THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘B’

Posted on by atheismworldwide

Edward Babinski

  • Don’t creationists ever wonder about the fact that the paleontologists   found ape-like skulls with the ‘human leg and foot bones,’ rather than the other way around, i.e., human skulls with ‘ape leg and foot bones?’ . . . Come on, creationists, think about it! Did God hide the human skulls, only leaving behind leg and foot bones belonging to human midgets with misshapen feet, and mix such bones only with the skulls of ape-like creatures with larger cranial capacities than living apes? What a ‘kidder’ the creationists’ God must be.

Lord Francis Bacon

  • A Christian is one   who   believes things he cannot comprehend….He believes three to be one and one to be three;   a father not to be older than his son…           He believes a virgin to be a mother of a son and that very son to be her maker…. He believes a most just God to have punished a most just person…He praises God for his justice, yet fears him for his mercy. The   more he forsakes worldly things the more he enjoys them… He is a peacemaker, yet is continually fighting and an irreconcilable enemy…He knoweth he can do nothing of himself, yet labors to work out his own salvation…He prays with all his heart not to be led into temptation, yet rejoices when he is fallen into it…The world   will sometimes   account   him a saint,   when God accounteth him a hypocrite.
  • An ill opinion of God is worse than Atheism.
  • Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
  • If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
  • In every age,  natural philosophy  had a troublesome adversary   and hard to deal with; namely, superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion.
  • They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility, for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.
  • We ought…to make a collection of particular history of all monsters and prodigious births or productions, and in a word of everything new, rare, and extraordinary in nature. But this must be done with the most severe scrutiny, lest we depart from truth. Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.

Walter Bagehot

  • So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise, and their conscience says it is wrong.

Kurt Baier

  • I suspect that many who reject the scientific outlook . . . confusedly think that if the scientific world picture is true, then their lives must be futile because… man has no purpose given him from without. These people mistakenly conclude that there can be no purpose in life because there is no purpose of life; that men cannot themselves adopt and achieve purposes.

Cyril Bailey

  • If we think that this search for God is a vain search, and that there is no reality to be discovered… then the history of religion becomes a study of the aberrations of the human mind.

Vanessa Baird

  • My mother had a medical attitude towards religion. If you didn’t give children a good dose of it early on they might catch a more extreme case later in life.
  • Today we are witnessing a new evangelical crusade coming from   the   West   which   has   been   dubbed   ‘evangelical capitalism.’ This is more than laissez-faire economics: it sees ‘the hand of God’ in economic liberty, which in reality turns out to be the unfettered freedom of huge corporations to dominate national and global markets. The gospel according to Halliburton. Pitch this against the surge of Saudi-financed Wahabist fundamentalism imposing its all-conquering version of the only true Islam, and it’s hard not to get trampled underfoot.

Carolyn Baker

  • Born-again Christians worship the Bible and not God…. Bible worship is nothing less than ‘having other gods before me…’
  • Christian fundamentalism in ‘cafeteria style’ has chosen which parts of Jesus’ teachings it chooses to honor and which not…. Little attention is given to the Sermon on the Mount and the many passages where Jesus condemns the wealthy and the religious leaders of his time for their callous, hypocritical, mean spirited absence of compassion. In fact, theologians who pay much attention to Jesus’ teachings on compassion are viewed as bleeding hearts, unorthodox, and not really Christian.
  • The hard core Christian message is: ‘You don’t believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God because your mind has been occupied by Satan.’

Robert A. Baker

  • What happens when the same number of people pray for something as pray against it? How does God decide whose prayer to answer? . . . This spring when a small Kentucky town won the State High School Girls’ Basketball crown, the town’s newspaper, as well as the largest newspaper in Kentucky, gave credit for the victory to God’s answering their prayers. Why their prayers were answered and the prayers of the losers were not remains unknown. One possibility is that the Hazard team had a better ‘pray-er’—in the form of their principal, who was also a minister. If it turns out that the   higher   one   stands in   the   religious hierarchy the better the chances that one’s prayers will be heeded, then it certainly behooves every athlete and every athletic   team   to   employ   the   most   religious   ‘pray-ers’ possible. Certainly no one should ever enter any contest unpre-prayered!

Joan Bakewell

  • It was in religiously devout America that Janet Jackson’s breast caused so much fuss. Only as we have become more secular have we shed our clothes and our inhibitions. Who are these gods that they should require their own creatures to be ashamed of their bodies? . . . The notion that the supposed creator is offended by the natural beauty of his own creation is well-nigh blasphemous.

Mikhail Bakunin

  • All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties.
  • If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
  • It appears as if you were not satisfied in recording our Atheism. You jump to the conclusion that we can have neither love nor respect for mankind, inferring that all those great ideas or emotions which, in all ages, have set hearts throbbing are dead letters to us. Trailing at hazard our miserable existences — crawling, rather than walking, as you wish to imagine us — you assume that we cannot know of other feelings than the satisfaction of our coarse and sensual desires. Do you want to know to what an extent we love the beautiful things that you revere? Know then that we love them so much that we are both angry and tired at seeing them hanging, out of reach, from your idealistic sky
  • People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves,   to forget their misery,   to imagine themselves,   for a few minutes anyway,   free and happy.
  • The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
  • The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty.

James Baldwin

  • If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
  • Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

Bernard J. Bamberger

  • The Bible as we have it contains elements that are scientifically incorrect or even morally repugnant. No amount of ‘explaining away’ can convince us that such passages are the product of Divine Wisdom.

Reverend President Canaan Sodindo Banana

  • Christian church history is a saga of exploitation in the name of Christ, from the subjugation of the European tribes, the crusades to redeem the Holy Land from the infidel, to the subjugation and exploitation of native people in the ‘new world,’ to the colonisation of Africa in the great mission thrusts of western civilisation. This history is long, sordid, and deeply sad: the result of the use of the Bible as a justification for exploitation; the self-serving adoption of one group as ‘superior’ to another. In other words, it can be argued that the ideology of racism has its genesis in the Bible.

Iain M. Banks

  • Faith is wrong; belief without reason and question is evil.

Dan   Barker

  • Asking ‘if there is no God, what is the purpose of life?’ is like asking ‘If there is no master, whose slave will I be?’
  • Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true and faith has no limits at all. A great escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.
  • I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self-denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.
  • If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?
  • I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say something positive. You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil-you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace and joy, Trust yourself.
  • Speaking for myself, if the biblical heaven and hell exist, I would choose Hell. Having to spend eternity pretending to worship a petty tyrant who tortures those who insult his authority would be more hellish than baking in eternal flames. There is no way such a bully can earn my admiration.
  • The preachers have got it completely backward. If life is eternal, then life is cheap. Value does not come from surplus, it comes from rarity. Prices rise as supply drops. The reality that our lives are brief is what makes them precious. The fact that they will end makes them more meaningful. ‘Ultimate purpose’ is no purpose at all: it is the surrender of purpose. It is the pretense that faith equals meaning.
  • There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling, absolutely essential to mental health and happiness.
  • The very concept of sin comes from the Bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?
  • Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, ‘yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down…. Amen!’ If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.
  • We think the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. What if the president declared a National Day of Cursing God because He failed us on September 11? . . . That’s how we feel when he promotes prayer.
  • Without the Law of Moses’ would we all be wandering around like little Gods, stealing, raping and spilling blood whenever our vanity was offended?
  • You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that am the one who is mentally ill?
  • You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say “God is love,” they will claim that ‘you’ are taking things out of context.

Phineas T. Barnum

  • The orthodox   faith painted God as so revengeful a being that you could hardly distinguish the difference between God and the Devil.

Ronald J. Barrier

  • Since Atheist ethics are of a higher caliber than religious morals, it stands to reason that our families would be dedicated more to each other than to some invisible monitor in the sky. With Atheism, women and men are equally responsible for a healthy marriage…. Atheists reject, and rightly so, the primitive patriarchal attitudes so prevalent in many religions with respect to marriage.

Dave Barry

  • If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.
  • In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.
  • The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.

Charles Baudelaire

  • God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.
  • Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.

Pierre Bayle

  • In matters of religion it is very easy to deceive a man, and very hard to undeceive him.

August Bebel

  • Christianity is the enemy of liberty and civilization. It has kept mankind in slavery and oppression. The church and the state have always fraternally united to exploit the people.

Samuel Beckett

  • What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

Henry Ward Beecher

  • The God of the Bible is a moral monstrosity.

John Leonard Beevers

  • I do not know that Christianity holds anything more of importance for the world. It is finished, played out. The only trouble lies in how to get rid of the body before it begins to smell too much.

Cardinal Robert Bellarmine

  • To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

Brendan Behan

  • I am a daylight atheist.

Jeremy Bentham

  • The   spirit   of   dogmatic   theology   poisons everything   it touches.

Nikolai Berdyaev

  • We find the most terrible form of atheism, not in the militant and passionate struggle against the idea of God himself, but in the practical atheism of everyday living, in indifference and torpor. We often encounter these forms of atheism among those who are formally Christians.

Bernard Berenson (Bernhard Valvrojenski )

  • Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her?

José Bergamín

  • You need to have a God, a lover, and an enemy, says the poet. Exactly: you need to have three enemies.

Ingmar Bergman

  • I hope I never get so old I get religious.

George Berkeley

  • Atheism … that bugbear of women and fools … is the very top and perfection of free-thinking. It is the grand arcanum to which a true genius naturally riseth, by a certain climax or gradation of thought, and without which he can never possess his soul in absolute liberty and repose.

Rich Bennett

  • Faith – the ability to believe the ridiculous for the sublime.

Sir Isaiah Berlin

  • As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any… and this is a source of great comfort to me. . . . Those who seek for some cosmic all-embracing libretto or God are, believe me, pathetically mistaken.

Matt Berry

  • Faith is the fatigue resulting from the attempt to preserve God’s integrity instead of one’s own.

Annie Wood Besant

  • An Atheist is one of the grandest titles . . . it is the Order of Merit of the World’s heroes…Copernicus,   Spinoza, Voltaire, Paine, Priestly.
  • For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most…. This coarse and insulting way of regarding woman,   as though they existed merely to be the safety-valves of men’s passions, and that the best men were above the temptation of loving them, has been the source of unnumbered evils.
  • No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
  • Some time ago, a Clergyman was proving to me by arguments many and strong that hell was right, necessary and just; that it brought glory to God and good man; that the holiness of God required it as a preventive, and the justice of God exacted it as a penalty of sin. I listened quietly till all was over and silence fell on the reverend denunciator…All I found to say in answer came in a few words:’ If I had not heard you mention the name of God, I should have thought you were speaking of the Devil.’

Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

  • Even the present life does not exist. How could the after-life exist?

John Bice

  • A belief in an afterlife has the unavoidable effect of making this life less unique and precious…. Good luck finding an atheist willing to strap a bomb to his or her back, or fly a plane into a building.
  • As bumper-sticker philosophy points out, ‘religions are just cults with more members.’… What’s the difference, rationally speaking, between believing in body-infesting souls and ancient galactic confederations, or in the stories of virgin birth, Vishnu, the Garden of Eden, transubstantiation, Noah’s ark, Judgment Day, or the baseless concept of the Trinity?
  • The vast majority of personal religious beliefs can be accurately predicted based solely on the beliefs of one’s parents or the culture one is raised in…. Religionists should ask themselves, ‘Are my religious beliefs based on rationality and evidence or indoctrination?’

Ambrose Bierce

  • Christian: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
  • Clergyman: A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.
  • Don’t believe without evidence. Treat things divine with marked respect, don’t have anything to do with them.
  • Evangelist: A bearer of good tidings, particularly such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbours.
  • Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
  • Heathen: A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.
  • Impiety: Your irreverence toward my deity.
  • Infidel: In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.
  • Ocean: A body of water occupying two thirds of a world made for man, who has no gills.
  • Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
  • Redemption: Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin, through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned.
  • Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
  • Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.
  • Reverence: The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.
  • Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
  • Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
  • Theology is a thing of unreason altogether, an edifice of assumptions and dreams, a superstructure without a substructure.

Mark K. Bilbo

  • The very need for a thing called ‘apologetics’ is example of the weakness of the theistic argument. ‘God’ always needs apologies, rationalizations, explanations, equivocations, excuses.

Arthur   Binstead  

  • The most serious doubt that has been thrown on the authenticity of the biblical miracles is the fact that most of the witnesses in regard to them were fishermen.

Björk       Gu mundsdóttir

  • I’ve got my own religion…. Iceland sets a world-record. . . . When we were asked what we believe, ninety percent said, ‘ourselves.’ I think I’m in that group.

Justice Hugo L. Black

  • Explaining the reasons behind the first amendment clause: Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.
  • Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between church and state.
  • No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance.
  • No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.
  • The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.

Jack Black

  • I don’t have any real spirituality in my life – I’m kind of an atheist – but when music can take me to the highest heights, it’s almost like a spiritual feeling. It fills that void for me.

Lewis Black

  • There are some people who believe that dinosaurs and men lived together, that they roamed the Earth at the same time. There are museums that children go to, in which they build …And what this is, purely and simple, is a clinical psychotic reaction. They are crazy. They are stone-cold fuck nuts. I can’t be kind about this because these people are watching the Flintstones as if it were a documentary.
  • Whenever someone says they believe the earth was created in seven days, I grab a fossil and say ‘…Fossil! And when they keep talking, I throw it…just over their heads.
  • You know, that’s why our enemy is so frightening—they have no humor. This is a group of people who wandered the desert for thousands and thousands of years and never ran into a knock-knock joke.

William   Blake  

  • As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
  • I care not whether man is good or evil; all that I care / Is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go, put off holiness / And put on intellect.
  • Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
  • The Vision of Christ that thou dost see, Is my vision’s greatest enemy. Thine is the Friend of all Mankind, Mine speaks in Parables to the blind. Thine loves the same world that mine hates, Thy heaven-doors are my hell gates.

David Bloomberg

  • To a scientific rationalist, there is no distinction between believing in leprechauns,   alien abductions,   ESP, reincarnation, or the existence of a God—each equally lacks objective evidence.

Robert Oxton Bolt

  • A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses, it is an idea that possesses the mind.

Napoleon Bonaparte

  • All religions have been made by men.
  • A man cannot become an atheist merely by wishing it.
  • A soul? Give my watch to a savage, and he will think it has a soul.
  • God fights on the side with the best artillery.
  • I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get.
  • If I had believed in a God of rewards and punishments, I might have lost courage in battle.
  • If I had to choose a religion I think I should become a worshipper of the sun. The sun gives to all things life and fertility. It is the true God of the earth.
  • I would believe any religion that could prove it had existed since the beginning of the world. But when I see Socrates, Plato, Moses, and Mohammed I do not think there is such a one. All religions owe their origin to man.
  • Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
  • Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Julian Bond

  • I’m not religious in any regard…at the recent NAACP convention, almost everyone who stood up prefaced their remarks with ‘first, giving honour to God’. And I never say that. It’s not part of me. And I think for some people that’s something lacking in me, but it’s perfectly fine with me, and I’m going to keep on doing it.

Sir Hermann Bondi

  • It is only in the last couple of centuries that Christian attitudes have   gradually   become   ‘civilised’   and   humane.   Why? Because of the rise of humanism and skepticism. We have given Christianity its modern face, which often quotes the very nice things Jesus is reported to have said, and carefully omits the nasty sayings such as ‘If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.’

Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

  • Now, in my seventy-eighth year, being of sane mind, I declare without reserve or hesitation that I have no belief, and never have had any belief, in any of the religions which obsess and oppress the minds of millions of more or less unthinking people throughout the world.

Bono (Paul David Hewson)

  • I often wonder if religion is the enemy of God. It’s almost like religion is what happens when the Spirit has left the building.
  • These are big questions. If there is a God, it’s serious. And if there isn’t a God, it’s even more serious. Or is it the other way around? I don’t know, but these are the things that, as an artist, are going to cross your mind.

Daniel J. Boorstin

  • God is the Celebrity-Author of the World’s Best Seller. We have made God into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.
  • I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. . It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at   the   stake   or   tortured   a   pagan,   a   heretic,   or   an unbeliever.

Elayne Boosler

  • The Vatican is against surrogate mothers. Good thing they didn’t have that rule when Jesus was born.

Jorge Luis Borges

  • Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
  • Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
  • To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

Max Born

  • Science is so greatly opposed to history and tradition that it cannot be absorbed by our civilization.

David Boulton

  • It once seemed that reason was leading us to lose faith in religion, but we woke up to find, instead, that we had lost faith in reason. So all the old appurtenances of religion which we had chucked out through the doorway came creeping back through the window.

Antony Bourdain

  • I was raised without religion. I don’t believe in higher power. I am instinctively hostile to any kind of devotion. Certainty is my enemy. You know, I’m all about doubt, questioning one’s self about the nature of reality, constantly.

David Bowie (David Robert Jones )

  • I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.
  • I’m not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with a potential of a superman I’m living on.
  • Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on: ‘Well, I’m almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months. ‘
  1. (Thomas) Coraghessan Boyle
  • There is nothing between us and the naked howling face of the universe. Nothing.
  1. Richard Bozarth
  • Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the   desperate   end   over   evolution,   because   evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god.

Charles Bradlaugh

  • I cannot follow you Christians; for you try to crawl through your life upon your knees, while I stride through mine on my feet.
  • The Atheist does not say ‘There is no God,’ but he says, ‘I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word ‘God’ is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.’

Justice Louis D. Brandeis

  • The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles.

Nathaniel Branden (Nathan Blumenthal)

  • Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts   every   day   the   devastation   wrought   by   the teachings of religion.

André Breton

  • I have always wagered against God and . . . I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!

Jacob Bronowski

  • There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.

Dr David M. Brooks

  • All religions are human in their origins, erroneous in their theories and ridiculous in their threats and rewards.
  • By predicating a First Cause, the theist removes the mystery a stage further back…. Such a belief is a logical absurdity, and is an example of the ancient custom of creating a mystery to explain a mystery…. Moreover, if it is reasonable to assume a First Cause as having always existed, why is it unreasonable to assume that the materials of the universe always existed?
  • In the whole long record of man’s career, the finger of God cannot be found pointing to one well substantiated fact.
  • To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure, to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.

C.W.Brown

  • Be careful you are not honouring power or prosperity, as seductive as they might be; but, only truth, as it is found through reason with evidence and understanding.
  • Every belief leads us down a different path. The farther down the path we go the harder it becomes to find our way back.
  • I believe Bible education is the answer to a world drowning in the ignorance, intolerance, exclusivity, and hate created by it.
  • I don’t know why people don’t get that a belief in God is not an answer to anything. You can’t use something never proven to explain everything that is not explained. It’s not helpful. It is the exact opposite of that. It’s harmful to intellectualism.

Derren Brown

  • The trap that people fall into is to think, ‘All the evidence I need is what I know in my head and feel in my heart and what I know to be true.’ But that isn’t really evidence for it being true, that’s just a statement about how much you believe it, and also how limiting your perspective can be.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

  • It is not Islamophobia that makes parents take 14-year-old bright girls out of school to marry illiterate men.

Parson   Brownlow

  • The   worst class of   men are preachers.

Lenny Bruce (Leonard Schneider)

  • Christ and Moses standing in the back of St. Pat’s, looking around. Confused, Christ is, at the grandeur of the interior, the baroque interior, the rococo baroque interior. Because his route took him through Spanish Harlem, and he was wondering what the hell fifty Puerto Ricans were doing living in one room when that stained glass window is worth ten G’s a square foot?
  • If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.
  • If you believe that there is a God, a God that made your body, and yet you think that you can do anything with that body that’s dirty, then the fault lies with the manufacturer.

Jean de la Bruyere

  • A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.

Martin Buber

  • I don’t like religion much, and am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.
  • Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one’s evil from oneself, as well as from others, than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture?
  • The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.

John Buchan

  • I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.

President James Buchanan

  • I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.

Pearl S. Buck

  • I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven or angels.
  • We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won’t let them into our country.

Henry Thomas Buckle

  • The act of doubting   is the necessary   antecedent   to all progress.
  • The clergy…have in all modern countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of knowledge, the danger of which to their own profession they, by a certain instinct, seem always to have perceived.

Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama)

  • After observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, accept it and live up to it.
  • Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense
  • Doubt everything. Find your own light.

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin

  • Science has shown that religion began with the worship of dead ancestors…The worship of dead rich men is thus the basis of religion.

Charles Bukowski

  • Beware those who only take instructions from their God, for they have failed completely to live their own lives.
  • I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our education system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

Luis Buñuel

  • God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.
  • If someone were to prove to me—right this minute—that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn’t change a single aspect of my behavior.
  • Thank God I’m an atheist.

Luther Burbank

  • Science…has opened our eyes to the vastness of the universe and given us light, truth and freedom from fear where once was darkness, ignorance and superstition.
  • The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me. The ravings of insanity! Superstition gone to seed. I don’t want to have anything to do with such a God. No avenging Jewish God, no Satanic Devil, no …hell is of any interest to me.
  • There is no personal salvation, there is no national salvation, except through science.
  • Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of scientific truth as they would a cold bath plunge.
  • Those who would legislate against the teaching of evolution should also legislate against gravity, electricity and the unreasonable velocity of light, and also should   introduce   a   clause   to   prevent   the   use   of   the telescope, the microscope and the spectroscope.

Hannibal Buress

  • My neighborhood is changing so much. There’s this place that was a Mexican restaurant. It is now a small church, which is upsetting to me because I like burritos more than I like Jesus. Because steak burritos are delicious and they’re real.

Anthony Burgess

  • A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature.

John Burroughs

  • It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
  • Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all—that has been my religion.
  • Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
  • Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
  • We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can.
  • What remains, then, for those who cannot pray…This alone, and this is enough: To love virtue, to love truth.

Sir Richard Francis Burton

  • The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

Steve Buscemi

  • What’s ‘God’? Well, you know, when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God’s the guy that ignores you.

President George H. W. Bush

  • I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.

Samuel Butler

  • Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
  • Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.
  • Christ was only crucified once, and for a few hours. Think of the thousands he has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.
  • Christ: I dislike him very much; still I can stand him. What I cannot   stand   is   the   wretched   band   of   people   whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.
  • If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.
  • People are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
  • Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them seriously.
  • Theist and Atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.
  • What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, ‘I bet that my Redeemer liveth.’

Rocco Buttiglione

  • The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion it is an atheist, nihilistic religion – but it is a religion that is obligatory for all.

Giulian Buzila

  • History teaches us that no other cause has brought more death than the word of god.

Lord Byron (George Noel Gordon)

  • All are inclined to believe what they covet, from a lottery-ticket up to a passport to Paradise; in which, from description, I see nothing very tempting.
  • A material resurrection seems strange, and even absurd, except for purposes of punishment; and all punishment, which is to revenge rather than correct, must be morally wrong. And when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?
  • If I am a fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.
  • I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another.
  • Of religion I know nothing, at least, in its favor.
  • The basis of your religion is injustice. The Son of God the pure, the immaculate, the innocent, is sacrificed for the guilty. This proves his heroism, but no more does away with man’s sin than a school boy’s volunteering to be flogged for another would exculpate a dunce from negligence.
  • The poor dog/ in life the firmest friend/ The first to welcome/ foremost to defend,/Whose honest heart is still the master’s own/ Who labours/ fights/ lives/ breathes for him alone/ Unhonour’d falls/ unnoticed all his worth,/Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth/ While man/ vain insect hopes to be forgiven/ And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
  • When the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?

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