I think that you are immune to the temptations of religion. If you are not, I cannot help you, any more than I could keep you from acquiring a drug h… - Robert A. Heinlein

When you’re rich, you don’t have friends; you just have endless acquaintances.

Father had long since cured me of any belief in the Apostles’ Creed. In its place I held a deep suspicion, planted by Professor Huxley and nurtured by father, that no such person as Jesus of Nazareth had ever lived.
As for Brother Timberly, I regarded him as two yards of noise, with his cracks filled with unction. Like many preachers in the Bible Belt, he was a farm boy with (I strongly suspected) a distaste for real work.
I did not and do not believe in a god up there in the sky listening to Brother Timberly’s words.

Mercifully, we stay our hand. Earth’s cities will not be bombed. The free citizens of Venus Republic have no wish to slaughter their cousins still on Terra. Our only purpose is to establish our own independence, to manage our own affairs, to throw off the crushing yoke of absentee ownership and taxation without representation which has bleed us poor.
In doing so, in so taking our stand as free men, we call on all oppressed and impoverished nations everywhere to follow our lead, accept our help. Look up into the sky! Swimming there above you is the very station from which I now address you. The fat and stupid rulers of the Federation have made of Circum-Terra an overseer’s whip. The threat of this military base in the sky has protected their empire from the just wrath of their victims for more then five score years.
We now crush it. In a matter of minutes this scandal in the clean skies, this pistol pointed at the heads of men everywhere on your planet, will cease to exist. Step out of doors, watch the sky. Watch a new sun blaze briefly, and know that its light is the light of Liberty inviting all of Earth to free itself.
Subject peoples of Earth, we free men of the free Republic of Venus salute you with that sign!