Shakespeare on Astrology

Edmund ‘This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit of our own behaviour,—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under ursa major; so that it follows I am rough and lecherous.—Tut!’

– Reed International Books Ltd. 1992. The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare London, Great Britain: Chancellor Press (1996) p. 836

On Astrology

“The stars, as I have already stated, are attached to the world and not, as the man in the street thinks, assigned to each of us, shining in proportion to our individual lot.”

– Pliny The Elder

On Atheism

“Atheist is really a term we do not need; in the same way we do not need a word for someone who is not an astrologer. We don’t have websites for non-astrologers, there are no groups for non-astrologers, nobody wakes up in the morning with the need to remind himself that he is not an astrologer.”

– Sam Harris