THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘R’

Aron Ra

• Atheists don’t want religions to have exemptions under the Law. And why should we atheists? It’s not our demographic that has the most divorce, the most chemical dependency, domestic violence, criminal convictions, or even abortion. The only thing we might have more of are Diplomas.

Francois Rabelais

• I am going to seek a Great Perhaps.

Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

• It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority, not violation of integrity.

Ayn Rand (Alissa Rosenbaum)

• All religious people their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say . . . God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit . . . knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.
• Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
• Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.
• For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket-by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief . . . by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners.
• I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion.
• If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking…. The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.
• If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a ‘moral commandment’ is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
• The cross is the symbol of torture. I prefer the dollar sign, the symbol of free trade, therefore of a free mind.

James Randi (The Amazing Randi) (Randall Zwinge)

• No amount of belief makes something a fact.
• Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What’s left is magic and it doesn’t work.
• Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.
• To make sure that my blasphemy is thoroughly expressed ,I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a superstition and that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s). Further, devils, demons, angels and saints are myths; there is no life after death, no heaven or hell; the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and the Holy Ghost is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision. I accuse the Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place-not to mention the ‘ethnic cleansing’ presently being performed by Christians in our world-and I condemn and vilify this mythical deity for encouraging racial prejudice and commanding the degradation of women.
• To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage.

A Philip Randolph

• Prayer is not one of our remedies. It depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer nothing more than a fervent wish, consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is.

Frater Ravus

• Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions.

Ibn   al-Rawandi

• Islam never really encouraged science,   if by science we mean ‘disinterested inquiry.’ What Islam always meant by ‘knowledge’ was religious knowledge, anything else was deemed dangerous to the faith. All the real science that occurred under Islam occurred despite the religion not because of it.  
• The myth of Islamic tolerance was largely invented by Jews and Western freethinkers as a stick with which to beat the   Catholic   Church.   Islam   was   never   a   religion   of tolerance…. Islam was spread by the sword . . . like the Arab empire. . . It is a religion largely invented to hold that empire   together   and   subdue   native   populations.   An unmitigated   cultural   disaster   parading   as   God’s   will. Religious minorities were always second-class citizens in this empire…. For polytheists and unbelievers there was no tolerance at all, it was conversion or death…. These repulsive characteristics are written into the Quran, the hadith and the sharia. . . . There is no way that Islam can reform itself and remain Islam, no way it can ever be made compatible with pluralism, free speech, critical thought and democracy.
• The mealy-mouthed and apologetic character of so much Western scholarship on Islam springs from the fact that many of these scholars, were, and are, believers in Christianity. . . . They were not keen to press the non- historical and non-divine arguments too far,   since they realised that such arguments could just as well be used against their own cherished beliefs.

Raymond of Aguilers

• A French witness to the First Crusade said: Wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded…. Others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers; others were tortured for several days, then burned with flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet. It was a just and marvelous judgment of God,   that   this   place   should   be   filled   with   the   blood   of unbelievers.

William Winwood Reade

• If, indeed, there were a judgment-day, it would be for man to appear at the bar, not as a criminal, but as an accuser.
• Prophets have existed in all countries and at all times, but the gift becomes rare in the same proportion as people learn to read and write.

Ronald Reagan Jr.

• I would be unelectable. I’m an atheist. As we all know, that is something people won’t accept.

Lou Reed

• My God is rock ’n’ roll.

Seneca Indian Chief Red Jacket

• You have got our country, but are not satisfied; you want to force your religion upon us. . . . Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it?

Christopher Reeve

• Even though I don’t personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though He was watching.

John E.Remsberg

• This doctrine of forgiveness of sin is a premium on crime. ‘Forgive us our sins’ means ‘Let us continue in our iniquity.’. . In teaching this doctrine Christ committed a sin for which his death did not atone, and which can never be forgiven.

Joseph Ernest Renan

• None of the miracles with which ancient histories are filled, occurred under scientific conditions. Observation never once contradicted, teaches us that miracles occur only in periods and countries in which they are believed in and before persons disposed to believe in them.
• Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.

Jules     Renard    

• I don’t know if god exists, but it would be better for his reputation if he didn’t.
• The Heavenly Father feedeth the fowl of the air’—and in winter He letteth them starve to death.

Ryan Reynolds

• Religion poisons everything good in this world.

Rick Reynolds

• As far as I can tell from studying the scriptures, all you do in heaven is pretty much just sit around all day and praise the Lord. I don’t know about you, but I think that after the first, oh, I don’t know, 50,000,000 years of that I’d start to get a little bored.

Heidi   Reynolds-Stenson

• My experiences growing up as an atheist in a conservative, Protestant suburb have made me realize just how harmful state- sponsored religion can be…. The church, as well as our local Campus Life group, was, in a sense, aligned with my high school. The Baptist church held their functions in our gymnasium and we held some of our sports practices in theirs. Campus Life had free reign in our hallways and lunch room and sponsors mandatory assemblies during school hours. I felt constantly bombarded with Christianity and saw many of my peers lured into the church and Campus Life by promises of friendship, community, free food and fun. . . . I began to feel more and more like I did not belong in my own high school and my own town…. At a compulsory Campus Life-sponsored assembly during school hours . . . they passed out teen Bibles at the door, preached, sang songs about Jesus and asked us to be saved if we hadn’t been already…. An announcer addressed the young women in the audience and told us to not trust Planned Parenthood and that condoms didn’t do anything.

Ann Richards

• I would do anything—light candles, say chants, recite prayers, give alms-on the off-chance that one of them would work.

1. Richard

• Almost   always the voice of the Church has been for war.

Alan Rickman

• It’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are , why we are, where we come from and what might be possible.

Mary Riddell

• Like other forms of private succour, such as Valium, Horlicks or a litre tub of chocolate-chip ice-cream, religion has limited use in the public domain.

Matt Ridley

• Readers prefer mysteries to facts,   which is why books about astrology, telepathy, and the Bermuda Triangle sell so well. But science need not concede mystery to the occult. It can match it or better. Mysteries like deep geological time, a boundless universe, the big bang, relativity, quantum mechanics, the double helix, natural selection, mass extinction, and chaos theory-these are richer fare than anything the occult can offer.

Jim Rigby

• Atheism can be the naked pursuit of truth, but anti-theism is more often the adolescent joy of upsetting and mocking religious people.
• I have spiritual friends who are trying to celebrate the mystery of life, and activist friends who are trying to change the world…. I don’t believe either option represents a complete life. Apolitical spirituality runs the danger of giving charity instead of justice, while atheistic humanism runs the danger of offering facts instead of meaning.
• One last irony is that early Christians were sometimes accused of being atheists. Like true Muslims and Jews, the early Christians refused to worship human images of God.

Casper Rigsby

• If I am tolerant of an ideology that perpetuates hatred, then I am complicit in the acts of hatred that arise due to that ideology. It makes me a facilitator and an accomplice and I simply can’t accept that position. I won’t accept that position.

Ali A. Rizvi

• I don’t judge Islam by the acts of a few, whether it’s people like you and Reza Aslan, or ISIS and Al Qaieda. I judge it by the one thing that is common to all of them-the Quran. And I assume its writer actually meant the words he wrote. If everything has twenty different interpretations, the writer is either grossly inarticulate or grossly incompetent. I don’t buy the idea that distortions of words and sentences to mean the opposite of what they say is a form of ‘interpretation’. If you’re interpreting ‘beat your wife’ to mean ‘women are equal to men,’ you lose credibility.
• If any book talked about Muslims the way the Quran talks about disbelievers, heads would roll. Literally.
• Human beings have rights and are entitled to respect. Books and beliefs don’t and aren’t.

Tom Robbins

• Human   beings   were   invented   by   water   as   a   means   of transporting itself from one place to another.
• Religion is not merely the opium of the masses,   it’s the cyanide.

Stephen Roberts

• I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Ian Robertson

• At the time of its Founding, the United States seemed to be an infertile ground for religion. Many of the nation’s leaders include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin – were not Christians, did not accept the authority of the Bible, and were hostile to organized religion. The attitude of the general public was one of apathy: in 1776, only 5 percent of the population were participating members of churches.

Richard Robinson

• Religious persons often consider gambling to be a bad thing. It certainly causes a great deal of misery. But much of the badness of gambling consists in its refusal to face the odds and be guided by them; and in the matter of refusing to face the odds religion is a worse offender than gambling, and does more harm to the habits of reason. Religious belief is, in fact, a form of gambling, as Pascal saw. It does more harm to reason than ordinary gambling does, however, because it is more in earnest.
• The main irrationality of religion is preferring comfort to truth.
• The   theist   sometimes   rebukes   the   pleasure-seeker   by saying: ‘We were not put here to enjoy ourselves; man has a sterner   and   nobler   purpose   than   that.’   The   atheist’s conception of man is, however, still sterner and nobler than that of the theist. . . . According to the atheist . . . there is noone to look after us but ourselves, and we shall certainly be defeated…. When we contemplate the friendless position of man in the universe, as it is right sometimes to do, our attitude should be the tragic poet’s affirmation of man’s ideals of behaviour. Our dignity, and our finest occupation, is to assert and maintain our own self chosen goods . . . of beauty and truth and virtue…. We are brothers without a father; let us all the more for that behave brotherly to each other.

Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

• If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.
• We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.

Chris Rock

• If you’re a black Christian, you have a real short memory.

Gene Roddenberry

• I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will-and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.
• If this is your God, he’s not very impressive. He has so many psychological problems; he’s so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He’s a pretty poor excuse for a Supreme Being.
• It was communion time, where you eat this wafer and are supposed to be eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood. My first impression was, ‘This is a bunch of cannibals they’ve put me down among!’. . . . It wasn’t until I was beginning to do Star Trek that the subject of religion arose again…. People were saying I would have to have a chaplain on board the Enterprise. I replied, ‘No, we don’t.’
• I’ve always thought that, if we did not have supernatural explanations for all the things we might not understand right away, this is the way we would be, like the people on that planet. I was born into a supernatural world in which all my people -my family- usually said ‘That is because God willed it,’ or gave other supernatural explanations for whatever happened. When you confront those statements on their own, they just don’t make sense. They are clearly wrong. You need a certain amount of proof to accept anything, and that proof was not forthcoming to support those statements.
• They said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must pray against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For me, religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just couldn’t agree with.
• We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.

Joe Rogan

• I saw a documentary on Stephen Hawking, where he said he had a meeting with the pope, and that the pope said to him that it’s alright to explore the universe, but not to look into   the   origins   of   the   big   bang,   for   that   would   be questioning God’s story of creation…. Wow. . . . Just imagine that one of the greatest minds to come along in the last few hundred years, and he’s taking directions from a cult leader that wears big goofy hats.

Joel Augustus Rogers

• The greatest hindrance to the progress of the Negro is that same dope that was shot into him during slavery. . . . The slogan of the Negro devotee is: Take the world but give me Jesus, and the white man strikes an eager bargain with him…Another fact-there are far too many Negro preachers. Religion is the most fruitful medium for exploiting this already exploited group. As I said,   the majority of the sharpers, who among the whites would go into other fields, go, in this case, to the ministry.

Will Rogers

• If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.

Andy Rooney

• The Pope traditionally prays for peace every Easter, and the fact it has never had any effect whatsoever in preventing or ending a war never deters him. What goes through the Pope’s mind about being rejected all the time? Does God have it in for him?

Ernestine Rose

• We are told that religion is natural; the belief in God universal. . . . It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are Atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so. Even as it is, they are great skeptics, until made sensible of the potent weapon by which religion has ever been propagated, namely, fear.

Jean Rostand

• Kill a man, one is a murderer; kill a million, a conqueror; kill them all, a God.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
• No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

Anne Royall

• Motto: Good works instead of long prayers.
• May the arm of the first member of Congress who proposes a national religion drop powerless from his shoulder, his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth and all the people say amen.
• What think you, Matt, of the Christian religion? Between you and I, and the bed post, I begin to think it is all a plot of the priests. I have ever marked them as the veriest savages under the sun.

Ernestine Rose

• It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.

Flemming Rose

• If a believer demands that I, as a non-believer, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect but my submission and that is incompatible with a secular democracy.

Dante G. Rossetti

• The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.

Jean Rostand

• Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are God.

Richard Rubenstein

• Only the terrible accusation, known and taught to every Christian in earliest childhood, that the Jews are the killers of Christ, can account for the depth and persistence of this supreme hatred. In a sense, the death camps were the terminal expression of Christian anti- Semitism.

Arthur Rubinstein

• On whether he had belief in God: No. You see, what I believe in is something much greater.

Michael Ruse

• It is difficult to imagine evolutionists signing a comparable statement that they will never deviate from the literal text of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species.

Salman Rushdie

• As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn’t get it right. There was no celestial churning, no maker ’s dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong. But here’s something genuinely odd. The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn’t lessened the zeal of the devout. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.
• Fundamentalism isn’t about religion. It’s about power.
• God, Satan, Paradise and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. I recall it vividly. I was at school in England by then. The moment of awakening happened, in fact, during a Latin lesson, and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. I remember feeling that my survival confirmed the correctness of my new position.
• One of the things that is a … of the religious bigot is, while they’re denying people their rights, they claim that their rights are being denied. While they are persecuting people, they claim to be persecuted. While they are behaving colossally offensively, they claim to be the offended party.
• The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas…uncertainty, progress, change …into crimes.
• On 9/11:‘This isn’t about Islam.’ The world’s leaders have been repeating this mantra for weeks … The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn’t true. Of course this is about Islam.
• To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities. So, how did we get here? Don’t look for the answer in ‘sacred’ storybooks. Imperfect human knowledge maybe be a bumpy, pot-holed street, but it’s the only road to wisdom worth taking. Virgil, who believed that the apiarist Aristaeus could spontaneously generate new bees from the rotting carcass of a cow, was closer to a truth about origins than all the revered old books.
• To put it as simply as possible: ‘I am not a Muslim’… I do not accept the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one cannot be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that ‘there can be no coercion in matters of religion’. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith ‘purely by virtue of birth’, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.
• We could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behavior. Once and for all, we could put the stories back into the books, put the books back on the shelves, and see the world undogmatized and plain.

John Ruskin

• I know few Christians so convinced of the splendor of the rooms in their Father’s house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions.
• I never yet met a Christian whose heart was thoroughly set upon the world to come . . . who cared about art at all.

1. Russel

• It appears to me one of the most immoral dogmas   ever advanced that a man must believe anything   without evidence to prove it.

Bertrand Russell

• A good world needs knowledge, kindliness and courage, it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
• And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.
• Apparently they conceive of the Deity as a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes. This view strikes me as curious.
• Consider the long history of the activities inspired by moral fervour: human sacrifices, persecutions of heretics, witch-hunts, pogroms leading up to wholesale extermination by poison gases … Are these abominations, and the ethical doctrines by which they are prompted, really evidence of an intelligent Creator? And can we really wish that the men who practised them should live forever? The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of a deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.
• Every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery . . . has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
• I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.
• I am suggesting that, in all our beliefs, we should admit a ‘probable error.’ If you believe for example that democracy is better than fascism, you should still admit the possibility of error, though the possibility may be very small. The possibility may be so small that you are willing to kill and die for your belief, yet the knowledge that the possibility exists may keep you from advocating large-scale persecutions and cruelties such as are almost always practiced by those who admit no doubts.
• I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.
• If everything happens in accordance with God’s will, God must have wanted Nero to murder his mother; therefore, since God is good, the murder must have been a good thing. From this argument there is no escape.
• If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.
• If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Indian’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said,   ‘How about the tortoise?’ the Indian said, ‘Suppose we change the subject.’
• If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather than by persecution, and will abandon of the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called ‘education’. This last is particularly dastardly, since it takes advantage of the defenselessness of immature minds.
• I get letters constantly from people saying, ‘Oh, God will look after it.’ But He never has in the past, I don’t know why they think He will in the future.
• I think that in philosophical strictness at the level where one doubts the existence of material objects and holds that the world may have existed for only five minutes, I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.
• It is more difficult to deal with the self-esteem of man as man, because we cannot argue out the matter with some nonhuman mind. The only way I know of dealing with this general human conceit is to remind ourselves that man is a brief episode in the life of a small planet in a little corner of the universe, and that, for aught we know, other parts of the cosmos may contain beings as superior to ourselves as we are to jellyfish.
• Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
• No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin; he does not say, ‘You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.’ He attempts to find out what is wrong and set it right.
• Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.
• One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
• Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
• Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
• So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
• Sometimes, if pious men are to be believed, God’s mercies are curiously selective.
• The Ages of Faith, which are praised by our neo-scholastics, were the time when the clergy had things all their own way. Daily life was full of miracles wrought by saints and wizardry perpetrated by devils and necromancers. Many thousands of witches were burnt at the stake. Men’s sins were punished by pestilence and famine, by earthquake, flood, and fire. And yet, strange to say, they were even more sinful than they are now-a-days. Very little was known scientifically about the world
• The Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.
• The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
• The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt
• The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
• There are logical difficulties in the notion of sin. We are told that sin consists in disobedience to God’s commands, but we are also told that God is omnipotent. If He is, nothing contrary to His will can occur; therefore when the sinner disobeys His commands, He must have intended this to happen.
• There is something feeble and contemptible about a man who cannot face life without the help of comfortable myths
• The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not dazzled by the divine radiance.
• The universe is vast and men are tiny specks on an insignificant planet. But the more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.
• The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
• To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
• We may define ‘faith’ as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of ‘faith’. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.
• What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.
• Whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.

Dora Black Russell

• When the male of the species, enamored of his stargazing, set up a God outside this planet as arbiter of all events upon it, and repudiated nature, together with sex, for a promised dream of a future life, he turned his back on that creative life   and   inspiration   that   lay   within himself   and   his partnership with woman. In very truth he sold his birthright for a mess of potage.

THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘Q’

Benjamin Quarles

• In a heated controversy over the wisdom of giving the Bible to slaves, Frederick Douglass asserted that it would be ‘infinitely better to send them a pocket compass and a pistol.’

THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘P’

 

Heinz Pagels

• I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.

Camille Paglia

• Although I’m an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. And I despise anyone who insults the sustaining values and symbol system of so many millions of people of different races around the world. An authentically avant-garde artist today would show his or her daring by treating religion sympathetically. Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.
• As an atheist, I acknowledge that religion may be socially necessary as an ethical counterweight to natural human ferocity. The primitive marauding impulse can emerge very swiftly in the alienated young.

Thomas Paine

• Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men, can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.
• All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
• All the tales of miracles with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe.
• As to the book called the Bible, it is blasphemy to call it the word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions, and a history of bad times and bad men. There are but a few good characters in the whole book. …there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any.
• Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
• I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
• I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
• If we are to suppose a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called nature, that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is, is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie
• It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes
• No falsehood is so fatal as that which is made an article of faith.
• Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief… it produces only atheists and fanatics.
• Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity.
• One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.
• Scientific Thinking: is the true theology.
• That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests cannot, or that the Bible does not.
• The adulterous connection between church and state.
• The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.
• The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or in print , cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God.
• The declaration which says that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children …is contrary to every principle of moral justice.
• The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
• The NT, compared with the Old, is like a farce of one act.
• There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice.
• The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar.
• The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.
• The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
• This story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple, by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up.
• Thomas did not believe the resurrection, and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.
• To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
• What is it the Bible teaches us?—rapine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us?—to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
• Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

John Pariury

• A favored argument of theists is that atheists are not aware of everything there is to know about the cosmos…. The flaw in this argument is that it can equally be applied to theists.
• No amount of philosophical argumentation will cause there to be a god. . . . Arguments are not evidence…. In the end, I am left with things I have evidence for, and those I don’t.

Dorothy Parker (Dorothy Rothschild)

• I went to a convent in New York and was fired finally for my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was a spontaneous combustion.

Rebecca Ann Parker

• God required his son to suffer in order to save the world. That is an image of God as a child abuser, and Jesus is imaged as the perfect victim. He accepts the abuse and does it silently. He is praised in his religious community for accepting abuse as the highest form of love…. If this can be looked at as the virtue of God’s son . . . how is the victim of the priest’s abuse going to find a justification for raising a protest? … How is the church going to see the perpetrators of abuse clearly if it can’t see its own conceptualization of God as abuser?

Reverend Theodore   Parker

• Vishnu, with a necklace of skulls, is figure of love and mercy, compared to the God of the Old Testament.

Blaise Pascal

• Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

• If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

Coventry Patmore

• Fortunately for themselves and for the world, nearly all men are cowards and dare not act on what they believe. Nearly all our disasters come of a few fools having the ‘courage of their convictions.’

Ron Patterson

• Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
• So-called Scientific Creationism is really nothing more than an attempt to give credence to an ancient Hebrew myth by trying to prove that virtually all the world’s biologists, geologists, and paleontologists are a bunch of incompetent buffoons.

Pope Paul IV (Giovanni Pietro Carafa)

• If my own father were a heretic, I would personally gather the wood to burn him.

Gregory S. Paul

• In the USA : the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest have markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy,   marital and related problems than the Northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms.
• Worldwide: higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion. The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S. . . . is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. . . . No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health…. The more secular, pro-evolution democracies. . . Feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion.

Leonard Peikoff

• The idea of the ‘supernatural’ is an assault on everything man knows about reality. It is a contradiction of every essential of a rational metaphysics. It represents a rejection of the basic axioms of philosophy.

Penn and Teller

• The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Dr.Pepper

• Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing one’s eyes shut and wailing ‘does not!’

Petronius

• Fear was the gods’ begetter in this world.

Emo Phillips (Philip Soltanec)

• I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said ‘Stop! Don’t do it!’ ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he said. I said, ‘Well, there’s so much to live for!’ ‘Like what?’ ‘Well . . . are you   religious or   atheist?’   ‘Religious.’ ‘Me too! Are   you Christian or Buddhist?’ ‘Christian.’ I said, ‘Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?’ ‘Protestant.’ ‘Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?’ ‘Baptist!’ ‘Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?’ ‘Baptist Church of God!’ ‘Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?’ ‘Reformed Baptist Church of God!’ ‘Me too! Are you reformed baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?’ He said, ‘Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!’ I said, ‘Die, heretic scum,’ and pushed him off.
• When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, didn’t work that way. So I just stole one and asked him to forgive me.

Philo

• He who tries to flee from God takes refuge in himself.

Eden Philpotts

• The Universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Pablo Picasso

• God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.

Steven Pinker

• Religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan,   why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window.

Robert M. Pirsig

• Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty- thousand-page menu and no food.
• What’s happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we’re getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought…occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like. . . because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.
• When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.

Ignots Pistachio

• Don’t believe everything you think.
• If you want to know if you’re insane, ask yourself if you have   an   unwavering   belief,   one   that you   could   never disavow no matter what. If you answered yes, then you’re insane.
• Religions eventually die out…. But atheism will live on regardless of what new religion replaces the old.

William Pitt the Elder

• We need a religion of humanity. The only true divinity is humanity.

Pope Pius XI (Damiano Achille Ratti)

• Mussolini is a wonderful man. Do you hear me? A wonderful man.

Pope Pius XII AKA Eugenio Pacelli

• One Galileo in two thousand years is enough.

La Place

• The   telescope sweeps the skies without finding God.

Darrell Plank

• Every Christian who tries to escape the path of a speeding bullet with fear in his eye is an example of a ‘foxhole conversion’ to atheism…. There are a hell of a lot more of those conversions than there are of atheists to Christians.

Plato

• Every serious man when dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing, lest thereby he may possibly cast them as prey to the envy and stupidity of the public.

Pliny the Elder

• It is ridiculous to think that a supreme being-whatever it is-cares about human affairs. Don’t we believe that it would be defiled by so gloomy and complex a responsibility?

Huang Po

• The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.

Edgar Allan Poe

• All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
• If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being! If we cannot understand him in his objective creatures, how then in his substantive moods and phases of creation?
• No man who has ever lived knows more about the hereafter . . . than you and I; and all religion . . . is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.

Katha Pollitt

• For me, religion is serious business-a farrago of authoritarian   nonsense,   misogyny   and   humble   pie,   the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.
• When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted-anything! The Ten Commandments have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people’s countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife beating, stoning, treating women-or anyone-as chattel or inferior beings.

Pompanatius

• Virtue is far purer when practiced for its own sake than for a reward.

Pontiac (Obwandiyag)

• They came with a Bible and their religion, stole our land, crushed our spirit, and now tell us we should be thankful to the Lord for being saved.

Carolyn Porco

• Let us teach our children about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is much more glorious, awesome, and even comforting than anything offered by scripture or God-concept that I know of.

Alexander Pope

• For modes of faith, let graceless zealots fight / He can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.
• For virtue’s self may too much zeal be had / The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.
• Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of mankind is man.
• Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.

Sir Karl Popper

• If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
• Our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
• Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.
• The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; he is well aware that acceptance or rejection of an idea is never a purely rational matter.
• Why do I think that we, the intellectuals, are able to help? Simply because we, the intellectuals, have done the most terrible harm for thousands of years. Mass murder in the name of an idea, a doctrine, a theory, a religion-that is all our doing, our invention.

Dennis Potter

• Religion to me has always been the wound,   not the bandage.

Ezra Pound

• The act of   bell ringing   is symbolic   of   all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

Sharath Prabhu

• Love is not extracted through primitive threats of torture , but is what you feel of your own violation

Dennis Prager

• Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.

Terry Pratchett

• I think I’m probably an atheist, but rather angry with God for not existing.
• The ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle, Pi: ought to be three times. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But does it? No. Three point one four one and lots of other figures. There’s no end to the buggers. Do you know how pissed off that makes me? . . . It tells me that the Creator used the wrong kind of circles . . . . I mean, three point five, you could respect. Or three point three. That’d look right.
• The merest accident of microgeography meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om the Lord, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent and need to be led.
• The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
• What good’s a god who gives you everything you want? … It’s the hope that’s important. Give people jam today, and they’ll just sit and eat it. Jam tomorrow-now, that’ll keep them going for ever.

Robert M. Price

• Who needs Satan when you have a God like this?

Protagoras

• About the gods I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist or what they are to look at. Many things prevent my knowing. Among others, the fact that they are never seen.

Marcel Proust

• It has even been said that the greatest praise of God lies in the   negation   of   the   atheist,   who   considers   creation sufficiently perfect to dispense with a creator.

Paul   Provenza  

• I point to how irrational it is to have any reverence for religion at all. We look at the ancient Greeks with their gods on a mountaintop throwing lightning bolts and say, ‘Those ancient Greeks. They were so silly. So primitive and naive.’
• Not like our religions. We have burning bushes talking to people and guys walking on water. We’re . . . sophisticated.

Samuel P. Putnam

• The definition given by Spencer to Agnosticism cannot be accepted by science. ‘The power which the universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.’ Science will not affirm that anything is inscrutable. To do so is suicidal. Science will never give up the eternal struggle to know. To know what-a part of things? No, but all things…. It is theology that talks of the ‘inscrutable’ as well as puts up the bars of ignorance . . . but not science.
• The last superstition of the human mind is the superstition that religion in itself is a good thing.

THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘O’

Ebenezer Obadare

• I used to teach in the Nigerian University and 90 percent of my students ended up as Evangelists or pastors. Who is going into industry? Who will do the thinking?

Sean O’Casey

• There’s no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
• What time has been wasted during man’s destiny in the struggle to decide what man’s next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in.

Flannery  O’Connor

• She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair

• An Atheist loves his fellow man instead of god. An Atheist believes that heaven is something for which we should work now-here on earth for all men together to enjoy. An Atheist believes that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction, and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it, and enjoy it. An Atheist believes that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellow man can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment. He seeks to know himself and his fellow man rather than to know a god. An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
• I feel that everyone has a right to be insane…. If they want religious schools, build them! … do not ask for the land to be tax-free. . . . Do not ask for money for teacher’s salaries, or more books, or anything else. Just go ahead and do your thing…. Just exactly the same as if you were a nudist. Somebody doesn’t get a tax break for being a Mason, or whatever they’re interested in.
• I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That’s me.
• My suggestion to you is pick up the Bible and read it. More Atheists come from this exercise than any other single thing.
• The thing I’m most proud of is that people can say, ‘I am an atheist,’ in the United States today, without being called a Communist atheist, or an atheist Communist. I separated the two words.
• The ‘Virgin’ Mary should get a posthumous medal for telling the biggest goddamn lie that was ever told…. I’m sure she played around as much as I have.

Ijeoma Oluo

• Some are raised in atheism by atheist parents. Some come to atheism after years of religious study. I came to atheism the way that many Christians come to Christianity – through faith. I was six years old, sitting in my frilly yellow Easter dress, throwing black jelly beans out into the yard, when my mom explained the story of Easter to me. She explained Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection as the son of God, going into great detail. And when she was finished telling me the story that had been a foundation of her faith for the majority of her life, I looked at her and said: ‘I don’t think that really happened.’ I didn’t come to this conclusion because the story of a man waking from the dead made no sense – I wasn’t an overly analytical child. I still enthusiastically believed in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny. But when I searched myself for any sense of belief in a higher power, it just wasn’t there. I wanted it to be there -how comforting to have a God. But it wasn’t there, and it isn’t to this day.

Culbert Olson

• General Eisenhower said, with reference to a break in the weather allowing the allied invasion of Europe to proceed ‘with losses far below what we anticipated,’ ‘if there were nothing else in my life to prove the existence of an almighty God, that did.’ I see little difference in the inanity of that statement of General Eisenhower’s and a declaration by a fundamentalist church leader in Chicago that he knows the world is flat because the Bible says so
• Well, it was a Mormon school and the principal in his sermons to the children would arouse emotionalism and the children would become so emotional that they would declare they saw angels. Of course I did not see any angels and therefore did not join in the emotionalism…. I was called into the principal’s office.  

Michel Onfray

• I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don’t constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood – which are my ideals.

Dr. Oort

• Our   increased knowledge   of Nature   has gradually undermined the belief in the possibility of miracles and the time is not far distant when, in the mind of every man of culture, all accounts of miracles will be banished to their proper region-that   of legend.

1. Robert Oppenheimer

• As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.
• There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

Song by The Original Caste- One Tin Soldier

• Go ahead and hate your neighbor, go ahead and cheat a friend Do it in the name of heaven – you can justify it in the end

1. J. (Patrick   Jake) O’Rourke      

• Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)

• Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
• He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
• No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid…. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
• One must choose between God and Man, and all ‘radicals’ and ‘progressives,’ from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

William Osler

• The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism

Professor Felix   L. Oswald

• Superstition   says ‘pray and you shall receive.’   Science says ‘sow and you shall reap.’
• The   history   of Christian dogmatism is the history of over 1,800 years of war against nature and truth.
• The world has trusted in the doctrine of miracle-mongers till skepticism   became   a   condition   of self-preservation.

Peter O’Toole

• QUESTION: How do you know you’re God?

ANSWER:   Simple. When I pray to him, I find I’m talking to myself.

Thomas Otway

• Well, all I say is, honest atheism for my money.

Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé )

• Christianity has made of death a terror which was unknown to the gay calmness of the pagan.
• The radical defect of Christianity is that it tried to win the world by a bribe.”

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)

• Bribes, believe me, buy both gods and men.

Robert Owen

• All the religions of the world are based on total ignorance of all the fundamental laws of humanity. . . . Fully conscious as I am of the misery which these religions have created in the human race . . . I would now, if I possessed ten thousand lives and could suffer a painful death for each, willingly thus sacrifice them to destroy this Moloch.
• Thus was I forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man . But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity—not for a sect or a party, or for a country or a colour, but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do them good.

 

THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘N’

Vladimir Nabokov

• A creative writer must study carefully the work of his rivals, including the Almighty.
• No free man needs a God.
• The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.

Shabnam Nadiya

• My interaction with the Koran told me that no matter how much I read, how much I knew, no matter what love and compassion for people I held in my breast, no matter my intelligence, my talents . . . I would never ever be as good as even the lowliest of men. . . . I was a field for a man to sow his seed . . . my word was not to be trusted against that of a man, I was the gateway to hell because men would desire me. . . . How could any system of belief compete with the dignity and the respect that non-belief had to offer to me?

Dr. Taslima Nasrin

• I don’t agree with those who think that the conflict is simply between two religions, namely Christianity and Islam. To me, the key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational logical minds.
• I don’t find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. I believe religion is the root, and from the root fundamentalism grows as a poisonous stem…. Maybe liberal Muslims are morally decent, but they’re not following Islam honestly. Fundamentalists are.
• It is unfair to label me anti-Islam. I am an atheist and a secular humanist.
• Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that?
• The prime necessity of a human being is freedom. It is the state which has forbidden women from enjoying that liberty. Religion is now the first obstacle to women’s advancement. Religion pulls human beings backwards, it goes against science and progressiveness. Religion engulfs people with a fear of the supernatural, it bars people from laughing and never allows people to exercise their choice.
• The Sharia laws cannot be changed. They must be thrown out, abolished…. Why do we need seventh- century law now?

Armin Navabi

• Islamaphobia is a term used by certain groups of Muslim apologists in order to protect Muslims from scrutiny. However, rather than protecting a group of people against bigotry, the term merely acts as a way to silence critics who raise valid points about the real and troubling aspects of Islam.

Thaila Nazario

• Let me see if I have this straight`: you believe the entire human race is the incestuous product of a man, a curious rib woman and their two boys; the rib woman took nutritional advice from a talking snake and ate an apple, and because of that now we’re all ‘fallen’ from god’s grace; after committing a lot of genocides (because he loves us so much), god decided to come down to earth. Impregnate a teenage virgin (with capacity to consent?) and become his own father, to later commit suicide as a sacrifice to himself to rid the human race of the ‘fallen’ status he bestowed on us; and then he became a zombie in order to return any day now and explode the planet…And that’s why the Easter Bunny hides the eggs?

Neander

• Christianity   diminishes the influence of woman.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru

• I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized, on this earth, capable of becoming true man, master of his fate and captain of his soul.
• The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organized religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer

• Religiously justified violence is first and foremost a problem of ‘sacred’ texts and not a problem of misinterpretation of texts.

Johann Neumann

• During the whole Nazi period religious education in the schools was never forbidden, but on the contrary was generously encouraged. Despite this, after the war the churches demanded, more or less as compensation, that there must be Catholic schools and religion classes, so that ‘something   like   that’   never   happened   again.   In   fact, however, one has to ask oneself if the religion classes before and during the Nazi period didn’t contribute substantially to Christian support for the war as the ‘work of God,’ through their inculcation of the doctrine of ‘obedience to the authorities.

Reverend Michael   Newdow

• Clearly it’s not treating atheists equal with people who believe in God when you say ‘In God We Trust’ or we are a ‘nation under God.’. . . . I couldn’t care less what anyone believes. I just care that our government treats everybody equally.
• I brought this case because I am an atheist and this offends me, and I have the right to bring up my daughter without God being imposed into her life by her schoolteachers.

Reverend .R. Heber Newton

• Faith has burned libraries, closed schools, anathematized science, martyred   philosophers,   stayed   the progress   of the human race, wrought incalculable evils to civilization.

Newsweek Magazine: Interview with Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s wife

• ‘There was no deathbed conversion,’ Druyan says. ‘No appeals to God, no hope for an afterlife, no pretending that he and I, who had been inseparably for twenty years, were not saying goodbye forever.’

‘Didn’t he want to believe?’ she was asked.

‘Carl never wanted to believe,’ she replies fiercely. ‘He wanted to know.’

Newsweek magazine, June 29, 1987

• By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic credentials (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists, less than 0.2%) who give credence to creation-science, the general theory that complex life forms did not evolve but appeared ‘abruptly.’
• It is interesting that every time God gives direct orders to anyone, it is always ‘Thou shalt kill.’

Friedrich Nietzsche

• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
• A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Mortal hostility against the masters of the earth, against the ‘noble’, that is also Christian. Hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind, is Christian; hatred of the sense, of the joy of the senses, of joy in general is Christian.
• Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
• Art raises its head where religions decline.
• Belief means not wanting to know what is true.
• Better songs would they have to sing, for me to believe in their Savior: more like saved ones would his disciples have to appear unto me!
• Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind,   masked   by,   dressed   up   as,   faith in ‘another’ or ‘better’ life…. The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
• Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
• Jesus died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age!
• Do not let yourself be deceived: great Intellects   are skeptical.
• Faith means not wanting to know what is true.
• God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers-at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!
• God is a thought-it maketh all the straight crooked, and all that standeth reel.
• God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.
• Has the famous story that stands at the beginning of the Bible really been understood? the story of God’s hellish fear of science?…Man himself had turned out to be God’s greatest mistake; he had created a rival for himself; science makes godlike-it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific…. Knowledge, the emancipation from the priest, continues to grow.
• Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
• I call Christianity the ‘one’ great curse, the ‘one’ great intrinsic depravity, the ‘one’ great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, ‘petty’ -I call it the ‘one’ mortal blemish of mankind
• I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
• I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.
• If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods.
• In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
• Is man one of God’s blunders, or is God one of man’s blunders?
• It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all.
• Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven
• Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.
• Out of terror, the type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal . . . the Christian.
• Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions to be destroyed.
• Stendhal… robbed me of the best atheist joke which precisely I could have made: ‘God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.’
• The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all price, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.
• The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
• The fact that faith may in certain circumstances save, the fact that salvation as the result of an idea fixed does not constitute a true idea, the fact that faith moves no mountains, but may very readily raise them where previously they did not exist—all these things are made sufficiently clear by a mere casual stroll through a lunatic asylum.
• The last Christian died on the cross.
• The man of belief is necessarily a dependent man. . . . He does not belong to himself, but to the author of the idea he believes.
• The only excuse for God is that he doesn’t exist.
• There is not enough love and goodness in the world for us to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things.
• The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.
• The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
• This alone is morality: Thou shalt not know
• Two great European narcotics: alcohol and Christianity.
• What? Is man just one of God’s mistakes? Or is God just one of man’s?
• Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared, we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence.
• Why atheism nowadays? ‘The father’ in God is thoroughly refuted; equally so ‘the judge,’ ‘the rewarder.’ . . . He does not hear-and even if he did, he would not know how to help.

Max Nordau

• As a literary monument the Bible is of much later origin than the Vedas; as a work of literary value it is surpassed by everything written in the last two thousand years by authors even of the second rank, and to compare it seriously with the productions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe would require a fantasized mind that had entirely lost its power of judgment. Its conception of the universe is childish, and its morality revolting, as revealed in the malicious vengeance attributed to God in the OT and in the New, the parable of the laborers of the eleventh hour and the episodes of Mary Magdalene and the woman taken in adultery.

Michael Nugent

• Atheism does not require faith. Faith is a belief that is disproportionate to the best currently available evidence. Atheism is proportionate to the evidence. There is no reasonable evidence that Gods exist, and a lot of evidence that humans invented the idea.
• Atheism does not require certainty. Strictly speaking, we cannot be certain about anything, but we can be as certain that the Christian God does not exist as Christians are that Thor or Zeus do not exist. Give us reliable evidence and we will change our minds.

Sherwin   Nuland  

• I call myself an observant agnostic, because I go to shul every Saturday. The rabbi knows I’m an agnostic . . . my colleagues in the shul know I’m an agnostic, but I get carried away by the emotion of the thing.
• The great progress that has been made in medicine and in science has not necessarily been made by men and women who don’t believe in anything supernatural but it has been made by men and women who when they are studying it refuse to believe that there is anything supernatural.

Gary Numan

• If nature is proof of God’s amazing creation then I have truly seen the light, and the light is black. Nature is genius at its most cruel and savage. No benevolent God could have come up with such an outrage.

Bill Nye

• I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it, because we need them.
• Science is the best idea humans have ever had. The more people who embrace that idea, the better.
• The earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old. It’s not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs.

THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘M’

Abu’l-ala-al-Ma’arri (Abu ’alaa’ Ahmed ibn Abd Allah ibn Sullaiman al-Tanookhy al-Ma’arri.

• Religion is a fable invented by the ancients,   worthless except for those who exploit the credulous masses . . . ay, the lonesome world will always want the latest fairytales.
• Of the Kaaba in Mecca: The black stone is only a remnant   of   idols   and   altar stones.
• The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

• Not two hundred men in London believe in the Bible.
• The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

Cheyenne MacDonald

• Humans are not inherently wired for religious belief, a new study claims. While modern rhetoric suggests that atheism is an idea of today’s world, a professor from the University of Cambridge argues that it is an ancient way of thought, which was later squashed by imperial forces. Disbelief in God (or gods) stretches back to the polytheistic civilizations of ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome -and in these ancient societies, atheism likely thrived.

Seth MacFarlane

• In the battle over science versus religion, science offers credible evidence for all the serious claims it makes. The church says, ‘Oh, it’s right here in this book, see? The one written by the people who thought the sun was magic?’ I for one would like to see some proof that there is a God. And if you say, ‘a baby’s smile’ I’m going to kick you right in the stomach.

Niccolo Machiavelli

• All armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.
• It is as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.
• Our religion places the supreme happiness in humility, lowliness . . . to enable us to suffer. . . . These principles seem to me to have made men feeble . . . and easy prey to evil-minded men, who can control them more securely. . . .

Ben Mack

• When these preachers on TV say God spoke to them, what the fuck? Shouldn’t this be front-page news? Either God is speaking to them and we have a modern day prophet and the newfound words should be published everywhere, or they are criminals for swindling their donations.

J.L. Mackie

• I read the Old Testament after I had acquired the habit of independent judgment. I was horrified at its barbarity, and bewildered that it had been widely held up as a store of ideals.
• More generally, tying morality to religious belief is liable to devalue it, not only by undermining it, temporarily, if the belief decays, but also by subordinating it to other concerns while the belief persists.
• There is at any rate no easy way of defending religion once it is admitted that the literal, factual claim that there is a god cannot be rationally sustained.

Archibald MacLeish

• A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
• I have no choice but to be guilty. .. . God is unthinkable if we are innocent.
• Piety’s hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man’s piety stinks. It’s insufferable.

MAD magazine

• You’re a group of Christian-based, conservative organizations with several million dollars to spend. Do you: feed the hungry? Clothe the poor? Don’t be so naive! You blow the millions on a series of slickly-worded, logic-bending ads espousing a widely- discredited theory that one can be ‘cured’ of homosexuality through counseling and prayer.

Rachel Maddow

• On the USA Republican Party: Republicans have been pointing out that the Democratic Platform contains no mention of God. Neither does the U.S. Constitution.

President James Madison

• Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
• It may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points. The tendency to unsurpastion on one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them, will be best guarded against by an entire abstinence of the Government from interference in any way whatsoever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order, and protecting each sect against. trespasses on its legal rights by others
• Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
• The appropriation of funds of the United States for the use and support of religious societies, is contrary to the article of the Constitution which declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.
• The number, the industry, and the morality of the Priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the Church from the State.
• The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
• What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, Superstition, Bigotry and Persecution.
• Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?

Ferdinand Magellan

• The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.

Bill Maher

• Athletes: Jesus doesn’t care who wins the game. So stop bothering him. I’ve never heard a team blame Jesus when they lose.
• If God chose George Bush of all the people in the world, how good is God?
• If you have a few hundred followers and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you Pope.  
• I hate religion. I think it’s a neurological disorder.
• Isn’t that what Jesus was all about? He’s hanging there—‘I hope my death will allow rappers to signal to chicks that they’re rich so they can get laid more.
• I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.
• Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don’t need.
• Until someone claims to see Christopher Hitchens’ face in a tree stump, idiots must stop claiming that atheism is a religion. There’s one little difference: Religion is defined as the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, and atheism is – precisely not that. Got it? Atheism is a religion like abstinence is a sex position.
• What they’re fighting about in the Middle East…. These myths, these silly little stories…. They take over this little space in Jerusalem where one guy flew up to heaven—no, no, this guy performed a sacrifice here a thousand million years ago. It’s like, ‘Who cares? What does that have to do with spirituality?
• When it comes to religion, we’re not two sides of the same coin, and you don’t get to put your unreason up on the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there, on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken, with the stuff that is not evidence-based, stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens.
• You can’t talk directly to god. That is bad. First you’ve got to talk to a priest. Then Mary. Then Jesus…. It’s like going to the DMV.

Norman Mailer

• God   can   write   in   the   third   person   only   so   long   as   He understands His world. But if the world becomes contradictory or incomprehensible to Him, then God begins to grow concerned with His own nature. It’s either that, or borrow notions from other Gods.
• God like us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

Kenan Malik

• A decade ago, the Independent asked me to write an essay on Tom Paine on the the 200th anniversary of his great polemic, The Age of Reason. I began the article with a quote from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to show the continuing relevance of Paine’s battle against religious authority. The quote was cut out because it was deemed too offensive to Muslims. The irony of censoring an essay in celebration of freethinking seemed to elude the editor.
• Far from censoring offensive speech, a vibrant and diverse society should encourage it…. For it is the heretics who take society forward…. Every scientific or social advance worth having begun by outraging the conventions of its time.

John Malkovich

• I grew tired of religion sometime not long after birth. I believe in people. I believe in humans. I believe in a car. But I don’t believe something I have absolutely no evidence of for millenniums.

André Malraux

• To the absurd myths of God and an immortal soul, the modern world in its radical impotence has only succeeded in opposing the ridiculous myths of science and progress.

Bill Mandel

• Two recent surveys rate the United States at the top among Western nations in belief in God and at the bottom among six major countries in school kids’ understanding of science and math. This could be dismissed as chance, but it shouldn’t be. While our economic competitors’ schools are teaching students advanced math and science, many of our schools are wasting energy debating whether to teach evolution or creationism, which maintains that God created the universe over a six-day period about 6,000 years ago.

Lucy Mangan

• Now that the season of goodwill has passed, let’s make a plea for greater intolerance…. The next time a woman asks you what star sign you are, swears by essential oils, magnet therapy or talks about realigning anything but shelves, make a stand. Back her into a corner and talk at her about Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Crick and Watson . . . until she admits the error of her ways. For astrology and the rest to flourish it is only necessary that those with an IQ in double figures do nothing.

Mangasar Magurditch Mangasarian

• Every copy of the bible must be written upfront: A Collection of Writings of Unknown Date and Authorship Rendered   into   English   From   Supposed   Copies of   Supposed Originals Unfortunately Lost.
• Your creed says that mankind is born and lives under the curse of God. . . . Your creed shows me a heaven thinly settled, a hell peopled…. Your creed tells me that under the eternal law of predestination nothing can change the number of souls ransomed. This is fatalism. What need, then, of preaching the gospel?

Irshad       Manji    

• Every faith has its share of literalists. . . . But only within Islam is literalism fast becoming mainstream. We Muslims, even here in the West, are routinely raised to believe that the Koran is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God’s will…. This is dangerous, because when abuse happens under the banner of my faith as it is today, most Muslims have no clue how to debate, dissent, revise or reform . . . because we have never been introduced to the possibility, let alone the virtue, of asking questions.
• Islam has a teaching against ‘excessive laughter.’ I’m not joking. But does this mean that we should cry ‘blasphemy’   over   less-than-flattering   depictions   of   the prophet Muhammad? . . . When Muslims put the prophet on a pedestal, we’re engaging in idolatry of our own…. Humility requires people of faith to mock themselves-and each other every once in a while.      

Suzi Manley

• It always makes me laugh when people say they talk to God. According to the bible, he didn’t even talk to the supposed mother of his child; he sent one of his angels. But apparently he speaks to these idiots? It cracks me up!

Marilyn Manson (Brian Warner)

• Christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks…. Is it a symbol of hope or hopelessness?
• If I believed in an outside force that we wanted to call God – and I believe that there is one. I think God would appreciate what I say, because I can’t see God wanting to create a world full of idiots.
• If they think that an artist can destroy their faith, then their faith is rather fragile.
• One hates what one fears.
• Why should we believe in a god, that doesn’t believe in us?

Jacques Maritain

• Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment.

Christopher Marlowe

• I count religion but a childish toy and hold there is no sin but ignorance.
• Religion hides many mischiefs from suspicion.

Yann Marte

• It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while…. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Emma Martin

• The bended knee is not the attitude for study.
• The person much inclined to ask God’s assistance, learns to repose on the hope of its obtainment, instead of actively seeking the good desired by his own labour.

George R. R. Martin

• I suppose I’m a lapsed Catholic. You would consider me an atheist or agnostic. I find religion and spirituality fascinating. I would like to believe this isn’t the end and there’s something more, but I can’t convince the rational part of me that makes any sense whatsoever.

Michael Martin

• Religious experiences are like those induced by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, and sleep deprivation: They tell no uniform or coherent story, and there is no plausible theory to account for discrepancies among them.
• Since   experiences   of   God   are   good   grounds   for   the existence of God, are not experiences of the absence of God good grounds for the nonexistence of God?

Harriet Martineau

• As   the   astronomer   rejoices   in   new   knowledge   which compels him to give up the dignity of our globe as the center, the pride, and even the final cause of the universe, so do those who have escaped from the Christian mythology enjoy their release from the superstition which fails to make them happy, fails to make them good, fails to make them wise…. I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy.
• I certainly had no idea how little faith Christians have in their own faith till I saw how ill their courage and temper can stand any attack on it.
• I never did a right thing or abstained   from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.

Rev.   Carlos Martyn

• It   is like counterfeit   coin;   current, but false …It puts the emphasis   on belief, when it should put it on conduct. … It builds ‘cathedrals, not men… Religion is transformed   from a principle   into an institution.   …We look for Christ and find a church…Phariseeism is resurrected and baptized with a Christian name….Churchianity has been the resolute   opposer of every single forward step.

Karl Marx

• De omnibus disputandum– Everything must be doubted
• Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.
• Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.
• Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people
• The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.
• The imaginary flowers of religion adorn man’s chains. Man must throw away the flowers and also the chains.
• The profane existence of error is discredited after its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis has been rejected. Man, who looked for a superman in the fantastic reality of heaven and found nothing there but the reflection of himself, will no longer be disposed to find but the semblance of himself, the non-human Unmensch where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

Jackie   Mason   (Jacob   Maza)

• If God exists he’s an idiot. That’s why I don’t believe in any God. Because if that’s how he behaves, I don’t want to know such a person.
• I see life as a dance. Does a dance have to have a meaning? You’re dancing because you enjoy it.

Marilyn   Mason

• Abuse of the young by religious groups often takes psychological forms, and assumes that children are the property of   their   parents.   Parental   rights   to   ensure   ‘education   and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions’   always seem to override children’s rights to ‘freedom of expression as well as to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds
• The Christian churches have a poor record on physical abuse; indeed Christian conservatives are among the few remaining supporters of corporal punishment in the westernized   world,   probably   because of   their   belief   in original sin and the literal truth of the Bible,   with its frequent references to physical punishment of children: ‘Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.’

Geoff Mather

• To say that atheism requires faith is as dim-witted as saying that disbelief in pixies or leprechauns takes faith. Even if Einstein himself told me there was an elf on my shoulder, I would still ask for proof and I wouldn’t be wrong to ask.

Dave Matthews

• Don’t you rob yourself of what you’re feeling.
• If there is a God, a caring God, then we have to figure he’s done an extraordinary job of making a very cruel world.
• Is this not enough… this blessed sip of life, is it not enough, staring down at the ground, well then complain and pray for more from above you greedy little thing.

1. Somerset Maugham

• I cannot believe in a God who has neither humor nor common sense.
• What mean and cruel things men can do for the love of God.

Armistead Maupin

• The Onion: Is there a God?

“No.”

Anything further to say?

“What further is there to say?”

David G. McAfee

• Jesus allegedly healed ten men of leprosy, but Jacinlo Convil did one better when he developed a vaccine that saved thousands of lives.

Joseph   McCabe

• Atheism will in this century be the common attitude of civilized people.
• Hourly we repeat the division of time into two parts, B.C., and A.D., and millions still think that B.C. means Benighted Chaos and A.D. means Age of Delight. In history we divide time into three parts, Ancient Times, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times; and we consider the Middle Ages a period of dark   and   turbulent   semi-barbarism   lying   between   two phases of civilization, ancient paganism and modern paganism.  
• The making of an Atheist implies a mental stimulation and training which brings into play the primary factors of social progress.
• The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself.

John McCarthy (Uncle John)

• An atheist doesn’t have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can’t be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.

Frank McCourt

• My hereafter is here. I am where I’m going, for I am mulch. It’s a great comfort to know that in my mulch- hood I may nourish a row of parsnips.

Carson McCullers

• For fear is a primary source of evil.

Ian McEwan

• For centuries now, it has regarded the end as ‘soon’—if not next week, then within a year or two. The end has not come, and yet no one is discomfited for long. New prophets, and soon, a new generation, set about the calculations, and always manage to find the end looming within their own lifetime. The million sellers like Hal Lindsey predicted the end of the world all through the seventies, eighties, and nineties—and today, business has never been better. There is a hunger for this news, and perhaps we glimpse here something in our nature, something of our deeply held notions of time, and our own insignificance against the intimidating vastness of eternity, or the age of the universe—on the human scale there is little difference. We have need of a plot, a narrative to shore up our irrelevance in the flow of things.

Colin McGinn

• Faith is believing things by definition, which are not justified by reason. If it were justified by reason, it wouldn’t be faith.
• I don’t think the belief in God has very much to do with people’s moral quality as people.

Sir Ian McKellen

• I’m an atheist. There’s a lot about the Catholic Church I don’t approve of, simply because they don’t approve of me.
• Well, I’ve often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying ‘This is fiction.’ I mean, walking on water? I mean, it takes an act of faith.

Bill McKibben

• America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. . . . In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid…. Nearly   18   percent   of   American   children   lived   in   poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring . . . childhood nutrition, infant mortality, and access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin…. Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers…. Having been told to turn the other cheek, we’re the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest…. Teenage pregnancy? We’re at the top of the charts. Personal self- discipline—like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask?

Carlespie Mary Alice McKinney

• Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, Controls people, and Deludes people.

Delos B. McKown

• The Bible is a mine rich in the ore of cognitive dissonance.
• The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.

Mignon McLaughlin

• Don’t look for God where He is needed most; if you didn’t bring Him there, He isn’t there.
• In church, sacred music would make believers of us all-but preachers can be counted on to restore the balance.
• Most sermons sound to me like commercials-but I can’t make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.
• When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.

Doug McLeod

• I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.

Rev. Howard McQueary

• An   extraordinary event should be proved by an extraordinary amount of evidence.

Butterfly McQueen

• As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion.

Margaret   Mead  

• Creationism: the theory that Rome was built in day.
• It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.

Sir Peter Medawar

• Evolutionary theory permeates and supports every branch of biological science, much as the notion of the roundness of the earth underlies all geodesy and all cosmological theories on which the shape of the earth has a bearing. Thus antievolutionism is of the same stature as flat-earthism.
• The only certain way to cause a religious belief to be held by everyone is to liquidate nonbelievers.

Philipp Melanchthon

• A man often preaches his beliefs precisely when he has lost them and is looking everywhere for them, and, on such occasions, his preaching is by no means at its worst.

Herman Melville

• Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
• Already we have been the nothing we dread to be.
• The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His Heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.

1. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken

• A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.
• Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
• God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent,   the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms,   but also a kind of superiority,   soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
• I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind-that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
• Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
• It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
• Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
• Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the person, the surer they are that they know precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in his field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure,’
• Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone,   somewhere, may be happy.
• Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
• Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration—courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
• Religion, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities.
• Since the early days, the church has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings.
• Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
• The cosmos is a gigantic fly wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
• Theology: An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.
• There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.
• The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
• The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit, it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
• To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
• We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the same sense and to the same extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
• What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell. It’s a business almost indistinguishable from that of a seller of snake-oil for rheumatism.
• Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a day when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And what of Huitzilopochtli?

1. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan

• The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe— that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud.

Moses Mendelssohn

• Among all the prescriptions and ordinances of the Mosaic Law, there is not a single one which says: You shall believe or   not believe. They all say: You shall do or not do…. Nowhere does it say: Believe O Israel, and you will be blessed; do not doubt, O Israel, or this or that punishment will befall you.
• Reader! To whatever visible church, synagogue, or mosque you may belong! See if you do not find more true religion among the host of the excommunicated than among the far greater host who excommunicated him.

Thomas Merton

• To be saved is to fall into the ludicrous and satanic flippancy of false religion.

Jean Meslier

• I would like, and this would be the last and most ardent of my wishes, I would like the last king to be strangled with the guts of the last priest.

Metallica

• Arrogance and ignorance go hand in hand.

Meteorite Debris (Peter Kelly)

• The more rabidly mad the church the more pews will be filled. So fundy evangelists have the biggest, and most profitable,   congregations. More moderate churches with some respect for humans as intelligent human beings are losing numbers. I think a big revival would happen in the churches   if   child   sacrifice   was   reintroduced.  The old symbolic body and blood just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Hemant Mehta

• It’s not narcissistic to say you’re an atheist when everyone around you has no problem wearing their cross necklaces, talking about how they’re praying for good luck or baptizing their children, and there’s a church on every block.

James A. Michener

• Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.

John Stuart Mill

• A being who can create a race of men devoid of real freedom and inevitably foredoomed to be sinners, and then punish them for being what he has made them, may be omnipotent and various other things, but he is not what the English language has always intended by the adjective holy.
• Christian morality has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; Innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts ‘thou shalt not’ predominates unduly over ‘thou shalt.’
• God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.
• If Christians would teach infidels to be just to Christianity, they should themselves be just to infidelity.
• On his father: I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations   have   represented their   gods   as   wicked, in a   constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. This ne plus ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity. Think ,he used to say, of a being who would make a Hell
• It can do truth no service to blink the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work, not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected, the Christian faith.
• It is historically true that a large proportion of infidels in all ages have been persons of distinguished integrity and honour.
• Modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christianity.
• The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.
• The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments-of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue-are complete skeptics in religion.
• Who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority of them were to be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment.

Dennis Miller

• Born again?! No, I’m not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time!
• It seems to be an intrusive nature to religion now in this country that I don’t quite understand- there isn’t an hour in the day where a television preacher doesn’t bully his way into your living room. I see through these guys like used Neutrogena. You know, they say they don’t favor any particular denomination, but I think we’ve all seen their eyes light up at 10s and 20s.
• Now 7-Eleven has bowed to pressure from the Moral Majority   to   remove Playboy     and Penthouse   from   their newsstand. I guess to be fair you have to look at it from the fundamentalist perspective . . . because what it does is it forces a certain type of literature on somebody in a public place. It would be like, uh, oh, I don’t know, say like putting the Bible in everybody’s hotel room, or something crazy like that.
• These televangelists say they don’t favor any particular denomination, but I think we’ve all seen their eyes light up at tens and twenties.

Sir Jonathan Miller

• In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners.

Olin Miller

• To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

1. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne

• The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief-call it what you will-than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

John Milton

• Better to reign in hell, then serve in heav’n.
• The greatest burden of the world is superstition.

Wilson Mizner

• I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education

University of Minnesota Research Study on Atheists

• We show not only that atheists are less accepted than other marginalized groups but also that attitudes toward them have not exhibited the marked increase in acceptance that has characterized views of other racial and religious minorities over the past forty years. . . . Americans are less accepting of atheists than of any of the other groups we asked about, and by a wide margin.

Marvin Minsky (Old Man)

• What caused the universe, and why? What is the purpose of life? How can you tell which beliefs are true? How can you tell what is good? . . . These questions seem different on the surface, but all of them share one quality that makes them impossible to answer: all of them are circular! You can never find a final cause, since you must always ask one question more: ‘What caused that cause?’ You can never find any ultimate goal, since you’re always obliged to ask, ‘Then what purpose does that serve?’ . . . I once heard W. H. Auden say, ‘We are all here on earth to help others. What I can’t figure out is what the others are here for.’… Every culture finds special ways to deal with these questions. One way is to brand them with shame and taboo . . . to make those questions undiscussable. . . . Another is to adopt specific answers to circular questions and . . . indoctrinate people with those beliefs. [Both ways] spare whole populations from wasting time in fruitless reason loops.

Warren Mitchell

• I enjoy being Jewish, but I’m an atheist…I hate fundamentalism in all its forms. Jews, Catholics, Baptists, I think they are all potty and capable of destroying the world.

George Monbiot

• Several million have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion…. Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these would be the establishment of a state of Israel. . . . The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth…. Before the big battle begins, all ‘true believers’ will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture…. The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about…. We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them…. Here we have a major political constituency— representing much of the current president’s George W. Bush core vote—in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act…. If the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don’t get to sit at the right hand of God.

Jacques Monod

• Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.
• Man knows at last that he is alone in the Universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.

Ashley Montagu

• Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
• The Good Book-one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.

Michel de Montaigne

• It is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them.
• Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a maggot, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
• We must not mock God. Yet the best of us are not so much afraid to offend Him as to offend our neighbors, kinsmen, or rulers.

Michael Moorcock

• The sentient may perceive and love the universe, but the universe may   not perceive and   love   the   sentient. The universe sees no distinction between the multitude of creatures and elements which comprise it. All are equal. None is favored…. It cannot control what it creates and it cannot, it seems, be controlled by its creations. Those who curse the workings of the universe curse that which is deaf. Those who strike   out at   those   workings fight that   which   is inviolate. Those who shake their fists, shake their fists at blind stars.

George Moore

• Women have never invented a religion; they are untainted with that madness, and they are not moralists.

Michael Moore

• There’s a gullible side to the American people. They can be easily misled. Religion is the best device used to mislead them.

Mark   Morford

• The environment does not matter because the Earth does not matter . . . all that does matter is the imminent return of the bloody Christ.
• The Vatican is instructing its priests all over the world, including those in AIDS-ravaged countries in Africa and Asia, to condemn condom use…. From Nicaragua to Kenya and the Philippines, where AIDS is raging like wildfire, the lie is the same: The church says condoms can kill. This is nothing new. The Vatican just really, really loathes condoms. And sex. And homosexuals. And women. And anything that might inhibit procreation, or that in any way empowers people to take control   over   their   reproduction   options,   or   that   might somehow loosen the church’s viselike grip.  

Reverend Donald Morgan

• If God is love, and if God is also omnipresent, then the Devil cannot exist. If the Devil exists, God cannot be love and also be omnipresent. Yet, an omnipresent God of love and the Devil are both said to exist. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure that there is something wrong here.
• Jesus’ last words on the cross, ‘My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ hardly seem like the words of the man who planned it that way.

Christopher Morley

• The Bible, you know, is rather a disappointment: it has never done for humanity what it should have done.

John Morley

• Those who dwell in the tower of ancient faiths, look about them in one constant apprehension, misgiving and wonder;   with the   hurried,   uneasy mien of people living upon earthquakes.
• Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

Chris Morris

• On the Bible: We’ve had this book analysed and it reads like the ramblings of a drugged horse. The question tonight-is God confused like his prating truth pimps, or is he dead?

Desmond Morris

• There have been many arguments about the location of the immortal human soul. Could it be in the heart, in the head, or perhaps diffused throughout the whole body—an all- pervading spiritual quality unique to the human being? The answer, it seems to me as a zoologist, is obvious enough: a man’s soul is located in his testicles; a woman’s in her ovaries. For it is here that we find the truly immortal elements in our constitution—our genes.

James Morrow

• I don’t like that word atheist because it feels like it is a negative, a void, whereas atheists of my stripe experience their attitude as something quite positive, quite nourishing…. I don’t like that word agnostic I find it evasive. It lacks sinew. An agnostic is an atheist who has lost his nerve.
• There are no atheists in foxholes’ isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes.

Lance Morrow

• If you scratch any aggressive tribalism, or nationalism, you usually find beneath its surface a religious core, some older binding energy of belief or superstition . . . that is capable of transforming itself into a death-force, with the peculiar annihilating energies of belief. . . . Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute.

John Mortimer

• I believe in everything to do with Christianity except for God. I believe in all the Christian ethics. But God. . . I suppose the best thing he could be called is uncaring. Every time I’ve interviewed Cardinals, Archbishops, their answer is free will. But it’s all rot. The Nazi guards could have free will, because they could decide whether to do it or not. But not the people who were put in gas chambers. Nobody has satisfactorily answered this question.

Bill Moyers

• The ruins were still smoldering when the reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell went on television to proclaim that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were God’s punishment of a corrupted America. They said the government had adopted the agenda ‘of the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians’ not to mention the ACLU and People for the American Way. . . . Just as God had sent the Great Flood to wipe out a corrupted world, now-disgusted with a decadent America—‘God almighty is lifting his protection from us.’ Critics said such comments were deranged. But millions of Christian fundamentalists and conservatives didn’t think so. They thought Robertson and Falwell were being perfectly consistent with the logic of the Bible as they read it…. Not many people at the time seemed to notice that Osama bin Laden had also been reading his sacred book closely and literally.

Malcolm Muggeridge

• The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.

Edvard Munch

• From my rotting body flowers shall grow, and I shall be in them.

Bill Murray

• It’s hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it’s damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person.

Dave Muscato

• If a religious moderate believes the proposition that the Bible is the inspired word of God, who is he to fault a religious extremist for actually doing what it says to do?
• You can’t have freedom of religion without a government that’s free from religion.

Dave Mustaine

• Religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell, whereas spirituality is for people like me who have been there.

P.Z.Myers

• There’s no surer way to make an atheist than to get someone to actually read scripture.

THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘L’

Henri-Dominique Lacordaire

• Whilst no people appears in history without the sign and palladium of a positive faith, without temple, altar, priesthood-that is to say, without a constituted religion-unbelief appears only under an individual form, sometimes proscribed, sometimes tolerated, seldom powerful, and never becoming established as the public and social expression of a nation.

Cathy Ladman

• All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.

Lalande

• I   have searched through the heavens, and nowhere have I found a trace of God.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

• Atheism is the only means of ensuring the happiness of the world, which has been rendered impossible by the wars brought     about     by     theologians.
• The soul is only the thinking part of the body, and with the body it passes away. When death comes, the farce is over, so let us take our pleasure while we can.

Anne Lamott

• You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Lange

• Education   and enlightenment,   as a rule, go hand in hand with the decrease of the clergy.

James Langer

• I wouldn’t want my doctor thinking that intelligent design was an equally plausible hypothesis to evolution any more than I would want my airplane pilot believing in the flat Earth.

Kenneth V. Lanning

• Nothing is more simple than ‘the devil made them do it.’ . . . Especially for those raised to religiously believe so, Satanism offers an explanation as to why ‘good’ people do bad things it might help to ‘explain’ bizarre and compulsive sexual urges…. The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan.
• Many children in the United States . . . are severely psychologically, physically, and sexually traumatized by angry, sadistic parents or other adults…. The vast majority of the children were abused by Christians.

Philip Larkin

• But superstition, like belief, must die.
• This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, that vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die.
• Yet stop I did: in fact I often do/And always end much at a loss like this/Wondering what to look for; wondering, too/ When churches fall completely out of use/ What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep/ A few cathedrals chronically on show/Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases/And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep/Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Mick LaSalle

• He Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci talked about Father Junipero Serra’s qualifications for sainthood: ‘They say he cured a nun’s lupus. A miracle. Now I’m not a doctor, but I know lupus goes into remission. It’s not always fatal. Have Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder play Ping-Pong together. That’s a miracle.

Gabriel Lauber

• For those who are born into atheism, it’s a faith like any other. The only real atheist is an ex-believer.

Hugh Laurie

• You talk to God, you’re religious. God talks to you, you’re psychotic.

Anton Szandor LaVey

• Many of you have already read my writings identifying TV as the new God. . . . In previous centuries, the Church was the great controller, dictating morality, stifling free expression and posing as conservator of all great art and music. Today we have television dictating fashions, thoughts, attitudes, objectives as once did the Church, using many of the same techniques but doing it so palatably that no one notices. Instead of ‘sins’ to keep people in line, we have fear of being judged unacceptable by our peers and fear of imposed insecurity concerning our own identities. Borrowing the Christian sole salvation concept, television tells people that only through exposure to TV can the sins of alienation and ostracism be absolved.

1. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

• A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it, and one ‘s religion is never and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.
• Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.
• I worship Christ . . . Jehovah . . . Pan . . . Aphrodite. But I do not worship hands nailed and running with blood.

Nigella Lawson

• I was brought up an atheist and have always remained so. But at no time was I lied to believe that morality was unimportant or that good and bad did not exist. I believe passionately in the need to distinguish between right and wrong and am somewhat confounded by being told I need God, Jesus or a clergyman to help me to do so.

Richard Leakey

• I myself do not believe in a god who has or had a human form and to whom I owe an existence. I believe it is man who created God in his image and not the other way around. Also, I see no reason to believe in life after death.

Timothy Leary

• Drugs are the religion of the 21st century.
• People use the word ‘natural.’… What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is four years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick’s cathedral, and the Sunday school teachings.
• Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelics drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that’s how they did it in the first century AD, and besides, telescopes are unnatural.

.Fran Lebowitz

• I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere.

Stanislaw   Jerzy   Lec  

• All gods were immortal.
• At the beginning there was the Word-at the end just the Cliché.    
• Do I have no soul as punishment for not believing in the soul?
• Do not ask God the way to heaven; he will show you the hardest one.
• I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.
• I dreamt of a slogan for contraceptives: ‘The unborn will bless you.’
• Perhaps God chose me to be an atheist?
• Puritans should wear fig leaves on their eyes.
• Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.
• Sometimes the devil tempts me to believe in God.
• Thou shalt not kill’ sounds like an admonition and is in fact a discovery.  
• You can change your faith without changing gods. And vice versa.

Prof. LeConte

• We are now on the eve of the greatest   change in traditional views that has taken place since the birth of Christianity.

Richard   Lederer  

• There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.

Leon Lederman

• Physics isn’t a religion. If it were, we’d have a much easier time raising money.

Geddy Lee (Gary Lee Weinrib)

• I consider myself a Jew as a race. But not so much as a religion. I’m not down with religion at all. I’m a Jewish atheist, if that’s possible.

Gypsy   Rose   Lee  

• God is love, but get it in writing.
• Praying is like a rocking chair-it’ll give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.

Harper Lee

• Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

Ursula K. Le Guin

• I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

Archbishop Leighton

• Never be afraid to doubt. Doubt, in order that you may end in believing.

John Lennon

• Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right, and I will be proved right… I don’t know what will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. We’re more popular than Jesus now. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.
• God is a concept by which we measure our pain. . . . I don’t believe in Bible … I don’t believe in Elvis . . . I don’t believe in Beatles . . . I just believe in me.
• Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try. No hell below us, Above us, only sky.
• I’ve never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days…. And that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit—religion was an outlet for my repression…. At one time I was so much involved in the religious bullshit that I used to go around calling myself a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalized madness. It was   therapy that stripped away all that and made me feel my own pain…. You are forced to realise that your pain is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. . . . This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit.

Annie Lennox

• So many wars and strife are borne out of opposing religious views. If people don’t have kindness, respect, tolerance and compassion at the core of their beliefs, then their religion is pointless

Pope Leo XIII (Vincenzo Pecci)

• The death sentence is a necessary and efficacious means for the Church to attain its ends when obstinate heretics disturb the ecclesiastical order.
• The equal toleration of all religions is the same as atheism.

Primo Levi

• An Auschwitz survivor asked about God: There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

1. S. Lewis

• A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
• Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

Joseph Lewis

• If I had the power that the New Testament narrative says that Jesus had, I would not cure one person of blindness, I would make blindness impossible; I would not cure one person of leprosy, I would abolish leprosy.
• Religion is all profit. They have no merchandise to buy, no commissions to pay, and no refunds to make for unsatisfactory service and results…. Their commodity is fear.
• Superstition is the poison of the mind.

Sinclair Lewis

• God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished. God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error. God give me strength not to trust God!
• It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

• Probably no invention came more easily to man than when he thought up heaven.
• There is a sort of transcendental ventriloquy through which men can be made to believe that something which was said on earth came from heaven.
• With most people unbelief in one thing is founded upon blind belief in another.

1. Gordon Liddy

• Looking at the Roman Catholic faith, I was unable to distinguish its assertion of a virgin birth, a return from the dead, and the bodily assumption into somewhere outside the universe of a man and his mother from among similar pagan superstitions. My last fear, the fear of God, died with my faith. I was now alone and would have to live life armed only with my own inner I   felt a   surge of   confidence and   resolve   like   that I   had experienced years before when I conquered my fear of lightning   I was free.

Robert Jay Lifton

• Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother’s parents were very steeped in.

Limp Bizkit

• You make believe that nothing is wrong until you’re cryin’ And you make believe that life is so long until you’re dyin’.

President Abraham Lincoln

• I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and by religious men who are certain they represent the Divine will. … I hope it will not be irreverent in me to say, that if it be probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.
• I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense. But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity.
• In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong.
• It has ever been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
• It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.
• My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them .
• The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.
• When I do good, I feel good, when I do bad, I feel bad. That is my religion.

Benjamin Barr Lindsey

• The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism,   and   other   burning   issues   by   burning   the ismists, which is fine proof that there is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God.

Walter Lippmann

• As long as all evils are believed somehow to fit into a divine, if mysterious, plan, the effort to eradicate them must seem on the whole futile, and even impious…. It is still felt, I believe, in many quarters, even in medical circles, that to mitigate the labor pains in childbirth is to blaspheme against the commandment that in pain children shall be brought forth.
• Mankind: having ceased to believe without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth and is at rest nowhere.
• It is to a morality of humanism that men must turn when the ancient order of things dissolves. When they find that they no longer believe seriously and deeply that they are governed from heaven, there is anarchy in their souls until by conscious effort they find ways of governing themselves.

Patricia Livingstone

• I’d rather navigate the seas of uncertainty than be mired in the concrete of dogma.

John Locke

• I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly: and where it fails them, they cry out, it is a matter of faith, and above reason.

Karen Loethen

• The Church itself send its people out into the world with the commission to spread their beliefs; the Good News, as it were. And I say that is quite audacious to move through the world assuming that everyone else is wrong and your book is right.

Joe Logan

• Every single religion that has ever been on the face of the earth, is a cult. That’s all they are. Just a cult with millions of people in them. Meanwhile, they have a bunch of really bad ideas that require more belief than an episode of ‘I Dream of Jeannie’.

Jack London

• I am a hopeless materialist. I see the soul as nothing else than the sum of activities of the organism plus personal habits-plus inherited habits, memories, experiences, of the organism. I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.

Jason Long

• Christians are normal people in the outside world, but their brains seem to switch to standby mode on Sunday.

Leighann Lord

• I have a problem with indoctrinating children with religion, I mean, you have to be a certain age to drive, to drink, to vote, to marry. I think you should be an adult before you choose a religion.

Alexander Loutsis

• To really be free, you need to be free in the mind.

1. P. Lovecraft

• All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don’t regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.
• If   religion   were   true,   its   followers would   not   try   to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.
• Morality is the adjustment of matter to its environment—the natural arrangement of molecules. More especially it may be considered as dealing with organic molecules. Conventionally it is the science of reconciling the animal Homo (more or less) sapiens to the forces and conditions with which he is surrounded. It is linked with religion only so far as the natural elements it deals with are deified and personified. Morality antedated the Christian religion, and has many times risen superior to coexistent religions. It has powerful support from very non-religious human impulses. Personally, I am intensely moral and intensely irreligious. My morality can be traced to two distinct sources, scientific and aesthetic. My love of truth is outraged by the flagrant disturbance of sociological relations involved in so-called wrong; whilst my aesthetic sense is outraged and disgusted with the violations of taste and harmony thereupon attendant.
• Personally, I should not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We, had it before we were born, yet did not complain. Shall we then whine because we know it will return?
• Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species . . . for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.
• The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
• To the scientist the joy in pursuing truth nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

St. Ignatius Loyola

• We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears to us to be white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.

Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus)

• All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
• Even if I knew nothing of the atoms, I would venture to assert …that the universe was certainly not created for us by divine power.
• Mind cannot arise alone without body, or apart from sinews and blood…. You must admit, therefore, that when the body has perished, there is an end also of the spirit diffused through it is surely lunacy to couple a mortal object with an eternal one.
• Nothing can be created from nothing. Nil pose creari De nilo
• Nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself, without meddling by the gods.
• The nature of the universe has by no means been made through divine power, seeing how great the faults that mar it are.

Martin Luther

• Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.

John Lydon (Johnny Rotten)

• Where is God? I see no evidence of God. God is probably Barry Manilow.

Grant Lyon

• After Jesus ascended into heaven, people thought he would come back during their lifetime. The Bible says the Second Coming of Christ is imminent. How many thousands of years do you think it takes before people get frustrated and stop thinking of him like a savior and start thinking of him like a dad that went to the liquor store for a packet of cigarettes?

THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘K’

 

 

Franz Kafka

• We are sinful not merely because we have eaten of the tree of knowledge, but also because we have not eaten of the tree of life.

Joachim   Kahl

• What after all is the cross of Jesus Christ? It is nothing but the sum total of a sadomasochistic glorification of pain. Christianity has not failed the ideals of its founder: Christ has failed. Corrupt in its very essence, the gospel of Christ alone has persecuted Jews, defamed the female and suppressed sexuality.

Michio Kaku

• Did God have a mother? Children, when told that God made the heavens and the earth, innocently ask whether God had a mother. This deceptively simple question has stumped the elders of the church and embarrassed the finest theologians, precipitating some of the thorniest theological debates over the centuries. All the great religions have elaborate mythologies surrounding the divine act of Creation, but none of them adequately confronts the logical paradoxes inherent in the question that even children ask.

Azam Kamguian

• Saying we must respect people’s culture and religion, however despicable sounds… If a culture allows women to be mutilated and killed to save the family’s ‘honour,’ it cannot be excused.

Wendy Kaminer

• Americans have become fascinated by angels and ‘out of body’ experiences and seem to be discarding the habit of critical thinking…. The dissemination of pseudoscience, including such things as the fascination with near-death experiences   and   the   growing   belief   by   Americans, 34 percent of them, in reincarnation are dangerous. They help to break down the standards of reason.
• If I were to mock religious belief as childish . . . I’d be excoriated as an example of the cynical, liberal elite responsible for America’s moral decline….I’d receive hate mail. Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles.
• People who believe that God exists and heeds their prayers have probably waived the right to mock people who talk to trees or claim to channel the spirits of Native Americans.

Immanuel Kant

• He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray.
• Sapere aude, have the courage to know: this is the motto of the Enlightenment.
• Supreme Being is a mere ideal,   the objective reality of which can neither be proved nor disproved by pure reason.
• The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

Spencer Kassimir

• With modern science or atheism, a new concept may be met with opposition, but once it becomes established, old texts and beliefs are scrapped and referenced for limited purposes.

Sir Bernard Katz

• Organized religion: The world’s largest pyramid scheme.

Walter Kaufmann

• Few Christians would be in doubt what to think of a father who tortured his children for forty-eight hours because they did not agree with him or did not obey him; and if he had a great many children and had given only a few of them a single chance while offering the vast majority no opportunity at all to know his will, most people would consider this the epitome of an inhuman lack of love and justice.
• The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that.

John Keats

• I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion-I have shudder’d at it-I shudder no more-I could be martyr’d for my Religion-Love is my religion- I could die for that.
• My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk.

Maynard James Keenan

• Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing.

Garrison Keillor

• My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in the USA in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

Helen Keller

• It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
• There is much in the Bible against which every instinct of my being rebels, so much that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end. I do not think that the knowledge which I have gained of its history and sources compensates me for the unpleasant details it has forced upon my attention.

Paul Keller

• Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition.

Joshua Kelly

• Christians keep saying that the God of the New Testament is completely different than the God of the Old…not realizing what an absurd argument that is. If you knew of a man who was a serial murderer…committed genocides, demanded child sacrifices, and crushed entire cities, would you suddenly start trusting him when he suggests crucifying his own son to make up for it?

President John F. Kennedy

• I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote-where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference-and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him

Johannes Kepler

• Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.

Holger Kersten and Elmer R. Gruber

• Qumran lies directly within the orbit of Jesus’ early activity. His first public appearance occurred in this region. It is a striking fact that the place where Jesus received the ritual baptismal bath in the Jordan at the hands of John, was only 5 km from the monastic settlement of Qumran. There is of course a reason for this. John the Baptist was a ‘schaliach’, an apostle of the sect of Qumran…John led a community of Essene moderates. After his baptism one should similarly count Jesus as a member of one of these communities, and refer to him as a Nazarene. This later led to the falsely translated and irrational description of him as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, a place which was not even in existence at the time of Jesus. Later a sign was said to have been fixed to the Cross, giving charge against him as membership of this sect: “Jesus, Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum–Jesus, Nazarene, King of the Jews

Florynce (Flo) Kennedy

• It’s interesting to speculate how it developed that in two of the most anti-feminist institutions, the church and the law court, the men are wearing the dresses.

Jomo Kenyatta

• When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the Land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.

Johannes Kepler

• When miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.

Omar Khayyam

• And do you think that unto such as you, A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew, God gave the Secret, and denied it me?- Well, well, what matters it! Believe that too.
• Look not above, there is no answer there; Pray not, for no one listens to your prayer; NEAR is as near to God as any FAR, And HERE is just the same deceit as THERE.
• Men talk of heaven,-there is no heaven but here; Men talk of hell,-there is no hell but here; Men of hereafters talk, and future lives,- O love, there is no other life-but here.

Søren Kierkegaard

• Christendom has done away with Christianity, without being aware of it…. The ideals of the New Testament have gone out of life…. it has been perceived by many. They like to give it this turn: the human race has outgrown Christianity.
• There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true. The other is to refuse to accept what is true.

Lemmy Kilmister

• Apparently people don’t like the truth but I do like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit , then maybe , just once , one of them will say ,’ Oh! Wait a minute. I was wrong.’ I live for that happening. Rare. I assure you.
• Religion is stupid anyway. I mean, a virgin gets pregnant by a ghost! You would never get away with that in a divorce court, would you?

Martin Luther King, Jr

• The most dangerous type of atheism is not theoretical atheism, but practical atheism …that’s the most dangerous type. And the world, even the church, is filled up with people who pay lip service to God and not life service. And there is always a danger that we will make it appear externally that we believe in God when internally we don’t. We say with our mouths that we believe in him, but we live with our lives like he never existed. That is the ever-present danger confronting religion. That’s a dangerous type of atheism.

Stephen King  

• The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything . . . nothing is left to chance . . . logic can be happily tossed out the window.

Sincere Kirabo

• Atheism itself isn’t the nexus to human progress. Nonbelief in supreme beings and perceived holy edicts isn’t a panacea for social ills, nor does it preclude cognitive error. That said, it’s certainly possible for those who make up movement atheism-organizers and participants –to be contributors to a more evolved resolve intent on dismantling disparities and replacing them with more egalitarian, charitable and empathetic ways of thinking.

Margaret Knight

• If your kid is normally intelligent, he is almost bound to get the impression that there is something odd about religious statements. If he is taken to church, for example, he hears that death is the gateway to eternal life, and should be welcomed rather than shunned; yet outside he sees death regarded as the greatest of all evils, and everything possible is done to postpone it…. The child soon gets the idea that there are two kinds of truth-the ordinary kind, and another, rather confusing and slightly embarrassing kind, into which it is best not inquire too closely. . . . Now all this is bad intellectual training.
• The fundamental opposition is between dogma and the scientific outlook. On the one side, Christianity and Communism, the two great rival dogmatic systems; on the other Scientific Humanism.

F.M. (Farquhar McGillivray Strachan Stewart) Knowles

• Faith is often the boast of a man who is too lazy to investigate.

Nanrei Kobori

• God is an invention of Man. So the nature of God is only a shallow mystery. The deep mystery is the nature of man.

Arthur Koestler  

• Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.
• God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.
• Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Jeremy Konopka

• In the brain of every religious person there is a god-shaped vacuum.

Karl Kraus

• When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.

Lawrence M. Krauss

• Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all things that matter for evolution weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
• No idea should be above ridicule. Ridicule is a very important tool. And why should religion not be subject to ridicule? If politics is subject to ridicule as a way of illuminating reality, why shouldn’t religion?

Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing

• We find that the sexual instinct, when disappointed and unappeased, frequently seeks and finds a substitute in religion.

Ed Krebs (Edwin Gerhard Krebs)

• The world is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can’t agree on whose fairy tales to believe.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

• For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, ‘Tell me all about it . . .’ and we are satisfied with their descriptions…. We are secondhand people.
• The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
• Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay
• Truth is a pathless land…. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.
• Truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to…. There is only you-your relationship with others and with the world-there is nothing else…. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing.

Nicholas D. Kristof

• Despite the lack of scientific or historical evidence, and despite the doubts of Biblical scholars, America is so pious that not only do 91 percent of Christians says they believe in the Virgin Birth, but so do an astonishing 47 percent of U.S. non-Christians.

Louis Kronenberger

• There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

Stanley Kubrick

• I’d be very surprised if the universe wasn’t full of an intelligence of an order that to us would seem God-like. . . . There are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone with approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. . . so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe . . . where intelligent life . . . is hundreds of thousands or millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia-less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe-can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities-and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.
• The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, 2001 shows that what some people call ‘god’ is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance…. This film is a rejection of the notion that there is a god; isn’t that obvious?

Milan Kundera

• Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands.

Paul Kurtz

• Homo religious invents religious symbols, which he venerates and worships to save him from facing the finality of his death and dissolution…. In the last analysis it is the theist who can find no ultimate meaning in this life and who denigrates it…. The theist can only find meaning by leaving this life for a transcendental world beyond the grave.
• Human life has no meaning independent of itself…. The meaning of life is what we choose to give it.
• Life is an opportunity, and it is pregnant with meanings. But the life that you live depends upon your choice.
• The beginning of wisdom is the awareness that there is insufficient evidence that a god or gods have created us and the recognition that we are responsible in part for our own destiny.
• The key to understanding who and what we are is that our futures, as individuals, societies or culture, are not fixed or pre-ordained by some hidden hand of god; that what will become of us depends in part on what we choose to become.
• The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.

 

THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘J’

Holbrook Jackson

• Man is a dog’s ideal of what God should be.

Susan Jacoby

• I believe that our obligation is to make life better because it’s our obligation to each other as human beings. Not in relation to eternal rewards and infernal punishments.

Clive James

• Religion is an advertising campaign for a product that doesn’t exist.

Dresden James

• When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.

William James

• Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s . . . pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organtones of misery it accounts for by a gastroduodenal catarrh.
• The arguments for God’s existence have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints.
• The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business.

Lewis G. Janes

• Doubt of miracle is faith in the eternal order of Nature.

1. D. Janes

• The Church of England   is an aristocracy that got all over the world with the Bible in one hand, a sword in the other, and a baggage-train   of opium and whisky.

Jim Jefferies (Geoff James Nugent)

• As far as I know, the Devil hasn’t brought out a book. We don’t know his side of the argument. If you ask me, God and the Devil are having an argument and the Devil’s being the bigger man because God is just writing shit about him and the Devil’s going: ‘I’m not even gonna fucking comment, son, if you talk about me like that.’

President Thomas Jefferson

• A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity, that ever were written
• All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution.
• But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
• Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man. . . .perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind . . . a mere contrivance for priests to filch wealth and power to themselves.
• Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
• Creeds have been the bane of the Christian church… made of Christendom a slaughter-house.
• Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a common censor over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.
• He is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
• History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.
• I am a Materialist; he Christ takes the side of Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin; I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it.
• I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State
• I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
• If the obstacles of bigotry and priestcraft can be surmounted, we may hope that common sense will suffice to do everything else.
• If we could believe that Jesus…countenanced the follies, falsehoods and charlatanisms which his biographers father on him …the conclusion would be irresistible…that he was an imposter.
• If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that is pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such thing exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and their reasoning in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally that while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D’Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than love of God.
• I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.
• In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty, he is always in allegiance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own…. History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government…. Political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.
• It is between fifty and sixty years since I read the Apocalypse, and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac.
• It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
• I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
• Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.
• Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
• No citizen: shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever…to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of religious opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.
• Show me where no religion doesn’t require the government to keep it going….It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
• State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine   all   our   civil   rights….   Erecting   the   ‘wall   of separation between church and state,’ therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
• The Athanasian paradox that one is three and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.
• The care of every man’s soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills. But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.
• The Christian god can be easily pictured as virtually the same as the many ancient gods of past civilizations .The   Christian   god   is   a   three   headed   monster;   cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.
• The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.
• The clergy believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny known to the mind of man.
• The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus… in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
• There is not a truth existing which I fear… or would wish unknown to the whole world.
• They priests dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live
• To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.
• We are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is. All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.
• In the gospels: We discover a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison

• Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow citizens he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles, on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency, will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Richard Jeni

• When one guy sees an invisible man, he’s a nut case, ten people see him, it’s a cult, ten million people see him it’s a respected religion.
• You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend.

Penn Jillette

• Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good. It makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
• I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy-you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word ‘elephant’ includes mystery, order, goodness, love, and a spare tire?
• I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. That’s easy-you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do…. I’m saying, ‘I believe there is no God.’ Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough . . . it just seems rude to beg the invisible for more.
• When people over seven years old have imaginary friends, there’s going to be trouble . . . they’re going to be killing somebody.
• You don’t have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is ‘I don’t know’.

Billy Joel

• I wasn’t raised Catholic, but I used to go to Mass with my friends, and I viewed the whole business as a lot of very enthralling hocus pocus. There’s a guy hanging upon the wall   .   .   .   Nailed   to  a   cross   and   dripping   blood   and everybody’s blaming themselves for that man’s torment, but I said to myself, ‘Forget it. I had no hand in that evil. I have no original sin. . . . I pass on all of this.’ . . . I had some Jewish guilt in me already . . . so I knew I definitely had no room for Catholic guilt too. . . . Then my mother took my sister and me to an Evangelical church. . . . I was baptised there at the age of twelve, and it was strictly hallelujah time. But one day the preacher is up in the pulpit unfolding a dollar bill saying, ‘This is the flag of the Jews.’ Whoa, fella! We left that flock. . . . I gradually decided that just because I didn’t have or couldn’t find the ultimate answer didn’t mean I was going to buy the religious fairytale.

Darrin Johnson

• But of course, many of the people who have committed the most heinous crimes were religious. This itself proves that religion is no guarantee of morality. Some of the kindest, most generous people I know are not religious at all. Personally, my gradual journey to atheism also resulted in my being more conscious of the needs of others. Re-evaluating my place in the world changed my view on religion, as well as my views on how I should trust my fellow human beings.

Ellen Johnson

• American Atheists has always encouraged the public to read both the Old and New Testaments from cover to cover. Many people become atheists after reading the Bible.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ)

• I believe in the American tradition of separation of Church and State which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. By my office, and at my personal conviction, I am sworn to uphold that tradition.

Samuel Johnson

• It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Sonia Johnson

• One of my favorite fantasies is that next Sunday not one woman, in any country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they cease to be.

Hanns Johst

• When I hear the word ‘culture’…I take the safety-catch off my Browning!

1. T. Joshi

• The atheist, agnostic, or secularist . . . should not be cowed by exaggerated sensitivity to people’s religious beliefs…. Those who advocate a piece of folly like the theory of an ‘intelligent creator’ should be held accountable for their folly; they have no right to be offended for being called fools until they establish that they are not in fact fools.

Joubert    

• It   is easy to believe in God if you are not asked to define him.

James Joyce

• The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
• There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

Alix Jules

• Everyone has this idea that African-Americans are hyper religious and that’s all you can be. Historically, that hasn’t been the case. In fact, historically speaking we weren’t Christians before we were enslaved, so this is not natural and I think it’s important that people at least realize that there is an alternative state.

Carl Jung

• It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities.
• Religion is a defense against the experience of God.

THE ATHEIST QUOTES ‘I’

Michael Ignatieff

• Secular faiths such as Marxism left much less room for doubt than religion. Religion knows all about doubt. Since God’s ways are unknowable, religion can endure only if it finds   a   place   for   self-questioning.   Prayer   itself   is   a questioning dialogue with God.

Incubus

• Ask myself how much I let the fear take the wheel and steer.

Colonel Robert   G.   Ingersoll  

• A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.
• A crime against god is a demonstrated impossibility.
• As long as every question is answered by the word ‘god,’ scientific inquiry is simply impossible.
• As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man. The bible was not written by a woman. Within its leaves there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her.
• A very pious friend of mine, having heard that I had said the world was full of imperfections, asked me if the report was true. Upon being informed that it was, he expressed great surprise that anyone could be guilty of such presumption. He said that, in his judgement, it was impossible to point out an imperfection ‘Be kind enough,’ said he, ‘to name even one improvement that you could make, if you had the power.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘I would make good health catching, instead of disease.’ The truth is, it is impossible to harmonize all the ills, and pains, and agonies of this world with the idea that we were created by, and are watched over and protected by an infinitely wise, powerful and beneficent God, who is superior to and independent of nature.
• Bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called faith.
• Christianity has such a contemptible opinion of human nature that it does not believe a man can tell the truth unless frightened by a belief in God. No lower opinion of the human race has ever been expressed.
• Every demonstration is an infidel. Everything that ever really happened testifies against the supernatural.
• Every fact is an enemy of the church. Every fact is a heretic
• Fear believes-courage doubts.   Fear falls upon the earth and prays-courage stands erect and thinks. Fear retreats-courage advances. Fear is barbarism-courage is civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion, courage is science.
• Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted, and heaven crammed with these phantoms.
• For many centuries the sword and cross were allies. Together they attacked the rights of man. They defended each other.
• For   the man Jesus, who loved his fellowmen, I have the most profound   respect;   but for Christianity, as taught in orthodox creeds, I have the most supreme contempt.
• From the aspersions of the pulpit I would rescue the reputation of the Deity.
• From the first doubt man has continued to advance.
• Give every human being every right you claim for yourself. Keep your mind open to the influences of Nature. Receive new thoughts with hospitality. Let us advance!
• Give me the storm and stress of thought and action rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith.
• Give the church a place in the constitution, let her touch once more the sword of power, and the priceless fruit of all ages will turn to ashes on the lips of men.
• Hands that help are far better than lips that pray.
• Honest investigation is utterly impossible within the pale of any church, for the reason, that if you think the church is right you will not investigate, and if you think it wrong, the church will investigate you.
• I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this.
• If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them. If slaves are freed, man must free them. If new truths are discovered, man must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are protected and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of man. The grand victories of the future must be won by man, and by man alone.
• If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost…I do not see how it is possible for an intelligent human being to conclude that the Song of Solomon is the work of God, and that the tragedy of Lear was the work of an uninspired man.
• If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament,   he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane. If Christ, in fact, said ‘I came not to bring peace but a sword’ it is the only prophecy in the New Testament that has been literally fulfilled.
• If Church property is allowed to go without   taxation,   it is only a question of time when the Churches will own a large percentage   of the property   of the civilized world and thus become dangerous to the liberties of mankind.
• If priests had not been fond of mutton, lambs never would have been sacrificed to god. Nothing was ever carried to the temple that the priest could not use, and it always happened that god wanted what his agents liked.
• If the founder of Christianity had plainly said: ‘It is not necessary to believe in order to be saved; it is only necessary to do, and he who really loves his fellow-men, who is kind, honest, just and charitable, is to be forever blest’-if he had only said that, there would probably have been but little persecution.
• If the people were a little ignorant, astrology would flourish, if a little more enlightened, religion would perish!
• I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders.
• Infidelity is liberty; all religion is slavery
• In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences.
• I thank the inventors, the discoverers, the thinkers, the scientists, the explorers. We are beginning to learn that to exchange a mistake for the truth-a superstition for a fact-is to progress!
• It is a blessed thing that in every age someone has had individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions. I believe it was Magellan who said, ‘The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the Church.’ On the prow of his ship were disobedience, defiance, scorn, and success.
• It is told that the great Angelo, in decorating a church, painted some angels wearing sandals. A cardinal looking at the picture said to the artist: ‘Whoever saw angels with sandals?’ Angelo answered with another question: ‘Whoever saw an angel barefooted?
• It may be that ministers really think that their prayers do good and it may be that frogs imagine that their croaking brings spring.
• Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers; it is the only prayer that deserves an answer-good, honest, noble work.
• Ministers say that they teach charity. That is natural. They live on hand-outs. All beggars teach that others should give.
• No man of any humor ever founded a religion.
• Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of ‘inspiration.’ It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge-that is to say, of science.
• Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.
• Prayer and miracle are twin sisters of superstition. Fear falls upon the earth and prays-courage   stands erect and thinks.
• Reason, Observation and Experience -the Holy Trinity of Science – have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.
• Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.
• Secularism… has no mysteries, no mummeries, no priests, no ceremonies, no falsehoods, no miracles, and no persecutions. It considers the lilies of the field, and takes thought for the morrow. It says to the whole world, Work that you may eat, drink, and be clothed; work that you may enjoy; work that you may not want; work that you may give and never need.
• Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.
• That Church teaches us that we can make God happy by being miserable ourselves.
• The book, called the Bible, is filled with passages equally horrible, unjust and atrocious. This is the book to be read in schools in order to make our children loving, kind and gentle! This is the book they wish to be recognized in our Constitution as the source of all authority and justice!
• The churches have no confidence in each other. Why? Because they are acquainted with each other.
• The civilization of man has increased just to the same extent that religious power has decreased. The intellectual advancement of man depends upon how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth. The church never enabled a human being to make even one of these exchanges; on the contrary, all her power has been used to prevent them. In spite, however, of the church, man found that some of his religious conceptions were wrong. By reading his Bible, he found that the ideas of his God were more cruel and brutal than those of the most depraved savage. He also discovered that this holy book was filled with ignorance, and that it must have been written by persons wholly unacquainted with the nature of the phenomena by which we are surrounded; and now and then, some man had the goodness and courage to speak his honest thoughts. In every age some thinker, some doubter, some investigator, some hater of hypocrisy, some despiser of sham, some brave lover of the right, has gladly, proudly and heroically braved the ignorant fury of superstition for the sake of man and truth. These divine men were generally torn in pieces by the worshipers of the gods. Socrates was poisoned because he lacked reverence for some of the deities. Christ was crucified by a religious rabble for the crime of blasphemy. Nothing is more gratifying to a religionist than to destroy his enemies at the command of God. Religious persecution springs from a due admixture of love towards God and hatred towards man.
• The clergy know that I know that they know that they do not know.
• The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It is the infamy of infamies. The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called ‘faith.’ What man, who ever thinks, can believe that blood can appease God? And yet, our entire system of religion is based upon that believe. The Jews pacified Jehovah with the blood of animals, and according to the Christian system, the blood of Jesus softened the heart of God a little, and rendered possible the salvation of a fortunate few. It is hard to conceive how the human mind can give assent to such terrible ideas, or how any sane man can read the Bible and still believe in the doctrine of inspiration.
• The hands that help are far better than the lips that pray.
• This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves.
• The hope of science is the perfection of the human race. The hope of theology is the salvation of a few, and the damnation of almost everybody.
• The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of him who reads.
• The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.
• The inventor of the plow did more good than the maker of the first rosary-because, say what you will, plowing is better than praying.
• The man who believed the Bible could not accept the facts, and the man who believed the facts could not accept the Bible.
• The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called ‘faith.’
• The old doctrine that God…rewarded the virtuous and punished the wicked is gradually fading from the mind. We know that some of the worst men have what the world calls success. We know that some of the best men lie upon the straw of failure. We know that honesty goes hungry, while larceny sits at the banquet. We know that the vicious have every physical comfort, while the virtuous are often clad in rags.
• The real oppressor, enslaver and corrupter of the people is the   Bible.   That   book   burnt   heretics,   built dungeons, founded the Inquisition, and trampled upon all the liberties of man.   That book spread the pall of superstition over the colleges and schools.   That book puts out the eyes of science and makes honest investigation a crime.   That book fills the world with bigotry,   hypocrisy   and fear. If cathedrals had been universities, if dungeons of the Inquisition had been laboratories, if Christians had believed in character   instead of creed, if they had taken from the Bible all the good and thrown away the wicked and absurd, if domes of temples had been observatories, if priests had been philosophers, if missionaries had taught the useful arts, if astrology   had been astronomy, if the black art had been chemistry, if superstition had been science, if religion had been humanity, this world would have been a heaven filled with love, with liberty and joy.
• There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: ‘let us be friends.’
• The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not know that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace
• These gods did not even know the shape of the worlds they had created, but supposed them perfectly flat. Some thought the day could be lengthened by stopping the sun, that the blowing of horns could throw down the walls of a city, and all knew so little of the real nature of the people they had created, that they commanded the people to love them. Some were so ignorant as to suppose that man could believe just as he might desire, or as they might command, and that to be governed by observation, reason, and experience was a most foul and damning sin. None of these gods could give a true account of the creation of this little earth. All were woefully deficient in geology and astronomy. As a rule, they were most miserable legislators, and as executives, they were far inferior to the average of American presidents.
• The terrible religious wars that inundated the world with blood tended at least to bring all religion into disgrace and hatred. Thoughtful people began to question the divine origin of a religion that made its believers hold the rights of others in absolute contempt. A few began to compare Christianity with the religions of heathen people, and were forced to admit that the difference was hardly worth dying for. They also found that other nations were even happier and more prosperous than their own. They began to suspect that their religion, after all, was not of much real value.
• This century will be called Darwin’s century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers… His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity. He has not only stated, but he has demonstrated . . . that the Bible is a book written by ignorance-at the instigation of fear.
• Those who love God are not always the friends of their fellow men.
• To fight for yourself is natural; to fight for others is grand; to fight for your country is noble; to fight for the human race; for the liberty of hand and brain is nobler still.
• We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want a ‘this year’s fact’. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years. Their reputation for ‘truth and veracity’ in the neighborhood where they resided is wholly unknown to us. Give us a new miracle, and substantiate it by witnesses who still have the cheerful habit of living this world. Do not send us to Jericho to hear the winding horns, nor put us in the fire with Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego. Do not compel us to navigate the sea with Captain Jonah, nor dine with Mr. Ezekiel. There is no sort of use in sending us fox-hunting with Samson. We have positively lost all interest in that little speech so eloquently delivered by Balaam’s inspired donkey. It is worse than useless to show us fishes with money in their mouths, and call our attention to vast multitudes stuffing themselves with five crackers and two sardines. We demand a new miracle, and we demand it now. Let the church furnish at least one, or forever hold her peace.
• When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust.
• When the people failed to worship one of these gods, or failed to feed and clothe his priests, (which was much the same thing,) he generally visited them with pestilence and famine. Sometimes he allowed some other nation to drag them into slavery – to sell their wives and children; but generally he glutted his vengeance by murdering their firstborn. The priests always did their whole duty, not only in predicting these calamities, but in proving, when they did happen, that they were brought upon the people because they had not given quite enough to them.
• When they attacked other religions it was a sword and when their religion was attacked it became a shield.
• When worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow- men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilized.
• With soap, baptism is a good thing.
• Yes; if a man really believes that God once upheld slavery; that he commanded soldiers to kill women and babes; that he believed in polygamy; that he persecuted for opinion’s sake; that he will punish forever, and that he hates an unbeliever, the effect in my judgment will be bad. It always has been bad. This belief built the dungeons of the Inquisition. This belief made the Puritan murder the Quaker.

Eugene Ionesco

• There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison.

John Irving

• Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.

Hirobumi Ito

• I regard religion itself as quite unnecessary for a nation’s life; science is far above superstition; and what is religion, Buddhism or Christianity, but superstition, and therefore a possible source of weakness to a nation?