December 14 that is widely attributed to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen:

       “An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.”
 
The source that’s usually cited for this quote is the December 14, 1955 issue of LOOK magazine.

Sheen did use this line in an article in LOOK magazine and it’s one of his best known quotes.

However, despite what many quotation reference books and websites say, that article was not in the December 14, 1955 issue of LOOK.

There was no December 14, 1955 issue of LOOK. The LOOK magazine published in mid-December of 1955 was dated December 13, 1955. And, Sheen wasn’t featured in that issue.

He was featured on the cover of the December 14, 1954 issue of LOOK and in an article inside that issue titled “Religion’s Best Sellers.”

So, December 14, 1954 is the correct date for Sheen’s use of “An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support” in LOOK.
 
It should also be noted that, contrary to what some people think, Sheen didn’t coin that famed saying.

In the book On Being a Real Person, published in 1943, American clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote:  

       “An atheist, says John Buchan, is ‘a man who has no invisible means of support.’” 

That’s apparently why many books and websites credit the line to John Buchan, the Scottish historian, Governor General of Canada and author of the book The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915).

However, Buchan didn’t coin the line either. His use, in a speech recorded in a law journal in 1935, was a reference to something he’d heard. Buchan said:

       “I have heard an atheist defined as a man who has no invisible means of support.”
 
Who created the definition that Buchan heard? Sorry, I don’t know. At this point, the real origin of the line is still a mystery.

I do know that, in his wickedly funny Devil’s Dictionary (1911), the great American writer, curmudgeon and atheist Ambrose Bierce defined the word prejudice as:

        “A vagrant opinion without visible means of support.”
 
Of course, from an atheist’s perspective “an opinion without visible means of support” might also seem like a reasonably good definition of religion.

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“I am not a crook!”

In retrospect, it’s ironic that one of the slogans used by Richard M. Nixon during his first presidential campaign in 1968 was: “The ‘I’ in Nixon stands for integrity.”

Today, the more remembered “slogan” is the one used against Nixon during the 1972 presidential election, a quip attributed to comedian Mort Sahl: “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

Of course, Nixon managed to beat Democrat George McGovern in the November 1972 election by a landslide.

But the pesky scandal that came to be called “Watergate,” which started with the bungled break-in at the Democratic National headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. on June 17, 1972, got steadily worse after Nixon was reelected.

By the summer of ‘73, a Congressional Committee and Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox were conducting official investigations to find out if Nixon was involved and determine whether he had tried to cover up his involvement.

Naturally, Nixon denied it for as long as he could.

On November 17, 1973, during a televised press conference, Nixon tried to make it seem like he welcomed the Watergate investigations and uttered one of his most famous quotes: “I am not a crook.” (Sometimes given as “I’m not a crook.)

“I made my mistakes,” Nixon said, “but in all my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service. I’ve earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President’s a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”

Most observers found the welcoming part especially hard to believe. Just a few weeks earlier, Nixon had fired Archibald Cox and abolished the Office of the Special Prosecutor, in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre.”

But the Congressional Watergate investigation continued and the dominoes kept falling for Nixon. It became clear that covert operatives working for him had conducted the Watergate break-in and that he and his administration had tried to cover it up. Eventually, to avoid impeachment, Nixon become the first U.S. president to resign, on August 9, 1974.

Shortly after Nixon announced his resignation, his Vice President, Gerald Ford, was sworn in as president. Ford’s brief acceptance speech that day included another famous political quotation: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

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“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”

Three years after Jack Kerouac coined the term “The Beat Generation” a group of Beat poets gathered at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street in San Francisco for a poetry reading.

The date was October 7, 1955 and Kerouac was there.

So were local Beat celebrities Gary Snyder, Phil Lamantia, Michael McClure and a then virtually unknown poet named Allen Ginsberg.

In his novel, The Dharma Bums (published in 1958), Kerouac called it “the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance.” He then described this memorable scene:

“Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbook was reading his, wailing his poem ‘Wail’ drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling ‘Go! Go! Go!’ (like a jam session).”

“Alvah Goldbook” was Kerouac’s humorous alias for the Ginsberg and “Wail” was the fictitious name he gave to Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” — which Ginsberg first read in public that October night.

“Howl” was a stylistically wild, groundbreaking poem that quickly became both famous and infamous.

The beginning of the long run-on sentence that makes up the first part of the poem is the most quoted bit:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
       starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
       looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
       to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking
       in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating
       across the tops of cities contemplating jazz..."

“Howl” was instantly revered by the Beat crowd and eventually gained worldwide fame. But it had a rocky start in printed form.

In the poem, Ginsberg writes graphically about heterosexual and homosexual sex and about the use of illegal drugs — forbidden subjects in the uptight society of the 1950s.

When “Howl” was printed by a British book publisher in 1955, copies were seized as “pornography” by Customs officials.

In 1956, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and a popular beat poet in his own right, published “Howl” in the U.S., in a small collection of Ginsberg’s poems titled Howl and Other Poems.

Copies of the book were soon seized by the San Francisco police and Ferlinghetti was arrested for publishing and selling an “obscene and indecent” book.

At the trial, Ferlinghetti was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

During the course of the trial, Judge Clayton W. Horn listened to nine literary experts testify about the book’s literary merits. In October 1957, he issued a carefully thought out ruling in favor of the defense.

Horn concluded that Howl and Other Poems met the current legal test of having redeeming social importance and was not “obscene.”

Thus, Ferlinghetti was found not guilty — and “Howl” and Ginsberg moved on to wider and everlasting fame.

Here are some of the other famous quotes and phrases linked to October 7:

• Former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s infamous comment about blacks wanting “good sex, ‘loose shoes’ and ‘a warm place’ when they use the toilet” was published in the October 7, 1976 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

• “Here is America struck by God Almighty in one of its vital organs, so that its greatest buildings are destroyed. Grace and gratitude to God.” - You may not remember those words, but if you were watching the news in 2001 you remember when Osama Bin Laden delivered them. They were the opening words in the videotaped statement he released on October 7, 2001, gloating about Al-Quaeda’s September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia.

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“Life is like a box of chocolates” – the misquote that launched a thousand variations…

Here’s another “Guest Post” from my QuoteCounterquote.com blog…

THE FAMOUS MOVIE QUOTE: “My mama always said, life was like a box a chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”        Forrest Gump (actor Tom Hanks)        In the 1994 film Forrest Gump        These lines are usually misquoted as “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”  And, both versions are different than what Forrest says in the 1986 novel by Winston Groom that the film is based on. What Forrest says in the opening line of the novel is: “Let me say this: bein a idiot is no box of chocolates.” He goes on to explain: “People laugh, lose patience, treat you shabby. Now they says folks sposed to be kind to the afflicted, but let me tell you — it ain’t always that way. Even so, I got no complaints, cause I reckon I done live a pretty interestin life, so to speak.”

THE 2020 PANDEMIC/POLITICAL CLUSTER$&*%/WILDFIRES VERSION: “LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES...BUT 2020 IS NOTHING BUT NUTS.”            A sign on a 2020 Halloween installation in Medina, Ohio, which features a life-size doll version of Forrest Gump on a park bench. A photo of the installation was included in an article on the Cleveland.com website posted in September 2020.

LEONARD NIMOY’S POIGNANT LAST TWEET: “A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.”           Leonard Nimoy        American actor and author, especially known for his portrayal of the Vulcan character Spock in the Star Trek TV series and movies        Nimoy posted these moving words on his popular Twitter feed the night of February 22, 2015. It was his last tweet. Early that morning he was rushed to the hospital. A few days later he died, at age 83, from end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The letters “LLAP” at the end of the tweet were his shorthand initials for “Live long and prosper,” the popular catchphrase he used in many Star Trek episodes and films. Nimoy first spoke the line in the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek series, aired on September 15, 1967, as Episode 1 of Season 2.

BILL MAHER’S COUNTERQUOTE: “Life is not like a box of chocolates. A box of chocolates is all good. I mean, it would be like a box of chocolates if there was a occasional turd.”          Bill Maher         American comedian and talk show host         A comment Maher made on an episode of his first major TV show Politically Incorrect. (I watched that ep and wrote down the quip, but I forgot to note the date. The show originally aired from 1997 to 2002.)

THE WEREWOLF SUPERMODEL COUNTERQUOTE: “Forrest Gump’s mother had a lot of catchy sayings. I never really understood any of them. Life is not like a box of chocolates. Life is more like a wad of gum stuck to the bottom of your favorite pair of shoes. The more you try to clean up the mess, the stickier it becomes.”          Ronda Thompson (1955-2007)         American novelist        In her novel Confessions of a Werewolf Supermodel (2007)

THE CIGARETTE SMOKING MAN’S RANT: “Life is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So you’re stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while there’s a peanut butter cup, or an English Toffee. But they’re gone too fast. The taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you’re desperate enough to eat those, all you’ve got left is a — is an empty box, filled with useless brown paper wrappers.”        The “Cigarette Smoking Man”        The X-Files character played by actor William B. Davis        In a 1996 episode of the The X-Files TV series

TOM LEHRER’S VARIATION: “Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”          Tom Lehrer        American songwriter and satirist         Part of his spoken introduction to the song “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” on the album An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer (1953). The lyrics of the song include the line: “Life is like a sewer / And I'm trying to wade through her.”

NEHRU’S VARIATION: “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism. The way you play it is free will.”        Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964)        Prime Minister of India from 1947 to 1964        This popular quote appears to have first been attributed to Nehru by Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, in a 1967 issue of that venerable periodical.

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