Atheism Quotes

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Atheism is a broad sense is a rejection of belief in the existence of deities, in a narrower sense, the specific belief that there are no deities, and most inclusively, it is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists. The word originates with the Greek ἄθεος (atheos), meaning “without god(s)”, used as a pejorative term applied to those thought to reject the gods worshipped by the larger society.

Bold with joy,
Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place
(Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism,
Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon,
Drops her blue-fringed lids, and holds them close,
And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven,
Cries out, “Where is it?” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Atheism is…

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

Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman whose beauty and sensibility it mars, nor the mother, who has a son to lose, nor the rulers of men, who have no surer pledge of the fidelity of their subjects than religion. – Francois-rene De Chateaubriand

Atheism can never be an institution … it can never be more than a destitution. – Robert Collyer

Atheism cheapens everything it touches-look at the results of communism, the most powerful form of atheism on earth. – Peter Kreeft

Atheism comes into rather a bad press and I suppose I’d rather describe myself as a humanist… I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe there is a God. – Stephen Fry

Atheism deprives superstition of its stand ground, and compels Theism to reason for its existence. – George Holyoake

Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness. – Madame de Stael

Atheism has become a major threat to the church. New Atheists tend to be articulate and belligerent. They are aggressively engaging in “atheist evangelism,” determined to stamp out every vestige of belief in God, which they insist is not only “stupid” but “wicked.” – Dave Hunt

Atheism has been on the rise for years now, and the Bible of the atheists is ‘The Origin of Species.’ – Kirk Cameron

Atheism has had a distinguished and varied lineage. It seems likely that doubt about religion is just as old as religion itself, although there is no way to prove what people believed or did not believe in cultures that have left us no literary evidence. – Emily Wilson

Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty. – Emma Goldman

Atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby. – Ricky Gervais

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God. – Tom Stoppard

Atheism is a disease of the mind caused by eating underdone philosophy. – Austin O’Malley

Atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the Light. – John Lennox

Atheism is a moral position — a rather rigid one, if you’ve ever read the opinions of its highest-profile espousers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. – Lynn Coady

Atheism is a non-prophet organization. – George Carlin

Atheism is a religion itself complete with fanatics and bigots. – Vanna Bonta

Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby. – Penn Jillette

Atheism is a strange thing. Even the devils never fell into that vice. – Charles Spurgeon

Atheism is a theoretical formulation of the discouraged life… – Harry Emerson Fosdick

Atheism is a very positive affirmation of man’s ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems. – Madalyn Murray O’Hair

Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular. – Maximilien Robespierre

Atheism is cheap on people, because it snobbishly says nine out of ten people through history have been wrong about God and have had a lie at the core of their hearts. – Peter Kreeft

Atheism is having a heyday in the born-again United States. – Alain de Botton

Atheism is like the highest level of white privilege. It’s like having a black belt in white privilege. – W. Kamau Bell

Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature. – Emmett F. Fields

Atheism is not a matter of the mind; it is a matter of the heart. – Dillon Burroughs

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. – Sam Harris

Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position. – Richard Dawkins

Atheism is not a world view or a belief system or a political philosophy. It is not a religion, it has no doctrine or dogma. It has nothing to do with whether a person is moral or immoral, good or evil. Atheism is simply a lack of belief in a god or gods. – Randy Vlach

Atheism is not just about not believing there is a God, but on the assumption that there is one, what kind of God is he? – Stephen Fry

Atheism is not the default position despite what many atheists persist. The default position is nothing. To be an atheist you must first become aware of the concept of gods to reject them either consciously or unconsciously. To disbelieve in something you must first acquire knowledge. – Unknown

Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious. – Slavoj Zizek

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. – Sam Harris

Atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of Man. – Francis Bacon

Atheism is really nothing but a sorry litany of non-sequiturs, e.g., if God existed, why do we have all the evil and horrors in the world? But this presupposes that God is all-good, an obvious non-sequitur. – Vincent Bugliosi

Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance. – Isaac Newton

Atheism is spreading like wildfire. – Ray Comfort

Atheism is the absence of religion. We don’t really need atheism. We just need to get rid of religion. – Penn Jillette

Atheism is the last word of theism. – Heinrich Heine

Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism. – Vladimir Lenin

Atheism is the only world-view or religious view that is not tolerated within the SS. – Heinrich Himmler

Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics. – Bill Gaede

Atheism is without God. It does not assert no God. – Charles Bradlaugh

Atheism leads to numerous absurdities promoted by otherwise intelligent people. – Dave Hunt

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. – Francis Bacon

Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds. – Madalyn Murray O’Hair

Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree. – Blaise Pascal

Atheism tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is. – Eric Metaxas

Atheism thrives on bad religion. – Os Guinness

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. – C.S. Lewis

Atheism — Your Gain, No Pain! – Ron Barrier

Atheism’s attraction — greatness, dare I say? — is that it takes seriously, deadly seriously indeed, the reality of this world, because, for atheism, this world is all we have. There is no emergency exit, which, for atheism, is what religious belief often amounts to. And in this perspective, the rejection of immortality can be seen as an invitation to a life of complete honesty in the here and now. – Martin Henry

Atheism, a religion dedicated to its own sense of smug superiority. – Stephen Colbert

Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain. – Alister E. McGrath

Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history. – Dinesh D’Souza

Atheism, the absence of belief in gods, is a comparatively late phenomenon in history. – Chapman Cohen

Atheism; the absence of theistic belief. – Joseph McCabe

God is…

God created the universe out of nothing in an act which also brought time into existence. Recent discoveries, such as observations supporting the Big Bang and similar astronomical phenomena, are wholly compatible with this view. – Henry Margenau

God has an unalterable and perfect plan for every person, but you should still pray in a vain attempt to change it. – David G. McAfee

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. – Voltaire

God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance. – Neil deGrasse Tyson

God is DEAD, and no one cares! If there is a hell I’ll see you there! – Trent Reznor

God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him. – Friedrich Nietzsche

God is dead. – Friedrich Nietzsche

God is man idealized. – Amiri Baraka

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and controls everything. Unless something bad happens. Then that was Satan. – Unknown

God is Truth. There is no incompatibility between science and religion. Both are seeking the same truth. Science shows that God exists. – Derek Barton

God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. – Aldous Huxley

God made you in his image, really? Then why aren’t you invisible? – Unknown

God must love stupid people; He made so many. – Unknown

God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it. – Francis Bacon

God promised the end of all wicked people, Thor promised the end of all Ice Giants. I don’t see any Ice Giants around. – Unknown

God should be executed for crimes against humanity. – Bryan Emmanuel Gutierrez

God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven’t figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don’t believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. – Richard Feynman

God [is] the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion. – Robert Boyle

Religion is …

Religion assures us that our afflictions shall have an end; she comforts us, she dries our tears, she promises us another life. On the contrary, in the abominable worship of atheism, human woes are the incense, death is the priest, a coffin the altar, and annihilation the Deity. – Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand

Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool. – Unknown

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery. – Robert Green Ingersoll

Religion can no longer rest its claims on a dogmatic supernaturalism, because any dogma that is irreconcilable with tested knowledge must be rejected… One sentence … sums up the dark and deadly pages of Christian history: “If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” – Herbert J. Muller

Religion cannot and should not be replaced by atheism. Religion needs to go away and not be replaced by anything. Atheism is not a religion. It’s the absence of religion, and that’s a wonderful thing. – Penn Jillette

Religion cannot sink lower than when somehow it is raised to a state religion … It becomes then an avowed mistress. – Heinrich Heine

Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage. – H. L. Mencken

Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, Controls people, Deludes people. – Carlespie Mary Alice McKinney

Religion easily has the best bullshit story of all time. Think about it. Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money. – George Carlin

Religion glorifies the dogma of a despotic, mythical God. Atheism ennobles the interests of free and progressive Man. Religion is superstition. Atheism is sanity. Religion is medieval. Atheism is modern. – E. Haldeman-Julius

Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!… But He loves you. … and HE NEEDS MONEY! – George Carlin

Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea. – Madalyn Murray O’Hair

Religion hides many mischiefs from suspicion. – Christopher Marlowe

Religion is “so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.” – H. L. Mencken

Religion is … the most pernicious single influence in human society, without one redeeming feature. – Theodore Schroeder

Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there. – Muhammad Naguib

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. – Richard Dawkins

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. – Sigmund Freud

Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning. – Jerry A. Coyne

Religion is based upon blind faith supported by no evidence. Science is based upon confidence that results from evidence – and that confidence can be modified and/or reversed by further observations and experimentation. Science approaches truth, closer and closer, by hard dedicated work. Religion already has it all decided, and it’s in the book. It’s dogma, unchangeable, and unaffected by reality and whatever facts we come upon in the real world. – James Randi

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. – Bertrand Russell

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich. – Napoleon Bonaparte

Religion is just mind control. – George Carlin

Religion is like a P. It’s fine to have one. It’s fine to be proud of it. But please don’t whip it out in public and start waving it around, and please don’t try to shove it down my throats. – Unknown

Religion is not a nice thing. It is potentially a very dangerous thing because it involves a heady complex of emotions, desires, yearnings and fears. – Karen Armstrong

Religion is not so bad, unless you believe it. – David Eller

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. – Seneca the Younger

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines. – Bertrand Russell

Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the open. Both have their proper sphere and they should realize that they are allies. – John B. S. Haldane

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand. – Karl Marx

Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses. – Arthur C. Clarke

Religion is the opiate of the masses. – Karl Marx

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. – Karl Marx

Religion is the venereal disease of mankind. – Henry de Montherlant

Religion makes good people better and bad people worse. – H. Richard Niebuhr

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end. – Richard Dawkins

Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place – service – social service – the ants creed, the bees creed. – John Galsworthy

Religion! O Diabole! Fie, I am asham’d, however that I seem, To think a word of such simple sound, Of such great matter should be made the ground. – Christopher Marlowe

Religion, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. – H. L. Mencken

Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don’t need. – Bill Maher

Science is …

Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved. – Tim Minchin

Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when. – Richard Dawkins

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now. – Arthur C. Clarke

Science can have no quarrel with a religion which postulates a God to whom men are His children. – Arthur Compton

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. – Richard Dawkins

Science is a limited way of knowing, looking at just the natural world and natural causes. There are a lot of ways human beings understand the universe – through literature, theology, aesthetics, art or music. – Eugenie Scott

Science is advanced by proposing and testing hypothesis, not by declaring questions unsolvable. – Nick Matzke

Science is and should be seen as “completely neutral” on the issue of the theistic or atheistic implications of scientific results. – George Coyne

Science is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing too. – Steven Weinberg

Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created. – James Clerk Maxwell

Science is the only savior. – Luther Burbank

Science itself is steadily nailing the lid on atheism’s coffin. – Lee Strobel

Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. – Ricky Gervais

Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion. – Steven Weinberg

Science with religion is lame; religion without science is blind. Science without religion is useful, religion with science is useless. – Albert Einstein

Short And Powerful Atheism Quotes

‘Tis well averred, A scientific faith’s absurd. – Robert Browning

A belief is not true simply because it is useful. – Henri Frederic Amiel

A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints. – Emile M. Cioran

A God comprehended is no God. – Gerhard Tersteegen

A mere society form of Atheism. – Charles Bradlaugh

Adults with imaginary friends are stupid. – Unknown

Agnostics are just atheists without balls. – Stephen Colbert

All Bibles are man-made. – Thomas Edison

All thinking men are atheists. – Ernest Hemingway

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. – John Buchan

An atheist is as religious as a theist. – Kedar Joshi

Atheist: A person who believes in one less God than you do. – Donald Morgan

Belief is the death of intelligence. – Robert Anton Wilson

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them. – Peter Ustinov

Blame is for God and small children. – Dustin Hoffman

By night an atheist half believes in God. – Edward Young

Christianity is such a silly religion. – Gore Vidal

Communism begins where atheism begins… – Karl Marx

Evolution … is opportunistic, hence unpredictable. – Ernst Mayr

Faith means not wanting to know what is true. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Fear was the first thing on earth to make gods. – Lucretius

Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion. – Wilhelm Stekel

Follow the argument wherever it leads. – Socrates

Heresy makes for progress. – Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. – T. S. Eliot

I am a daylight atheist. – Brendan Behan

I am without religious feeling. – Charles Sumner

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. – Frank Lloyd Wright

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist. – Albert Camus

I do not believe there is such a thing as a God. – George Holyoake

I don’t believe in atheists. – Neal Boortz

I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose. – Clarence Darrow

I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her. – Arthur Clarke

I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of Him. – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist. – Graham Greene

I oscillate between agnosticism and atheism. – Brad Pitt

I regret my disbelief in God. – Peter Medawar

I think it’s a bit excessive. – Stephen Reinhardt

I want to be left alone. – Greta Garbo

I waver between a cop-out agnostic and principled atheism – Dan Savage

I’m a born-again atheist. – Gore Vidal

If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair colour. – Mark Schnitzius

If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease! – Clark Adams

If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby. – David Eller

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. – Voltaire

If God did not forgive sinners, heaven would be empty. – Unknown

If God does not exist, everything is permissible. – Fyodor Dostoevsky

If god doesn’t like the way I live, Let him tell me, not you. – Unknown

If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor. – Voltaire

If there is a supreme being, he’s crazy. – Marlene Dietrich

If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex? – Art Hoppe

If there were no God, there would be no atheists. – G. K. Chesterton

If you do not sin, God’s son died for nothing. – Unknown

If you have a sloppy religion you get a sloppy atheism. – Ronald Knox

Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved. – Thucydides

In the absence of fear there is little faith. – Michael Palin

Inventions and purely human institutions. – Jean Meslier

It all depends what you mean by… – C. E. M. Joad

It is atheism to pray and not wait on hope. – Richard Sibbes

It is like confessing to a murder. – Charles Darwin

It is not the Head but the Heart that is the Seat of Atheism. – Mary Astell

It was man who first made men believe in gods. – Critias

Kill them all, for God knows His own. – Pope Innocent III

Liberty’s chief foe is theology. – Charles Bradlaugh

May God bless you a long, sick and shameful life. – Unknown

Morality does not depend on religion. – John Ruskin

No diety will save us; we must save ourselves. – Paul Kurtz

No man is above the law. – William H. Pryor, Jr.

No one ever dies an atheist….. – Plato

Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. – Woody Allen

Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced. – Auguste Comte

Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism. – Arthur Schopenhauer

Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy. – David Bentley Hart

Prayer never changes the laws of nature. – Dan Barker

Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail. – Aristotle

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. – Napoleon Bonaparte

Star stuff contemplating star stuff … – Carl Sagan

Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs. – Marlene Dietrich

Sure, I love fairy tales. – Maynard James Keenan

Thank God I’m an atheist. – Luis Bunuel

The beast’s faith lives on its own dung. – Algernon Charles Swinburne

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. – William Shakespeare

The god of the world’s leading religion. – Ambrose Bierce

The more I study science, the more I believe in God. – Albert Einstein

The only atheism is the denial of truth. – Arthur Lynch

The opposite of Christianity is not atheism, but idolatry. – Peter Kreeft

The opposite of theism is not atheism, it’s idolatry – Peter Kreeft

The plain fact is: religion must die for mankind to live. – Bill Maher

The politer the society, the greater the lies it requires. – Lincoln Steffens

The Pope? How many divisions has he got? – Joseph Stalin

The sacrifice of Diogenes to all the gods. – Diogenes

The supernatural does not exist. – Camille Flammarion

The temerity to believe in nothing. – Ivan Turgenev

The universe is a put-up job. – Fred Hoyle

The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. – Benjamin Franklin

The whole world is men’s bloody fantasies. – Kathy Acker

The word heretic ought to be a term of honour… – Charles Bradlaugh

There are no atheists in foxholes. – William Thomas Cummings

There are no sects in geometry. – Voltaire

There are parodies of non-existent things. – Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

There’s probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life. – Ariane Sherine

Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself. – George Carlin

To really be free, You need to be free in the mind. – Alexander Loutsis

To you, I’m an atheist. To God, I’m the loyal opposition. – Woody Allen

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today. – Horace

Too stupid to understand science? Try religion! – Unknown

What Zeus? Do not trifle. There is no Zeus. – Aristophanes

We sucked in atheism with our canned milk. – Joy Davidman

Where doubt there truth is – ’tis her shadow. – Philip James Bailey

Where knowledge ends, religion begins. – Benjamin Disraeli

Who knows most, doubts most. – Robert Browning

Who needs Satan when you have a God like this? – Robert M. Price

Without doubt you are not sane. – Tage Danielsson

You keep believing, I’ll keep evolving. – Bumper sticker

More Atheism Quotes

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition. – Jose Bergamin

A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing. – Robert G. Ingersoll

A celebrated north country apostle, who, after Calvin had damned ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind, had contrived a scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin. – William Godwin

A certain portion of mankind do not believe at all in the existence of the gods. – Plato

A Christian telling an atheist they’re going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they’re not getting any presents from Santa. – Ricky Gervais

A comely female inhabiting the Mohammedan Paradise to make things cheery for the good Mussulman, whose belief in her existence marks a noble discontent with his earthly spouse, whom he denies a soul. – Ambrose Bierce

A Creator must exist. The Big Bang ripples and subsequent scientific findings are clearly pointing to an ex nihilo creation consistent with the first few verses of the book of Genesis. – Henry F. Schaefer, III

A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire. – Gustave Le Bon

A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. – Richard Dawkins

A devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty. – James A. Baldwin

A disbelief in God does not result in a belief in nothing; disbelief in God usually results in a belief in anything. – Arthur Lynch

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams. – Umberto Eco

A functioning police state needs no police. – William S. Burroughs

A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect. he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all-knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified. – Karen Armstrong

A good deal of so-called atheism is itself, from my point of view, theologically significant. It is the working of God in history, and judgement upon the pious. An authentic prophet can be a radical critic of spurious piety, of sham spirituality. – James Luther Adams

A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional…values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. – C. S. Lewis

A heathen philosopher once asked a Christian, ‘Where is God’? The Christian answered, ‘Let me first ask you, Where is He not?’ – Aaron Arrowsmith

A large stone presented by the archangel Gabriel to the patriarch Abraham, and preserved at Mecca. The patriarch had perhaps asked the archangel for bread. – Ambrose Bierce

A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it. – David Stevens

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. – Francis Bacon

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. – C.S. Lewis

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 complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification. – D. H. Lawrence

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. – Mark Twain

A man who parades his piety is one who, under an atheist king, would be an atheist. – Jean De La Bruyere

A man will pass better through the world with a thousand open errors upon his back than in being detected in one sly falsehood. When one is detected, a thousand are suspected. – Thomas Paine

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. – Albert Einstein

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes. – James Kern Feibleman

A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world. – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A peace that is truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. – George Orwell

A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system. – George Eliot

A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it. – Anonymous (wrongly attributed to Mencken, Oscar Wilde and others)

A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one. – Richard K Morgan

A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind. – Clarence Darrow

A profession that we are a nation “under God” is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation “under Jesus,” a nation “under Vishnu,” a nation “under Zeus,” or a nation “under no god,” because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion. – Alfred Goodwin

A proponent of the big bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the matter of the universe came from nothing and by nothing. – Anthony John Patrick Kenny

A purpose derived from a false premise – that a deity has ordained submission to his will – cannot merit respect. The pursuit of Enlightenment-era goals – solving our world’s problems through rational discourse, rather than through religion and tradition – provides ample grounds for a purposive existence. It is not for nothing that the Enlightenment, when atheism truly began to take hold, was also known as the Age of Reason. – Jeffrey Tayler

A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism. – Dion Fortune

A Roman Catholic worships a god who speaks through the Pope, while a Baptist worships a god who does not. They cannot be worshipping the same god. – Judith Hayes

A scenario is suggested by which the universe and its laws could have arisen naturally from nothing. Current cosmology suggests that no laws of physics were violated in bringing the universe into existence. The laws of physics themselves are shown to correspond to what one would expect if the universe appeared from nothing. There is something rather than nothing because something is more stable. – Victor J. Stenger

A scientific discovery is also a religious discovery. There is no conflict between science and religion. Our knowledge of God is made larger with every discovery we make about the world. – Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr.

A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion. – Honore de Balzac

A thorough reading and understanding of the bible is the surest path to atheism. – Donald Morgan

A true friend is a gift from God. Since God doesn’t exist, guess what? Neither do true friends. – Scott Dikkers

A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere–‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as Herbert says, ‘fine nets and stratagems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous. – C.S. Lewis

Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomenon. – Jacques Maritain

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. – Eric Hoffer

Activity proneness in the service of an ideology … leads the individual into an irreversible series of commitments from which is forged an identity to which the individual inevitably becomes strongly attached psychologically. – Edgar Schein

Addressing the conclusions of The God Delusion point by point with the devastating insight of a molecular biologist turned theologian, Alister McGrath dismantles the argument that science should lead to atheism, and demonstrates instead that Dawkins has abandoned his much-cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism. – Francis Collins

After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands. – Friedrich Nietzsche

After having treated of these false Zealots in Religion, I cannot forbear mentioning … the Zealots in Atheism. One would fancy that these Men, tho’ they fall short, in every other Respect, of those who make a Profession of Religion, would at least outshine them in this Particular, and be exempt from that single Fault which seems to grow out of the impudent Fervours of Religion: But so it is, that Infidelity is propagated with as much Fierceness and Contention, Wrath and Indignation, as if the Safety of Mankind depended upon it. – Joseph Addison

“Agnostic” is a much more recent word than “atheist”, coined by Thomas Huxley in 1869 to mean “without knowledge of God” and acquiring the usage of Being doubtful about the existence of God. – Jim Herrick

Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence. – Herbert Spencer

Agnostics cannot understand Christ for the same reason a thief find a policeman–they don’t want to. – John Hagee

Ah, the bitter, hopeless heart-hunger of godlessness none but an atheist can understand! – Miles Franklin

Ah-rah-han, the first Buddhist apostle of Burma, under the patronage of King Anan-ra-tha-men-zan, disseminated the doctrines of atheism and taught his disciples to pant after annihilation as the supreme good. – Adoniram Judson

All children are atheists; they have no idea of God. – Paul-Henri Holbach

All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification. – Learned Hand

All forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past and can do so again. – Theodore Dreiser

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. – Aldous Huxley

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon’s time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts. – Auguste Comte

All history shows that, in exact proportion as nations advance in civilisation, the accounts of miracles taking place among them become rarer and rarer, until at last they entirely cease. – William Edward Hartpole Lecky

All it takes for America to become a theocracy is for nonbelievers to do nothing. – Judith Hayes

All kinds of frankness and honesty are terrible crimes in the eyes of society. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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. – Thomas Paine

All of science is built on territory once occupied by gods. Is there some boundary at which science is supposed to stop? – Robert L. Park

All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity. – Baron d’Holbach

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher. – Lucretius

All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former – of the corruption of the will. – Alexander Herzen

All religions must be tolerated … every man must go to heaven in his own way. – Frederick The Great

All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. – Mikhail Bakunin

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science. – Matthew Arnold

All the events said to have been witnessed by John alone are omitted by John alone. This fact seems fatal either to the reality of the events in question or to the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel. – William Rathbone Greg

All the progress we have made in philosophy … is the result of that methodical skepticism which is the element of human freedom. – Charles Sanders Peirce

All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many. – Ulrich Beck

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with ‘winning or losing this game of chess. – Marcel Duchamp

All three of our major religions in Britain ~ Christianity, Islam and Judaism – have a hateful idea at the very core. That idea is Exclusion: the “othering,” if you like, of the unredeemed. – Matthew Parris

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent. – Tennessee Williams

Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzche? – John Fante

Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities. – William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Alright, let’s admit it, we Jews killed Christ – but it was only for three days. – Lenny Bruce

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. – Richard Dawkins

Although God believers don’t need evolution to be false, atheists need evolution to be true. – Ann Coulter

Although I know of no reference to Christ ever commenting on scientific work, I do know that He said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Thus I am certain that, were He among us today, Christ would encourage scientific research as modern man’s most noble striving to comprehend and admire His Father’s handiwork. The universe as revealed through scientific inquiry is the living witness that God has indeed been at work. – Wernher von Braun

Always run to the short way; and the short way is the natural: accordingly say and do everything in conformity with the soundest reason. For such a purpose frees a man from trouble, and warfare, and all artifice and ostentatious display. – Marcus Aurelius

America’s freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, offers every wisdom tradition an opportunity to address our soul-deep needs: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, secular humanism, agnosticism and atheism among others. – Parker Palmer

Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman’s position. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths. – Clarence Darrow

An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated. – Justin Brown

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. – John McCarthy

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God. – Simone Weil

An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. – Madalyn Murray O’Hair

An ideologue – one who thinks ideologically – can’t lose. He can’t lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular experience or observation. They are derived from the ideology, and not subject to the facts. – James Burnham

An ideology can be defined as a group of beliefs that individuals borrow; most people borrow an ideology by identifying with a social group … with a body of sacred documents and heroes. – Robert E Lane

And fragile is thy tenure of this world Still haunted by the monstrous ghost of God. (“To Science”) – George Sterling

And God promised men that good and obedient wives would be found in all corners of the world. Then He made the earth round and laughed. – Unknown

And I can see that everything about this God has been purposely designed to poison our experience of life on earth, not to enhance it, to keep us fearful, to suppress knowledge, to curtail freedom and creativity, and to celebrate death. It’s nothing less than the sanctified dumbing-down of the human race. And demanding respect for it is frankly an insult that deserves to be repaid with considerable interest. – Pat Condell

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. – Bertrand Russell

And Jesus was a Jew too. Your god. He was a Jew like me. And so was his father. – James Joyce

And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all. – Lucretius

And of all plagues with which mankind are curst, Ecclesiastic tyranny’s the worst. – Daniel Defoe

And when the Old Man wished to kill someone, he would take him and say: “Go and do this thing. I do this because I want to make you return to paradise.” And the assassins go and perform the deed willingly. – Marco Polo

And when your minister asks you for money for missionary purposes, tell him there are higher, and holier, and nobler missions to be performed at home. When he asks for colleges to educate ministers, tell him you must educate woman, that she may do away with the necessity of ministers, so that they may be able to go to some useful employment. – Ernestine Rose

Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its fight channel. – Florida Scott-Maxwell

Animals do not have gods, they are smarter than that. – Ronnie Snow

Another question a biblically literate reporter might have asked is, “Why are you proclaiming the Ten Commandments when you believe no one can live up to all of them?” – Cal Thomas

Any well-established village in New England or the northern Middle West could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats. – D. W Brogan

Anybody can see that the little money you get is half-wasted, because you cannot spend it to advantage. The worst food comes to the poor, which their poverty makes them buy and their necessity makes them eat. Their stomachs are the waste-basket of the State. It is their lot to swallow all the adulterations on the market. – George Holyoake

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing. – George Orwell

Anything more than the truth would be too much. – Robert Frost

Apologys for self-evident Truths can never have any effect on those who have so little Sense as to deny them. They are the Foundation of all Reasoning, and the only just Bottom on which Men can proceed in convincing one another of the Truth: and by consequence whoever is capable of denying them, is not in a condition to be informed. – Anthony Collins

Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who straightforwardly call themselves atheists. – Richard Dawkins

As a preacher, I’m working with the crowd, watching the crowd, trying to bring them to that high point at a certain time in the evening. I let everything build up to that moment when they’re all in ecstasy. The crowd builds up and you have to watch it that you don’t stop it. You start off saying you’ve heard that tonight’s going to be a great night; then you begin the whole pitch and keep it rolling. – Marjoe Gortner

As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life. – C. Wright Mills

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. – Rick Reynolds

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities. – Charles Darwin

As for Hitler, his professed religion unhesitatingly juxtaposed the God-Providence and Valhalla. Actually, his god was an argument at a political meeting and a manner of reaching an impressive climax at the end of speeches. – Albert Camus

As he was pummeled into one tight spot after another, emerging each time breathless and in amazed chagrin, Bryan flushed, with spots of anger in his cheeks. His whole body sagged. Before our very eyes, he became a beaten man. – E. Haldeman-Julius

As I conceive this doctrine to be a gross misrepresentation of the character and moral government of God, and to affect many other articles in the scheme of Christianity, greatly disfiguring and depraving it; I shall show, … that it has no countenance whatever in reason, or the Scriptures; and, therefore, that the whole doctrine of atonement, with every modification of it, has been a departure from the primitive and genuine doctrine of Christianity. – Joseph Priestley

As I’ve said, I’ve never believed in God, which technically makes me an atheist (since the prefix “a” means “not” or “without”). But I have problems with the word “atheism.” It defines what someone is not rather than what someone is. It would be like calling me an a-instrumentalist for Bad Religion rather than the band’s singer. Defining yourself as against something says very little about what you are for. – Greg Graffin

As long as every question is answered by the word “God,” scientific inquiry is simply impossible. – Robert Green Ingersoll

As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth. – Mikhail Bakunin

As people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers. – Robert G. Ingersoll

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. – Protagoras

Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately. – Scott Adams

Assent — and you are sane — Demur — and you’re straightaway dangerous — and handled with a chain. – Emily Dickinson

Assuming the universe came from nothing, it is empty to begin with… Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God. – Victor J. Stenger

Assuredly whatsoever things are fabled to exist in deep Acheron, these all exist in this life. There is no wretched Tantalus, fearing the great rock that hangs over him in the air and frozen with vain terror. Rather, it is in this life that fear of the gods oppresses mortals without cause, and the rock they fear is any that chance may bring. – Lucretius

Astronomers who do not draw theistic or deistic conclusions are becoming rare, and even the few dissenters hint that the tide is against them. Geoffrey Burbidge, of the University of California at San Diego, complains that his fellow astronomers are rushing off to join ‘the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang.’ – Hugh Ross

Astronomy … is of all others the science which seems to present to us the most striking instance of waste in nature. – Richard A. Proctor

Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan. – Arno Allan Penzias

At age fourteen I was asking questions. When the answers failed to satisfy me, I searched elsewhere for different answers and found wisdom in atheism. And I am far from alone in that experience. – Hemant Mehta

At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets. – Denis Diderot

At Oxford University, the certainties of my atheist faith (and atheism is a faith) began to crumble. – Alister E. McGrath

At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world. – George Bernard Shaw

Atheist, without God, I look to humankind for sympathy, for love, for hope, for effort, for aid. – Charles Bradlaugh

Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist. – C.S. Lewis

Atheists have just as much civil right to teach atheism as Christians have to teach Christianity; agnostics have just as much right to teach agnosticism as Christians have to teach their religion. – William Jennings Bryan

Atheists in our midst are proof that all consciences can be accommodated here, even those that have no ground for holding that conscience is sacred, inalienable, and prior to civil society. – Michael Novak

Atheists put on a false courage and alacrity in the midst of their darkness and apprehensions, like children who, when they fear to go in the dark, will sing for fear. – Alexander Pope

Atheists themselves used to be very comfortable in maintaining that the universe is eternal and uncaused. The problem is that they can no longer hold that position because modern evidence that the universe started with the Big Bang. So they can’t legitimately object when I make the same claim about God-he is eternal and he is uncaused. – William Lane Craig

Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god – both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter. – Dan Barker

Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-seeing Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood or believing in God. – Scott Dikkers

Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. – Richard Dawkins

Because of the confusion surrounding the term “agnosticism,” it would seem better to use the very similar term “rationalism” in its place when referring to the original Huxleyan meaning of the term. The use of “rationalist” for “agnostic” would also seem to be less ambiguous. – Gordon Stein

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. – Edward Abbey

Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing. – Maynard James Keenan

Believers talk about atheism as if it’s a pathology of a particularly odd phase of modern Western culture that will pass, but if you ask someone to think hard, clearly people also thought this way in antiquity. – Tim Whitmarsh

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have. – Penn Jillette

Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn’t mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence. – Richard Dawkins

Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a “medium” hired at a guinea a seance. – Thomas Huxley

Beware of the community in which blasphemy does not exist: underneath, atheism runs rampant. – Antonio Machado

Beware of the fury of the patient man. – John Dryden

Beware of those who say: “I know this too well to be able to express it.” For if they cannot do so, this is because they don’t know it or because out of laziness they stopped at the outer crust. – Albert Camus

Biographies by preachers are of no value. If they admire a man they always make him a saint, while if they dislike one, they always make him a demon. – George C. Lorimer

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning. – H. G. Wells

Black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen. – Stephen Hawking

Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence. – Unknown

Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing. – Isaac Newton

Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent. – Richard Dawkins

Born again?! No, I’m not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time. – Dennis Miller

Both of them were very good and kind – the one who went to church and the one who didn’t. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well. – Langston Hughes

Bryan – a great friend of mine, by the way – had a Neanderthal type of head, Burbank says. As to Riley, he has not even the oratorical skill of Bryan. The whole movement is based on the poor whites of the south. – Luther Burbank

But after he was pleased to reveal himself to me I did presently, like Abraham, run to Hagar. And after that he did let me see the atheism of my own heart, for which I begged of the Lord that it might not remain in my heart. – Anne Hutchinson

But amid much elegance and precision, the details of life and the Universe also exhibit haphazard, jury-rigged arrangements and much poor planning. What shall we make of this: an edifice abandoned early in construction by the architect? – Carl Sagan

But I still don’t know what kind of monster was this god, until I saw that Jesus deliberately hid his light under a bushel. “Tell no one” was often his command. – Ruth Hurmence Green

But if the gods do not exist at all – then we are lost,’ I said. On the contrary – we are found!’ said Aesop. But when we are afraid, who can we turn to, if not the gods?’ Ourselves. We turn to ourselves anyway. We only pretend there are gods and that they care about us. It is a comforting falsehood. – Erica Jong

But the context of religion is a great background for doing science. In the words of Psalm 19, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork’. Thus scientific research is a worshipful act, in that it reveals more of the wonders of God’s creation. – Arthur Leonard Schawlow

But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate. – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color. – Don Hirschberg

Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know. – Ann Druyan

Catholic – which I was until I reached the age of reason. – George Carlin

Certain things are complete superstition and have no validity at all in the Bible. Yeah. They’re just the antithesis of everything that is correct intellectually. – Lenny Bruce

Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him. – William A. Dembski

Christ’s religion needs no prop of any kind from any worldly source, and to the degree that it is thus supported is a millstone hanged about its neck. – George W Truett

Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude. – H. L. Mencken

Christianity … that musty old theology, which already has its grave clothes on, and is about to be buried… A wall of Bible, brimstone, church and corruption has hitherto hemmed women into nothingness. – Lucy Stone

Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems. – Aldous Huxley

Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from the reason but also from the life of mankind, and it is nothing more than a fixed idea. – Ludwig Feuerbach

Christianity provided man for the first time with supernatural beings who, he knew, could neither envy nor ridicule him. – Helmut Schoeck

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest. – Emile Zola

Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism. – Richard Dawkins

Communism is what happens when atheism meets bureaucracy. – Theodore Beale

Communistic evolution, according to the Senate committee that examined it, is responsible for 135 million deaths in peacetime. There’s no religion that has a tiny fraction of that many deaths on its conscience. There are scientists who will admit that there’s not one iota of scientific evidence to support it. – D. James Kennedy

Compulsion in the literal Sense is maliciously misrepresented, by supposing it authorizes Violences committed against the Truth. The Answer to this; by which it is prov’d, that the literal Sense does in reality authorize the stirring up Persecutions against the Cause of Truth, and that an erroneous Conscience has the same Rights as an enlighten’d Conscience. – Pierre Bayle

Confronted with the universe, with fields of space sown thick with stars, with all there is of life, the wise man, being asked the origin and destiny of all, replies: “I do not know. These questions are beyond the powers of my mind.” The wise man is thoughtful and modest. He clings to facts. Beyond his intellectual horizon he does not pretend to see. He does not mistake hope for evidence or desire for demonstration. He is honest. He neither deceives himself nor others. – Robert Green Ingersoll

Consequently, the first thing to be done in any search after philosophic principles is to travel over the special sciences with a view to extracting from them such information as is relevant to our purpose. – Hugh Elliot

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 for ever? 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. – Bertrand Russell

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Counterfeit tolerance includes the opportunism of one who seeks, or accepts, tolerance for himself, as a minority, but who would deny it to others if ever he should be in a position to grant it. – Carl Joachim Friedrich

Creationists make it sound as though a “theory” is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. – Isaac Asimov

Creationists [and] other religious enthusiasts [are], in many parts of the world …, the most dangerous adversaries of science. – Steven Weinberg

Crucially, Marxist atheism is only achieved once the theological critique of capitalism is completed. This is what separates Marxist atheism from the gliberal platitudes of the likes of Nick Cohen, who proclaim secularism while remaining attached to the theology of capital (liberal commonsense). – Mark Fisher

Customs will often outlive the remembrance of their origin. – Thomas Paine

Damning, with bell, book and candle / Some sinner whose opinions are a scandal. / A rite permitting Satan to enslave him / Forever, and forbidding Christ to save him. – Ambrose Bierce

Darwinism’s atheism prevents science from knowing why things are as they are. Without God there is no answer to the why for anything. – Dave Hunt

Death is the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing. – Aldous Huxley

Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him. – John Barrymore

Difficulties arise when reported observations seem to conflict with ‘facts’ that the majority of scientists accept as established and immutable. Scientists tend to reject conflicting observations…..Nevertheless, the history of science shows that new observations and theories can eventually prevail. – Ian Stevenson

Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last it was complete. – Charles Darwin

Divisions in the church always breed atheism in the world. – Thomas Manton

Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature… Do not terrify them in early life with the fear of an after-world. Never was a child made more noble and good by the fear of a hell. – Luther Burbank

Do people ever reflect, one wonders, that the best way to protect against the penetration of one’s secrets by others is to have the minimum of secrets to conceal? – George F. Kennan

Do you believe in telepathy? No? Then what are you doing when you pray? – Charles R. Moore

Do you not know that every religion in the world has declared every other religion a fraud? Yes, we all know it. That is the time all religions tell the truth — each of the other. – Robert Green Ingersoll

Do you think in many ways, sir, you’re the victim of circumstance now? – Peter Jennings

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker. – Mikhail Bakunin

Dogma is a defensive reaction against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but doubt of which he is unaware. – Harold Lasswell

Dogmas of every kind put assertion in the place of reason and give rise to more contention, bitterness, and want of charity than any other influence in human affairs. – Arthur Conan Doyle

Don’t be afraid of being emotional. You won’t die of it. – John Osborne

Don’t pray in my school, and I won’t think in your church. – Unknown

Dr. Manton taught my youth to yawn, and prepared me to be a High-Churchman, that I might never hear him read nor read him more. – Henry Bolingbroke

During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely, enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely, Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God. – Paul Kalanithi

During the ages of faith the Church argued, not illogically, that any degree of cruelty towards sinners and heretics was justified, if there was a chance that it could save them, or others, from the eternal torments of hell. Thus, in the name of the religion of love, hundreds of thousands of people were not merely killed but atrociously tortured in ways that made the gas chambers of Beslen seem humane. – Margaret E. Knight

Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty. – Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Early America does not deserve to be considered uniquely, distinctly or even predominantly Christian… There is no lost Golden Age to which American Christians may return. – Mark Noll

Education teaches people how to think, while propaganda teaches people what to think. – James A.C. Brown

Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. – Sam Harris

Either god should have written a book to fit my brain, or he should have made my brain to fit his book. – Robert Green Ingersoll

Eleven times Jesus died on the cross, Eleven times falls down a body thrown upward, Eleven times also I abandon the logical flow of thought. – Daniil Kharms

Empty-brained triflers who have never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions, speak of atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. – Annie Besant

Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle. – Samuel Beckett

Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.. – William of Ockham

Epicurus … whose genius surpassed all humankind, extinguished the light of others, as the stars are dimmed by the rising sun. – Lucretius

Essentially I see the new atheism as largely part of the crisis of the left. Having failed to carry through its agenda in relation to political and economic life it’s rounding on religion, ignoring the fact that, in some key respects, many believers are likely to share leftist aspirations. – George Pattison

Eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions god’s infinite love. – Bill Hicks

Ethical teaching is weakened if it is tied up with dogmas that will not bear examination. – Margaret E. Knight

Even if nothing worse than wasted mental effort could be laid to the charge of theology, that alone ought to be sufficient to banish it from the earth, as one of the worst enemies of mankind. – Lydia M. Child

Even if we don’t have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific. – Paul Davies

Even now, there are still days so beautiful, I almost believe in God. – Ann Hood

Even the Atheists … readily acknowledge it for an indubitable truth, that there must be something … which was never made or produced — and which therefore is the cause of those other things that are made, something … whose existence must needs be necessary…. Wherefore all the question now is, what is this … self-existent thing, which is the cause of all other things that are made. – Ralph Cudworth

Every luxury was lavished on you – atheism, breastfeeding, circumcision. – Joe Orton

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals. – E. O. Wilson

Every true Freethinker accords to each individual the right to mental freedom. Where this freedom leads is no concern of others so long as it encroaches not upon their rights. – Etta Semple

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of ‘the flock. – Christopher Hitchens

Everything is proof to the faithful. Everything is proof to the atheists. – Jean Dutourd

Everything serious that he says is a joke and everything humorous that he says is dead serious. – Clarence Darrow

Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence. – Christopher Hitchens

Existentialist philosophy recognizes the existence of the individual as the real purpose of human life. The recognition is basically atheistic and it encourages the individual to free himself from the impositions of custom, governmental authority, economic pressures, and cultural inhibitions. – Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. – Carl Sagan

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. – Aldous Huxley

Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. – Orlando Bloom

Faith can remove a mountain, but doubt can put it back in place again. – Tage Danielsson

Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions. – Frater Ravus

Faith in God necessarily implies a lack of faith in humanity. – Barbara G. Walker

Faith is essentially intolerant … essentially because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one’s cause is also God’s cause. – Ludwig Feuerbach

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. – Richard Dawkins

Fanaticism and bigotry require any food but common sense and reason, which would break the charm of those spellbound fanatics. – Anne Royall

Far from being an aberration that is not representative of Christianity, the persecution of heretics follows logically from the connection of faith and salvation as presented by Jesus in the Gospels. – Shadia Drury

Fear is the mother of all gods … Nature does all things spontaneously, by herself, without the meddling of the gods. – Lucretius

Few men are so obstinate in their atheism, that a pressing danger will not compel them to acknowledgment of a divine power….. – Plato

Fierce invectives against women form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers. – William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Fifteen years of skepticism has done more for me than 20 years of force-fed religion and 30 years of indifference in between. – Victor J. Stenger

First, whenever a man talks loudly against religion, always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions, which have got the better of his creed. A bad life and a good belief are disagreeable and troublesome neighbors, and where they separate, depend upon it, ‘Tis for no other cause but quietness sake. – Laurence Sterne

Fools, your reward is neither here nor there. – Omar Khayyam

For all their raving, ranting, and name-calling, these atheists will stand before God one day–and they will exist for eternity, though sadly they will be separated from God unless they repent and receive the free gift of salvation. – Ken Ham

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing. – H.L. Mencken

For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner? – Paul the Apostle

For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. – Albert Einstein

For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization. – Robert A. Heinlein

For my part, I wish, with Mr. Howells, that the literature of the past might be purged of all that is ugly and barbarous in it, although I should object as much as any one to having these great works weakened or falsified. – Helen Keller

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing. – George Santayana

For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men. – Albert Camus

For the fundamentalist who wants to believe every word of the Bible, however, life is a house of cards, with each card a tenet of faith. If you remove one card, the entire house collapses. – Morris Sullivan

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

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stonewritten. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. – Charles Bukowski

For truth is strong next to the Almighty. She needs no policies or stratagems or licensings to make her victorious. These are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. – John Milton

For years I’ve been stressing with regard to UFOs that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. – Carl Sagan

Forgive and forget? I’m neither God nor do I have Alzheimer’s. – Unknown

Forgiveness is between them and God. It’s my job as a hitman to arrange the meeting. – Unknown

Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence. – Salman Rushdie

Freedom is the only law which genius knows. – James Russell Lowell

Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice – a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation’s liberties. – Norman Cousins

Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender. – Dan Barker

From Apollonius I learned freedom of will and undeviating steadiness of purpose; and to look to nothing else, not even for a moment, except to reason. – Marcus Aurelius

From my early 20s on, I would waver between atheism and agnosticism, never coming close to considering that God could be real. – Kirsten Powers

From that day to this that religion has been the greatest curse that ever afflicted the earth. – Charles Chilton Moore

Fundamentalism, of any type, due to its prerequisite lack of intelligent thought, could prove to be the worst weapon of mass destruction, of all. – David J. Constable

Fundamentalists of different religions have more in common with each other than they do with the moderates of their own religions. – Mark Thomas

George Bush says he speaks to god every day, and Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd. – Sam Harris

Get two-thirds of the states to alter the Constitution; come out with their national religion, and then let the people get their throats ready. – Anne Royall

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. – Benjamin Disraeli

God’s little Blond Blessing we have long deemed you, and hope his so-called Will will not compel him to revoke you. – Emily Dickinson

God’s nature is revealed most perfectly in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as recorded in the New Testament of the Bible, who was sent by God to reveal the divine nature, summarized in ‘God is Love.’ – George F. R. Ellis

God’s only excuse is that He does not exist. – Stendhal

God, equally with gods, angels, demons, spirits, and other small spiritual fry, is a human product, arising inevitably from a certain kind of ignorance and a certain degree of helplessness with respect to man’s external environment. – Julian Huxley

God, immortality, duty — how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third. – George Eliot

God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master. – Mikhail Bakunin

God, please give me patience, if you give me the strength I will just punch them in the face. – Unknown

God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. … 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. … From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person. – Salman Rushdie

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. – Chapman Cohen

Gods dont kill people. People with Gods kill people. – David Viaene

Government being, among other purposes, instituted to protect the consciences of men from oppression, it certainly is the duty of Rulers, not only to abstain from it themselves, but according to their stations, to prevent it in others. – George Washington

Grant that we may be one flock and one shepherd! – Pope Benedict XVI

Hallucinations and illusions are not facts useful for scientific investigation. – Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

Has creation a final purpose at all, and if so why is it not attained immediately, why does perfection not exist from the very beginning? – Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat. – Emile Zola

Hatred, for the man who is not engaged in it, is a little like the odor of garlic for one who hasn’t eaten any. – Jean Rostand

Hawking has violated the unspoken rules of atheism. He isn’t supposed to use words like ‘create’ or even ‘made.’ They necessitate a Creator and a Maker. Neither are you supposed to let out that the essence of atheism is to believe that nothing created everything, because it’s unthinking. – Ray Comfort

He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound … to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil. – William Godwin

He stripped off the armor of institutional friendships To dedictate his soul To the terrible deities of Truth and Beauty. – Edgar Lee Masters

He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity – a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation. – Norman Douglas

He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. – William Drummond

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him) and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve. – George Orwell

He was extremely reticent in his religious sentiments, at least in all that he wrote. Allusions to his belief are rarely, if ever, to be met with in his correspondence. – Daniel Coit Gilman

He who does not believe in hell is in the greatest danger of landing there. – Eduardo Schwank

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

Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside. – George Bernard Shaw

“Heaven help us,” said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another. – George Eliot

Hell has been conceived as a police institution, to inspire fear in this world. But the worst of it all is that it no longer frightens anyone, and therefore it will have to be closed down. – Miguel de Unamuno

Here the only genuine conflict is between true believers. Of a given text in Holy Writ one faction may say this thing and another that, but both agree unreservedly that the text itself is impeccable, and neither in the midst of the most violent disputation would venture to accuse the other of doubt. To call a man a doubter in these parts is equal to accusing him of cannibalism. Even the infidel Scopes himself is not charged with any such infamy. – H. L. Mencken

Here we are, we’re alone in the universe, there’s no God, it just seems that it all began by something as simple as sunlight striking on a piece of rock. And here we are. We’ve only got ourselves. Somehow, we’ve just got to make a go of it. We’ve only ourselves. – John Osborne

Here, no mercy is shown. One hates one’s fellow man to the glory of God. – Selma Lagerlöf

“Heresy,” by the way, simply means “choice.” It came to mean “thoughtcrime,” implying it was blasphemy to presume to choose your own belief instead of swallowing what the bishops spoonfed you. – Robert M. Price

Heretics were most often bitterly persecuted for the their least deviation from accepted belief. It was precisely their obstinacy about trifles that irritated the righteous to madness. – Lev Shestov

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom. – Herbert Spencer

Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him. – Bertrand Russell

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

Hollywood and Disneyland are the legacy of Europe’s cultural imperialism. We gave them nursery rhymes and they gave back film. Televised riots are as American as Barbie/ Big Macs. Tomorrow the riots will be forgotten but Mickey mouse will still be there. Welcome to Disneyland. – Richey Edwards

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable. – Henri Bergson

How can any woman believe that a loving and merciful God would, in one breath, command Eve to multiply and replenish the earth, and in the next, pronounce a curse upon her maternity? I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or gave out the laws about women which he is accused of doing. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? – Woody Allen

How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones? – Samuel Beckett

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape. – Christopher Hitchens

How do I know the Bible isn’t the word of God? Well if it was the word of God it would be clear and easy to understand…considering God was the creator of LANGUAGE! – Bill Hicks

How do you know it’s not true if you don’t believe in it? – Pete Hautman

How is it that the Church produced no geometer in her autocratic reign of twelve hundred years? – John William Draper

How long, O how long will mankind worship a book? How long will they grovel in the dust before the ignorant legends of the barbaric past? How long, O how long will they pursue phantoms in a darkness deeper than death? – Robert Green Ingersoll

How some dare scorn (as if a fabulous lie) that they should rise whom death to dust doth bind – and like to beasts, a beastly life they lead, who naught attend save death when they are dead. – William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling

How unfortunate for mankind that the Lord is reported by Holy Writ as having said ‘Vengeance is mine!’ – Julian Huxley

However far back we may be able to trace the – so to speak – internal history of the Universe, there can be no question of arguing that this or that external origin is either probable or improbable. We do not have, and we necessarily could not have, experience of other Universes to tell us that Universes, or Universes with these particular features, are the work of Gods, or of Gods of this or that particular sort. – Antony Flew

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. – Christopher Hitchens

Humanists hold that ethical values are relative to human experience and need not be derived from theological or metaphysical foundations. – Paul Kurtz

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. – Cheyenne Macdonald

Hypothesis is a toll which can cause trouble if not used properly. We must be ready to abandon our hypothesis as soon as it is shown to be inconsistent with the facts. – William Ian Beardmore Beveridge

I accept that there are multitudes seeking God, seeking meaning, and so on, but if they reject atheism, I would rather they became modern-day Catholics or Jews than that they became Muslims. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonise the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there. – R. J. Hollingdale

I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith. – Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. – Richard Dawkins

I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief. – Dan Barker

I am an atheist out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. – Isaac Asimov

I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion. – Oriana Fallaci

I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days. – Lois McMaster Bujold

I am an infidel. I know what an infidel is, and that’s what I am. – Luther Burbank

I am arguing that faith as such, faith as an alleged method of acquiring knowledge, is totally invalid and as a consequence, all propositions of faith, because they lack rational demonstration, must conflict with reason. – George H. Smith

I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content. – Richard Dawkins

I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Almighty Creator. By fighting the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work. – Adolf Hitler

I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts. – Thornton Wilder

I am fond of saying that reading the Bible turned me into an atheist. – Ruth Hurmence Green

I am high in the sky, and still I do not see the face of god. – Gherman Titov

I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief. – George Eliot

I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. – Bertrand Russell

I am not a spokesperson for the church and the church is not a spokesperson for the United States of America. I’m running for president and I’m running to uphold the Constitution, which has a strict separation of church and state. – John F. Kerry

I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so. – Adolf Hitler

I am personally convinced of the great power and deep significance of Christianity, and I won’t allow any other religion to be promoted. – Adolf Hitler

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. – James A. Michener

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality. – H. P. Lovecraft

I asked God for a car, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a car and asked for forgiveness. – Unknown

I asked God to punish me for I have sinned, next day I met you. – Unknown

I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right — either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack. – Richard Dawkins

I believe in God because of a personal faith, a faith that is consistent with what I know about science. – William Daniel Phillips

I believe in God. In fact, I believe in a personal God who acts in and interacts with the creation. I believe that the observations about the orderliness of the physical universe, and the apparently exceptional fine-tuning of the conditions of the universe for the development of life suggest that an intelligent Creator is responsible. – William Daniel Phillips

I believe in God… just in case. It’s like there’s some list somewhere and you don’t want to be on it. I don’t want to say THERE’S NO GOD! and then die and say, Oh, Hi… Is there some kind of community service I can do? – Marc Maron

I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. Being at one with nature. – Mikhail Gorbachev

I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism. – Lord Kelvin

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. – Bertrand Russell

I believe the fast track to atheism is reading the Bible. I’ve read it three times all the way through. It’s a big part of our culture, a big part of our history. I don’t just read things I agree with. – Penn Jillette

I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful. – Stephen Hawking

I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. – Adolf Hitler

I build molecules for a living. I can’t begin to tell you how difficult that job is. I stand in awe of God because of what he has done through his creation. My faith has been increased through my research. Only a rookie who knows nothing about science would say science takes away from faith. If you really study science, it will bring you closer to God. – James Tour

I came- though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents – to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve. – Albert Einstein

I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute … it may be the most important contribution that we can make. – Steven Weinberg

I can not imagine a God … made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him ‘great’. – Susan B. Anthony

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious. – Anton Chekhov

I can say that the happiest period of my life has been since I emerged from the shadows and superstitions of the old theologies, relieved from all gloomy apprehensions of the future, satisfied that as my labors and capacities were limited to this sphere of action, I was responsible for nothing beyond my horizon, as I could neither understand nor change the condition of the unknown world. Giving ourselves, then, no trouble about the future, let us make the most of the present, and fill up our lives with earnest work here. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I can’t believe it. Maybe there is a God after all. Herbal supplement sales only grew 1 percent last year. The years before, it was 17 percent, 12 percent, 18 percent. – Dean Edell

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time. – Friedrich Nietzsche

I cannot but pity the man who recognizes nothing godlike in his own nature. – William E. Channing

I certainly never believed, more or less, in the “essential doctrines” of Christianity, which represent God as the predestinator of men to sin and perdition, and Christ as their rescuer from that doom. I never was more or less behuiled by the trickery of language by which the perdition of man is made out to be justice, and his redemption to be mercy. – Harriet Martineau

I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul. – James Joyce

I consider myself an atheist. My wife is Jewish. And I’m fine with my son being raised as a Jew. He’s learning Hebrew and is really into it. I will talk to my own son about my atheism when the time is right. But there’s a great tradition of Jewish atheism, there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews. – Paul Giamatti

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. – Stephen Roberts

I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this. – Jonathan Safran Foer

I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world … profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove. – George Eliot

I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I die as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly. – Voltairine de Cleyre

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. – Susan B. Anthony

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. – Albert Einstein

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. – Thomas Paine

I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe. – William Howard Taft

I do not deny “God”, because that word conveys to me no idea, and I cannot deny that which presents to me no distinct affirmation, and of which the would-be affirmer has no conception. – Charles Bradlaugh

I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith. – Robert M. Price

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. – Mark Twain

I do not feel I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die. – Emily Dickinson

I do not know the needs of a god or of another world… I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one. – Helen H. Gardener

I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them. – Galileo Galilei

I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone. – Albert Camus

I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. – Isaac Asimov

I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t. – Jules Renard

I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God. – George H. W. Bush

I don’t mind if other people call me an atheist, but I call myself a naturalist. Atheism doesn’t tell you much about what I do believe in; the term naturalist opens up the discussion better. – Greg Graffin

I don’t see how you have the nerve to oppose this bill when you run the biggest gambling business in the world – gambling on the hereafter. – Loring M. Black, Jr.

I don’t spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don’t consider that a relevant question. It’s unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can’t worry about. – Wendy Kaminer

I don’t think atheism means one does not believe in a spiritual life. I think it means one does not follow the tenets of the established religions. – Amanda Donohoe

I don’t think even the blackest atheist has an idea of what real separation [from God] will be. Outer darkness. What we live in you might call … “inner darkness.” – John Updike

I don’t think God is an explanation at all. It’s simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do. – Richard Dawkins

I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose. – Clarence Darrow

I don’t profess any religion; I don’t think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.’ – Philip Pullman

I don’t want to believe. I want to know. – Carl Sagan

I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it. – Thomas Huxley

I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn’t start with an invocation! – Steven Weinberg

I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism. – Isaac Asimov

I feel as I always have, that the earth is the home and the only home of man, and I am convinced that whatever he is to get out of his existence he must get while he is here. – Clarence Darrow

I felt like a loser. I was unhappy as a child most of the time. We were terribly poor and I hated my size. – Don Knotts

I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time. – Isaac Asimov

I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing. – Allan Sandage

I find that the whole weight of relieving human misery and distress falls on the shoulders of those Heretics and Infidels; and though great part of this distress has been occasioned by those ravening wolves’ hopeful converts. – Anne Royall

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously. – Douglas Adams

I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. – C.S. Lewis

I get up and retire when I wish. I go out if I wish and I do not go out if I do not desire to do so, except for the two days on which I give lectures. – Pierre Bayle

I give money for church organs in the hope the organ music will distract the congregation’s attention from the rest of the service. – Andrew Carnegie

I had no idea how Stevenson’s cases would hold up under close scrutiny. But given what was at stake — nothing less than possible concrete evidence of life after death — weren’t they at least worth a visit? – Tom Shroder

I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. – Charles Darwin

I had one nanny who made me sit in front of a bowl of porridge for three or four days running when I refused to eat it. I remember being very unhappy about that. – Anjelica Huston

I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily. – Isaac Newton

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose. – Orson Welles

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned. – Lord Byron

I have always heard, Sancho, that doing good to base fellows is like throwing water into the sea. – Miguel de Cervantes

I have always regretted the dumb and offensive comments I made in my 20s on atheism and homosexuality. – Mehdi Hasan

I have been raised to believe in freedom of thought and speech. If a minority wishes to accept that position it’s their right. What I fear is that this minority may seem to be larger than it truly is. What is strange is that there are still people who believe the world is not a globe. – Richard Leakey

I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. – Thomas Jefferson

I have hitherto followed the lines marked out by the Theist in his attempt to prove that there exists a mind behind natural phenomena, and that the universe as we have it is, at least generally, an evidence of a plan designed by this mind. I have also pointed out that the only datum for such a conclusion is the universe we know. We must take that as a starting point. We can get neither behind it nor beyond it. We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world. – Chapman Cohen

I have long been convinced that the Christian Eucharist is but a continuation of the Eleusinian mysteries. St Paul, in using the word teleiois, almost confirms this. – James Anthony Froude

I have neither time nor disposition to enter into discussion with the Friend, and end this occasion by suggesting for her consideration the question whether, if it be true that the Lord has appointed me to do the work she has indicated, it is not probable that he would have communicated knowledge of the fact to me as well as to her. – Abraham Lincoln

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake… Religion is all bunk. – Thomas Edison

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know. – Epicurus

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men. – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever. – Daniel Boorstin

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. – Albert Einstein

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world. – Georges Duhamel

I have wished to crush Rome that I might crush Christianity. – Otto von Bismarck

I keep a conscience uncorrupted by religion, a judgment undimmed by politics and patriotism, a heart untainted by friendships and sentiments unsoured by animosities. – Ambrose Bierce

I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I lay down the Position, That whatever a Conscience well directed allows us to do for the Advancement of Truth, an erroneous Conscience will warrant for advancing a suppos’d Truth. – Pierre Bayle

I like lime-flavoured yoghurt. The end. There is no religion. It’s a man-made fabrication. Once you understand that, you’ll be a happier individual. Atheism is as pointless as satanism. – John Lydon

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. – Mohandas Gandhi

I love you so much that I’m going to hide my existence to the point that I will be indistinguishable from other gods, and if you follow the wrong god, you are going to suffer for eternity. – Unknown

I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s. – William Blake

I myself find it hard to accept the notion of self-creation from nothing, even given unrestricted chance. – J. L. Mackie

I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people believe. – Leo Rosten

I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew. – Steven Pinker

I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up – they have no holidays. – Henny Youngman

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there’s no truth. – Flannery O’Connor

I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don’t have to waste your time in either attacking or defending. – Isaac Asimov

I really believe in non-violence, but I also believe in a short of resistance that has to be respectful. – Alexandra Paul

I refuse to believe in a god who is the primary cause of conflict in the world, preaches racism, sexism, homophobia, and ignorance, and then sends me to hell if I’m ‘bad’. – Mike Fuhrman

I refuse to prove that I exist, “says God,” for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing. – Douglas Adams

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. – Bertrand Russell

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

I strongly believe in the existence of God, based on intuition, observations, logic, and also scientific knowledge. – Charles Hard Townes

I studied every page of this book, and I didn’t find enough love to fill a salt shaker. God is not love in the Bible; God is vengeance, from Alpha to Omega. – Ruth Hurmence Green

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me. – Christopher Hitchens

I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one’s existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable. – A.J. Ayer

I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. – William Ernest Henley

I think comics is a really good way to talk about skepticism and atheism and things like that… it was easy to tell those stories and, I think, helpful to some people to tell them in comic form. Using visuals makes it easier to break stuff down and makes it somewhat easier to understand. – Box Brown

I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass. – Barry Goldwater

I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder. – Bill Maher

I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking. – Terence McKenna

I think only an idiot can be an atheist. We must admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge that started the whole universe going in the first place. – Christian B. Anfinsen

I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it. Now I cannot bring myself to fear a God who is either spiteful or weak. I defy Him without fear and care not a fig for his thunderbolts. – Marquis de Sade

I think the Constitution has been upheld. I think they made the right decision. – Michael Newdow

I think the neoatheists have set atheism back a few decades. And I’m a self-described atheist. – Matt Stone

I think true atheism is a rare thing in human affairs: Even in the most secularized precincts of Europe, a lot of nominal nonbelievers turn out to have all sorts of supernatural and metaphysical beliefs. – Ross Douthat

I think what bothers me so much of the time, is they take the data and theory and distort it. They must know they’re distorting. – Eugenie Scott

I told God to protect me from my enemies and I started losing friends. – Unknown

I took about a year to fully adjust. Like there’s a death at the family or a divorce, you don’t just snap your fingers and it’s over. – Dan Barker

I tried to believe that there is a God, who created each of us in His own image and likeness, loves us very much, and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize, something is fucked up. – George Carlin

I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That’s me. – Madalyn Murray O’Hair

I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther. – Margaret Sanger

I was being foolish. An atheist can’t stand behind their assertion that God doesn’t exist. The stupidest thing I ever could have done was to reject His Truth. – Kirk Cameron

I was convinced that, besides millions of frank unbelievers, there are today large numbers of half-believers to whom religion is a source of intellectual and moral discomfort. – Margaret E. Knight

I was raised in a deeply Catholic family. There was a sense that everything we were doing was to prepare ourselves for an afterlife in heaven. In my teenage years, that became less important to me. Eventually, that turned into agnosticism, which became atheism. – David Lowery

I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14. I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism. – Rupert Sheldrake

I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above. – Karl Marx

I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. – Bertrand Russell

I wonder who got the shit job of scouring the planet for the 15000 species of butterfly or the 8800 species of ant they eventually took on board Noah’s Ark. But at least we got that magical rainbow for all their trouble. – Azura Skye

I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was… nothingness. – Frances Farmer

I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent. – Arthur C. Clarke

I would like to call your attention to … an evil that, if allowed to continue, will probably lead to great trouble … It is the accumulation of vast amounts of untaxed church property. – Ulysses S. Grant

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. – Carl Sagan

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, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet. – Harriet Martineau

I would, like any other scientist, willingly change my mind if the evidence led me to do so. So I care about what’s true, I care about evidence, I care about evidence as the reason for knowing what is true. It is true that I come across rather passionate sometimes and that’s because I am passionate about the truth. … I do get very impatient with humbug, with cant, with fakery, with charlatans. – Richard Dawkins

I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people. – Katharine Hepburn

I’m an atheist, but I’m very relaxed about it. I don’t preach my atheism, but I have a huge amount of respect for people like Richard Dawkins who do. – Daniel Radcliffe

I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death. – George Carlin

I’m constantly reading books on God or the absence of God and atheism. – Liam Neeson

I’m not an atheist. How can you not believe in something that doesn’t exist? That’s way too convoluted for me. – A. Whitney Brown

I’m not observant, personally, but if I ever see a priest resurrect the dead before my eyes I promise to revisit my atheism. – Matthew Yglesias

I’m now a bit anti-Jewish since my last visit to the synagogue, but my atheism does not necessarily reject religion. – Jack Steinberger

I’m probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic. I don’t think anyone really knows. You’ll either find out or not when you get there, until then there’s no point thinking about it. – Brad Pitt

I’m still an atheist, thank God. – Luis Bunuel

I’m the world’s least happy atheist. I miss having religious faith, but trying to have it seems like trying to be in love with someone that you’re not in love with. – Lisa Williams

I’ve been an agnostic for as long as I can remember … so I don’t know where we go. But if it turns out that the lights are just turned off and nothing happens, well, that’s okay. – John Chancellor

I, personally, am unable to accept any revealed religion, Christian or not. – Bronislaw Malinowski

Idle and meaningless … a form less solemn to me than the affirmation I would have reverently made. – Charles Bradlaugh

If ‘God’ is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that ‘God exists’ is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance. – A.J. Ayer

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. – Robert Green Ingersoll

If anybody wants to believe they’re the descendants of a primate, they’re welcome to do it. – Mike Huckabee

If atheism is a religion, then off is a TV channel and bald is a hair colour. – Hemant Mehta

If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt. – Leslie Stephen

If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies instead of the land of corpses. – John C. Wright

If atheism spread, it would become a religion as intolerable as the ancient ones. – Gustave Le Bon

If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again. – Penn Jillette

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true ‘by faith,’ and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits. – Dan Barker

If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one. – W. Somerset Maugham

If God created the world, then who created god? and who created whoever created god? So somewhere along the line something had to just be there. So why can’t we just skip the idea of god and go straight to earth? – Ryan Hanso

If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd. – Archibald MacLeish

If god is the alpha and the omega. The begining and the end, knows what has passed and what is to come, like it states in the bible, why do people pray and think it will make any difference. – Mark Fairclough

If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. – Mikhail Bakunin

If god wanted people to believe in him, why’d he invent logic then? – David Feherty

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself. – Alexandre Dumas

If God would concede me His omnipotence for 24 hours, you would see how many changes I would make in the world. But if He gave me His wisdom too, I would leave things as they are. – Jacques-Marie-Louis Monsabre

If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? If he has spoken, why is the universe not convinced? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest? – Percy Bysshe Shelley

If I could have my way I would place the Deity on half-pay as the Government of this Country did the subaltern officers. – George Holyoake

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I thought the Jews killed God, I’d worship the Jews. – Bill Hicks

If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet. – Wolfgang Pauli

If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible that main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.’ – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. – Isaac Asimov

If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic. So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition of theism. – Antony Flew

If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever. – Woody Allen

If it were true that Christianity and science were incompatible, there would be no Christians who were respected scientists. If fact, about forty percent of professional natural scientists are practicing Christians, and many others are theists of other kinds. Fewer than thirty percent are atheists. – Jeffrey Burton Russell

If it’s 1 or 1000 sins you’re still getting sent to Hell. So why not go for 1,000,000 sins and come down here a legend. – Unknown

If life can emerge just from naturalistic circumstances, then God is out of a job. – Lee Strobel

If men do their best endeavours to free themselves from all errors, and yet fail of it through human frailty, so well I am persuaded of the goodness of God, that if in me alone should meet a confluence of all such errors of all the Protestants in the world that were thus qualified, I should not be so much afraid of them all, as I should be to ask pardon for them. – William Chillingworth

If miracles be incredible, Christianity is false. If Christ wrought no miracles, then the Gospels are untrustworthy. – Frederic Farrar

If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. It cuts its own throat. – C.S. Lewis

If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good. – Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

If one believes in a god, one is a Theist. If one does not believe in a god, then one is an A-theist — he is without that belief. The distinction between atheism and theism is entirely, exclusively, that of whether one has or has not a belief in God. – Chapman Cohen

If one has belief, knowledge is lacking. If one has knowledge, belief is unnecessary. – David Eller

If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad. – Aleister Crowley

If oxen and horses and lions could draw and paint, they would delineate the gods in their own image. – Xenophanes

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. – Albert Einstein

If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong. – Francis Crick

If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray? – Dan Barker

If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted. – A.J. Ayer

If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we’re going? – Justin Brown

If the book the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree? – Robert Green Ingersoll

If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust? – Tim Keller

If the hammer and the shuttle could move themselves, slavery would be unnecessary. – Aristotle

If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish — if a little more enlightened, religion would perish. – Robert Green Ingersoll

If the Prodigal Son’s a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech. – Dan Barker

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion. – Edmond de Goncourt

If there is no military need for the building, leave it alone, neither putting anyone in or out of it, except on finding someone preaching or practicing treason, in which case lay hands on him, just as if he were doing the same thing in any other building. – Abraham Lincoln

If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle. – Dave Barry

If there was not one man Adam and one woman Eve, and a literal event of the one man Adam taking the fruit in rebellion and thus bringing sin and death into world, then one may as well throw the rest of the Bible away. – Ken Ham

If there were a god, there would be no need for religion. If there were not a god, there would be no need for religion. – Ron Barrier

If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Therefore there are no gods. – Friedrich Nietzsche

If this be not atheism, to acknowledge no other deity besides dead and senseless matter, then the word hath no signification. – Ralph Cudworth

If thou beest ever so exact in thy morals, and not a worshiper of God, then thou art an atheist. – William Gurnall

If we are honest – and scientists have to be – we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. – Paul Dirac

If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder. – H.L. Mencken

If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? …Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God. – Thomas Jefferson

If we ever opened a meeting with a prayer, silent or otherwise, we would disintegrate. – Jerry Falwell

If we expect God to subscribe to one religion at the exclusion of all the others, then we should expect damnation as a matter of chance. This should give Christians pause when expounding their religious beliefs, but it does not. – Sam Harris

If when I am libelled I take no notice, the world believes the libel. If I sue, I have to pay about one hundred pounds’ costs for the privilege, and gain the smallest coin the country knows for recompense. – Charles Bradlaugh

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he’d be dead by now. – Salman Rushdie

If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home there? – C.S. Lewis

If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. Are they? Do members of atheist organizations in the United States commit more than their fair share of violent crimes? Do the members of the National Academy of Sciences, 93 percent of whom do not accept the idea of God, lie and cheat and steal with abandon? We can be reasonably confident that these groups are at least as well behaved as the general population. And yet, atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States. – Sam Harris

If you believe in evolution and naturalism then you have a reason not to think your faculties are reliable. – Alvin Plantinga

If you can’t trust the Bible’s history, how can you trust its morality? – Ken Ham

If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people. – House (Film)

If you don’t believe in God, all you have to believe in is decency. Decency is very good. Better decent than indecent. But I don’t think it’s enough. – Harold MacMillan

If you have a very commanding argument that you cannot refute, not to accept the argument is to act irrationally. – Robert F. Almeder

If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God. – Lord Kelvin

If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it. – Haruki Murakami

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him. – Denis Diderot

If you’re going to get into big time religion, these are the games you have to play. You go into it as a business and you work it as a business. – Marjoe Gortner

If your religion requires that you hate someone you need a new religion. – Unknown

If, unable to solve the mysteries of Providence, we plunge into Atheism, we only increase a thousand fold the darkness by which we are surrounded. – Charles Hodge

If, when we compare two versions of a story, the second known to be a retelling of the first, and find that the second has more of a miraculous element, we may reasonably conclude we have legendary (or midrashic or whatever) embellishment. The tale has grown in the telling. This sort of comparison is common in extrabiblical research and no one holds that it cannot properly indicate legend formation there. – Robert M. Price

Imagine that the brain is a computer and that religion is a virus. Atheism is the wiping of that virus. – Nick Harding

Immortality is a belief grounded upon other men’s sayings, that they knew it supernaturally; or that they knew those who knew them that knew others that knew it supernaturally. – Thomas Hobbes

Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change. – Marquis de Sade

In 1850, I believe, the church property in the United States, which paid no tax, amounted to $87 million. In 1900, without a check, it is safe to say, this property will reach a sum exceeding $3 billion. I would suggest the taxation of all property equally. – Ulysses S. Grant

In a Jewish theological seminar there was an hours-long discussion about proofs of the existence of God. After some hours, one rabbi got up and said, “God is so great, he does not even need to exist.” – Victor Frederick Weisskopf

In a liberal scientific society, to claim that you are above error is the height of irresponsibility. – Jonathan Rauch

In agony or danger, no nature is atheist. The mind that knows not what to fly to, flies to God. – Hannah More

In all countries, and in all ages, from the Druids down to brother Beecher, priests have aimed at universal power. – Anne Royall

In August, 1900, [Friedrich] Nietzsche was laid to rest Nietzsche, as the apostle of atheism, heralded the darkest century the world has ever known. – Benjamin Wiker

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. – Friedrich Nietzsche

In every age ‘the good old days’ were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them. – Brooks Atkinson

In good philosophy, the word cause ought to be reserved to the single Divine impulse that has formed the universe. – Louis Pasteur

In my own experience, I have been amazed to see how unrealistic are the bases for political opinion in general. Only rarely have I found a person who has chosen any particular political party – democratic or totalitarian – through study and comparison of principles. – Joost Meerloo

In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people. – James Madison

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist. – Albert Camus

In other words, they decided right from the start that there’s no God, and they’re setting out to try to prove that there’s no God, That’s their bias to start with. – Ken Ham

In our country we ask no toleration for religion and its free exercise, but we claim it as an inalienable right. – Philip Schaff

In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll’s Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit. – Charlie Chaplin

In regard to atheism, religious apologists have one and only one task: Produce credible real world evidence to back up their belief in whatever god(s) they believe in. Everything else they talk about, all the millions of words these people produce discussing every subject under the sun except this one, is precisely an evasion of their sole task, in regard to atheism. The vast majority of the rhetoric of religious apologetics is one huge profusion of red herring. – Steve Greene

In short, I didn’t become a Christian because God promised I would have an even happier life than I had as an atheist. He never promised any such thing. Indeed, following him would inevitably bring divine demotions in the eyes of the world. Rather, I became a Christian because the evidence was so compelling that Jesus really is the one-and-only Son of God who proved his divinity by rising from the dead. That meant following him was the most rational and logical step I could possibly take. – Lee Strobel

In that we say he [Christ] made whole the lame, the paralytic, and those born blind, we seem to say what is very similar to the deeds said to have been done by Esculapius. – Justin Martyr

In the absence of evidence, the scientist says, ‘I don’t know,’ but the religionist says, ‘I believe.’ – David Eller

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. – David Foster Wallace

In the first place, I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard. – J. D. Salinger

In the last century the Arab thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: ‘Every Muslim is sick and his only remedy is in the Koran.’ Unfortunately the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken. – Conor Cruise O’Brien

In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called “Objections to Astrology” and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian. – Carl Sagan

In theology we must consider the predominance of authority; in philosophy the predominance of reason. – Johannes Kepler

In theology, the state of a luckless mortal prenatally damned. The doctrine of reprobation was taught by Calvin, whose joy in it was somewhat marred by the sad sincerity of his conviction that although some are foredoomed to perdition, others are predestined to salvation. – Ambrose Bierce

In this climate – with belief in guardian angels and creationism becoming commonplace – making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion hall. – Wendy Kaminer

In this infinite space is placed our universe (whether by chance, by necessity, or by providence I do not now consider). – Giordano Bruno

Indeed, one modern President abjured God altogether, ending speeches with a chaste ‘Thank you very much.’ This was Jimmy Carter, the most genuinely devout President of the postwar period. – Jonathan Rauch

Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme. – Raymond Aron

Interviewer: “Didn’t [Sagan] want to believe?” Druyan: “He didn’t want to believe. He wanted to know. – Ann Druyan

Intolerance has always been one of the cornerstones of Christianity – the glorious heritage of the Inquisition. – Madalyn Murray O’Hair

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? – Epicurus

Is it not gain to have diminished the faith that it was the duty of the wretched and the miserable to be content with the lot in life which providence had awarded them? – Charles Bradlaugh

Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man? – Friedrich Nietzsche

Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God? – Plato

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? – Douglas Adams

Isn’t killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity? – Arthur C. Clarke

It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. – Mark Twain

It appears as if you were not satisfied in recording our Atheism. You jump to the conclusion that we can have neither love nor respect for mankind, inferring that all those great ideas or emotions which, in all ages, have set hearts throbbing are dead letters to us. Trailing at hazard our miserable existences — crawling, rather than walking, as you wish to imagine us — you assume that we cannot know of other feelings than the satisfaction of our coarse and sensual desires. Do you want to know to what an extent we love the beautiful things that you revere? Know then that we love them so much that we are both angry and tired at seeing them hanging, out of reach, from your idealistic sky. – Mikhail Bakunin

It does not at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team. – Isaac D’Israeli

It does not seem to me that the evidence concerning the being of a God, and concerning immortality, is such as to enable us to assert anything in regard to either of these topics. – Charles Eliot Norton

It follows from the assumption of a universally valid ideology, just as night follows day, that other positions are heresy. – Paul Watzlawick

It is a conspicuous fact in our modern Christian society that as a result and cumulation of our partriarchal development, the woman does not belong to herself…. Man has made her a perpetual minor. – Francesc Ferrer i Guardia

It is a curiosity of human nature that lack of self-assurance seems to breed an exaggerated sense of power and mission. – J. William Fulbright

It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions. – Dan Barker

It is accepted as an axiom by all Americans that the civil power ought to be not only neutral and impartial as between different forms of faith, but ought to leave these matters entirely on one side, regarding them no more than it regards the artistic or literary pursuits of the citizens. – James Bryce

It is almost impossible to convince people who are under the influence of ideological bigotry that whose whom they regard as belonging to the enemy species are human. – Louis J. Halle

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong. – Thomas Jefferson

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

It is as clear as the sun and as evident as the day that there is no God and that there can be none. – Ludwig Feuerbach

It is because one can build a compelling set of arguments – informed by science and thoroughly compatible with it — that to believe in anything despite the complete lack of evidence is, in fact, irrational. – Massimo Pigliucci

It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are. – Ovid

It is criminal negligence to leave suckers lying around to tempt honest men. – Wilson Mizner

It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of. – Samuel Butler

It is extremely naïve to think that mankind is capable of sinning against god. If god exists as a being who watches us, judges us, and cannot be contradicted, then how could anyone possibly contradict laws of conduct set forth by that being? – Gregory Wallace Campbell

It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. – Carl Sagan

It is for the good of states that men should be deluded by religion. – Marcus Terentius Varro

It is hard to have patience with people who say “There is no death” or “Death doesn’t matter.” There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. – C.S. Lewis

It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. – William Anthony Donohue

It is important to bear in mind the now commonly accepted fact that in its primitive stages, religion had nothing to do with morals as understood by us today. – James Henry Breasted

It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image. – Ludwig Feuerbach

It is not at all uncommon, even among ourselves, to hear persons and parties branded as atheistical, only because individuals who so stigmatize them have not been able, and perhaps are not in the least willing, to appreciate the sort of theism which they profess. – John Stuart Blackie

It is not hardness of heart or evil passions that drive certain individuals to atheism, but rather a scrupulous intellectual honesty. – Steve Allen

It is not possible even to state the doctrine of an atheistic creation without using the language of theism in the statement. – Lyman Abbott

It is now becoming clear that everything can – and probably did – come from nothing. – Robert Matthews

It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover the sources of Truth, Reason and Morality, and the real motives that should incline us to Virtue. – Paul-Henri Holbach

It is only common prejudice that induces us to believe that atheism is a fearful state. – Pierre Bayle

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great. – Havelock Ellis

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity… To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously — these have been thought points of honor with the gods. – George Santayana

It is permissible with certain precautions to speak in print of coitus, but it is not permissible to employ the monosyllabic synonym for this word. – Bertrand Russell

It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion. – Bertrand Russell

It is relatively unusual that a physical scientist is truly an atheist. Why is this true? Some point to the anthropic constraints, the remarkable fine tuning of the universe. For example, Freeman Dyson, a Princeton faculty member, has said, ‘Nature has been kinder to us that we had any right to expect.’ – Henry F. Schaefer, III

It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power. – Emma Goldman

It is the best book ever written on the subject. There is nothing like it! – Thomas A. Edison

It is the black work of an ungodly man or an atheist that God is not in all his thoughts. What comfort can be had in the being of God without thinking of him with reverence and delight? A God forgotten is as good as no God to us. – Stephen Charnock

It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us. – Peter De Vries

It is the inevitable effect of religion on public policy that makes it a matter of public concern. Advocates of religiosity extol the virtues or moral habits that religion is supposed to instill in us. But we should be equally concerned with the intellectual habits it discourages. – Wendy Kaminer

It is through the perversion of the religious element in woman, playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding this life with all its high duties in abeyance to that which is to come, that she and the children she has trained have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and superstition. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious. – George Eliot

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? – Robert Green Ingersoll

It is true that a great deal of the rhetoric of the new atheism is often just the confessional rote of materialist fundamentalism (which, like all fundamentalisms, imagines that in fact it represents the side of reason and truth); but it is also true that the new atheism has sprung up in a garden of contending fundamentalisms. – David Bentley

It is when we are in misery that we revere the gods; the prosperous seldom approach the altar. – Silius Italicus

It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around…. It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord. – Barbara Tuchman

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. – Hellen Keller

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions. – Thomas Huxley

It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion. – Paul Davies

It might be said that religious freedom in the American sense, incorporating the separation of church and state, has been the pivotal concept of the national development of the United States of America. – Joseph Leon Blau

It seems to me that the bane of our country is a profession of faith either with no basis of real belief, or with no proper examination of the grounds on which the creed is supposed to rest. – James Russell Lowell

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. … Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. – Albert Einstein

It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious. . . . I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life. – Arthur Leonard Schawlow

It takes five years for a willing person’s mind to change. Have patience with yourself and others when treading in an area protected by a taboo. – Garrett Hardin

It turns out that the word atheism means much less than I had thought. It is merely the lack of theism. – Dan Barker

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world. – Simone de Beauvoir

It was not that I thought I was smarter. I had simply explored science and found what seemed to me a far more powerful authority. And, I did not steal or murder because I thought they were wrong, not because I feared damnation. – Victor J. Stenger

It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be. – Eric Hoffer

It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian. – Lee Strobel

It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible. – George W. Foote

It would be more consistent that we call [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. – Thomas Paine

It wouldn’t matter if every single President since Washington had been a Bible-toting, evangelical Christian. They weren’t, of course, but even if they had been, it still would not change the secular foundation of our republic. Christians like to quote various Presidents or Supreme Court Justices who (quite incorrectly) have referred to our “Christian nation.” But what do those quotes prove? I could quote Richard Nixon, but would that prove that ours was intended to be a nation of crooks? – Judith Hayes

It’s all about secular unionism, the advancement of atheism, which they even tried to create in this law — Democrats did — an atheistic chaplaincy. – John Fleming

It’s easy to sell good news like this, and the authors confidently rely on classic fallacious arguments. They argue by declaration, which is what makes the books so amusing. In matter-of-fact, authoritative tones, the authors tell us how plants and human beings exchange energy — or they describe what angels look like, whether or how they’re sexed, how they communicate with human beings, and how they differ from ghosts. Readers might be expected to wonder, How do they know? – Wendy Kaminer

It’s the lie of evolution that all man are just evolved and that they’re all equal, and that all creatures are equal. – Tim LaHaye

It’s the noisiest thing I’ve ever experienced. – Alfred Goodwin

It’s a strange myth that atheists have nothing to live for. It’s the opposite. We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for. – Ricky Gervais

I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. – Douglas Adams

I’m a polyatheist — there are many gods I don’t believe in. – Dan Fouts

I’ve got nothing against God. It’s his fan club I can’t stand. – Unknown

Jerusalem has been — and for many, still is — a metaphor for destruction and the vengeance of an offended God. She is the city where believers have killed unbelievers to give life to faith. – Amos Elon

Jesus knows our world. He does not disdain us like the God of Aristotle. We can speak to Him and He answers us. Although He is a person like ourselves, He is God and transcends all things. – Alexis Carrel

Judging from the tendency and effect of his arguments, an atheist does not appear positively to refuse that a God may be… His verdict on the doctrine of God is only that it is not proven. It is not that it is disproven. He is but an atheist. He is not an anti-theist. – Thomas Chalmers

Just as Christianity must destroy reason before it can introduce faith, so it must destroy happiness before it can introduce salvation. – George H. Smith

Just in the ratio knowledge increases, faith decreases. – Thomas Carlyle

Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do? – Chuck Palahniuk

Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts. – Saint Peter

Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the private opinions of men. Test-laws are useless and ineffectual, unjust and tyrannical. – Oliver Ellsworth

Let no more gods or exploiters be served Let us learn rather to love one another. – Francesc Ferrer i Guardia

Let us enquire. Who, then, shall challenge the words? Why are they challenged. And by whom? By those who call themselves the guardians of morality, and who are the constituted guardians of religion. Enquiry, it seems, suits not them. They have drawn the line, beyond which human reason shall not pass — above which human virtue shall not aspire! All that is without their faith or above their rule, is immorality, is atheism, is — I know not what. – Frances Wright

Let us inquire what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants? – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Life feeds on life… feeds on life feeds on life… this is neccesary… this is necessary life feeds on life… feeds on life. – Maynard James Keenan

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself. – George Santayana

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches. – Benjamin Franklin

Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it. – Richard Dawkins

Little science takes you away from God but more of it takes you to Him. – Louis Pasteur

Long time men lay oppress’d with slavish fear Religion’s tyranny did domineer … At length a mighty one of Greece began To assert the natural liberty of man, By senseless terrors and vain fancies let To slavery. Straight the conquered phantoms fled. – Lucretius

Look through new atheist websites and twitter feeds. You’ll see the same hatred and bigotry that theists have been spouting against other theists for millennia. But when confronted about this bigotry, we say “But I feel this way about all religion,” as if that somehow makes it better. But our belief that we are right while everyone else is wrong; our belief that our atheism is more moral; our belief that others are lost: none of it is original. – Ijeoma Oluo

Look, I happen to agree with what George says about the interpretation of the New Testament, but I want to remind both of you to never play God. – Billy Graham

Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race. – William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Man created God in his image : intolerant, sexist, homophobic and violent. – George Weinberg

Man has always required an explanation for all of those things in the world he did not understand. If an explanation was not available, he created one. – Jim Crawford

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe. – Billy Graham

Man is the measure of all things, of the reality of those which are, and of the unreality of those which are not. – Protagoras

Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world. – John Burroughs

Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it just as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn’t. – Frederick Buechner

Many books have been written to show that Christianity has emasculated the world, that it shoved aside the enlightenment and wisdom of Hellas for a doctrine of superstition and ignorance. – Edgar Lee Masters

Many humanists have argued that happiness involves a combination of hedonism and creative moral development; that an exuberant life fuses excellence and enjoyment, meaning and enrichment, emotion and cognition. – Paul Kurtz

Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience. – Nicolas Gomez Davila

Many prominent scientists — including Darwin, Einstein, and Planck — have considered the concept of God very seriously. What are your thoughts on the concept of God and on the existence of God? – Christian B. Anfinsen

Mass Man, the universal psychopath, is born when the individual ego is weakened to the point at which it loses separate identity and is forced, for security, to merge with the mass. – Robert M. Lindner

Maybe the atheist cannot find God, for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman. – Laurence J Peter

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before. – T. S. Eliot

Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions. – Blaise Pascal

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. – Robert A Heinlein

Men tell us sometimes there is no such thing as an atheist. There must be. There are some men to whom it is true that there is no God. They cannot see God because they have no eye. They have only an abortive organ, atrophied by neglect. – Henry Drummond

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. – Denis Diderot

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What was been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites. – Thomas Jefferson

Modern, post-Enlightenment atheism has a particular social function: it draws authority away from the clergy, towards the secular “priests” of science. In the ancient world, the conflict between science and religion did not exist, at least not in these terms. But it does not follow that nobody in antiquity ever questioned the traditional stories about the gods, which were often patently ridiculous. – Emily Wilson

Monkeys are superior to men in this: When a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey. – Malcolm de Chazal

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. – H. L. Mencken

Morality is only moral when it is voluntary. – Lincoln Steffens

Most atheists bristle at the thought that atheism has anything to do with faith, but not Penn Jillette. – Ray Comfort

Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion – natural religion, that is – as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete. – Edwin Gaustad

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. – Mark Twain

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God. – Daniel Dennett

Most scientists I know don’t care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. – Steven Weinberg

Most sermons sound to me like commercials — but I can’t make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product. – Mignon McLaughlin

Most successes are unhappy. That’s why they are successes – they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice. – Agatha Christie

Most true believers, when faced with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, will hold on to those beliefs even more strongly. – Mark Thomas

Mr. Lincoln had no hope, and no faith, in the usual acceptation of those words. – Mary Todd Lincoln

My atheism … is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. – George Santayana

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. – George Santayana

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can. – Frank Zappa

My business in life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned. The freedom is itself a positive and never-failing enjoyment to me, after the bondage of my early life. – Harriet Martineau

My dog is an atheist: he no longer believes in me. – Francois Cavanna

My hands are small, but they’re not yours, they are my own… I am never broken. – Jewel

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk. – John Keats

My mother attended the local church, Saint Nicolas, and consequently, I attended that church and its Sunday School. My only prizes from the Sunday School were ‘for attendance,’ so I presume my atheism, which developed when I left home to attend university, although latent, was discernible. – Michael Smith

My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there. – Thomas Jefferson

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. – Bertrand Russell

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism. – Richard Dawkins

Nature is not personal. She is the compound of all these processes which move through the universe to effect the results we know as Life and of all the ordinances which govern that universe and that make Life continuous. She is no more the Hebrew’s Jehovah than she is the Physicist’s Force; she is as much Providence as she is Electricity; she is not the Great Pattern any more than she is the Blind Chance. – Luther Burbank

Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God. That is to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of a cause which you understand not at all. – Baron d’Holbach

Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed. – Bertrand Russell

Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed. – Hunter S. Thompson

Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it. – C. S. Lewis

No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism. – Harold Laski

No doubt the testimony of natural reason, on whatever exercised, must, of necessity, stop short of those truths which it is the object of revelation to make known; still it places the existence and personal attributes of the Deity on such grounds as to render doubts absurd and atheism ridiculous. – John Herschel

No evidence or proof of the existence of a God has been found in the phenomena of nature, based on experience. – Charles Proteus Steinmetz

No fear… we are never sure of anything… fear never prevents [bad things] from happening. – Vanessa Paradis

No man has ceased to believe in God before having decided that he should not exist; no book would produce atheism, and no book can restore faith. – Joseph de Maistre

No matter whether you claim a slave by purchase or capture, the title is bad. They who claim to own their fellow-men, look down into the pit and forget the justice that should rule the world. – Zeno of Citium

No one is so much alone in the universe as a denier of God. With an orphaned heart, which has lost the greatest of fathers, he stands mourning by the immeasurable corpse of nature, no longer moved and sustained by the Spirit of the universe. – Jean Paul

No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism. – Annie Besant

No religion is suddenly rejected by any people; it is rather gradually outgrown. None sees a religion die; dead religions are like dead languages and obsolete customs: the decay is long and – like the glacier march – is perceptible only to the careful watcher by comparisons extending over long periods. – Charles Bradlaugh

No sign of purpose can be detected in any part of the vast universe disclosed by our most powerful telescopes. – Hugh Elliot

Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God. – Heywood Broun

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. – Mahatma Gandhi

Nonbelievers are protected by the religion clauses of the Constitution not because secular humanism is a religion, which it is not, but because when the government acts on the basis of religion it discriminates against those who do not “believe” in the governmentally favored manner. – Norman Dorsen

Nothing enlarges the gulf of atheism more than the wide passage that lies between the faith and lives of men pretending to teach Christianity. – Benjamin Stillingfleet

Nothing is bigger than life. There’s nothing noble in death. What’s noble about never seeing the sunshine again? What’s noble about having your legs and arms blown off? What’s noble about being an idiot? What’s noble about being blind and deaf and dumb? What’s noble about being dead? – Dalton Trumbo

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. – Michel de Montaigne

Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view. – Horace

Nothing, absolutely nothing, has a more direct bearing on the moral choices made by individuals or the purposes pursued by society than belief or disbelief in God. – Ravi Zacharias

Now that I am a Christian I do not have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. – C.S. Lewis

Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever. – Antony Flew

Obsolete misleading theologies bear the same relation to the essence of true religion that scarlet fever, mumps, and measles do to education. – Luther Burbank

Obviously, if theism is a belief in a God and atheism is a lack of a belief in a God, no third position or middle ground is possible. A person can either believe or not believe in a God. Therefore, our previous definition of atheism has made an impossibility out of the common usage of agnosticism to mean “neither affirming nor denying a belief in God.” – Gordon Stein

Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men. – Voltaire

Of course it must, and our scientific men must be criticized boldly. They will not feel comfortable when you and I are through with them. – Luther Burbank

Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks. – H. L. Mencken

Oh, that [his Thanksgiving Message] is some of Seward’s nonsense, and it pleases the fools. – Abraham Lincoln

Oh, you’re tired of my anti-religion posts? Why don’t you pray to God for me to stop? – Unknown

On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful. – Steven Weinberg

On second thought, maybe the atheist cannot find God, for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman. – Laurence J. Peter

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. – Christopher Hitchens

Once you sacrifice your rights, it’s hard to get those rights protected again. – Dianne Feinstein

One day I was just looking at the coins is what brought this up. I saw “In God We Trust” on my coins. I said, “I don’t trust in God,” what is this? And I recalled there was something in the Constitution that said you’re not allowed to do that and so I did some research. And as soon as I did the research, I realized the law seemed to be on my side and I filed the suit. It’s a cool thing to do. Everyone should try it. – Michael Newdow

One does not become an atheist out of a desire for hassle-free Sunday mornings. People come to atheism because they have a problem with organized religion – usually a problem they consider to be of moral urgency. – Lynn Coady

One does not have to appeal to God to set the initial conditions for the creation of the universe, but if one does He would have to act through the laws of physics. – Stephen Hawking

One does not have to prove a negative. One should assume a negative. – David Eller

One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature – a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man. – William Winwood Reade

One may sigh for all that one loses in giving up the old religion… but the new irreligion is the manlier, honester and simpler thing, and affords a better throry of life and a more solid basis for morality. – Charles Eliot Norton

One must be stark mad, to believe that mankind can subsist without magistrates. – Pierre Bayle

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. – Arthur C. Clarke

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural. – James D. Watson

One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it. – Gustave Le Bon

One remarkable fact stands out in the history of witchcraft; and that is, its victims were chiefly women. Scarce one wizard to a hundred witches was ever burned or tortured. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

One would fancy that the zealots in atheism would be exempt from the single fault which seems to grow out of the imprudent fervor of religion. But so it is, that irreligion is propagated with as much fierceness and contention, wrath and indignation, as if the safety of mankind depended upon it. – Joseph Addison

One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad. – Aleister Crowley

Only he is a truly ethical, a truly human being, who has the courage to see through his own religious feelings and needs. – Ludwig Feuerbach

Only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective. – Albert Einstein

Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. – John Milton

Opinions don’t affect facts. But facts should affect opinions, and do, if you’re rational. – Ricky Gervais

Opposite to godliness is atheism in profession, and idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind, that it never had many professors. – Isaac Newton

Our atheism family tradition is traced to a – I don’t know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana. – Barbara Ehrenreich

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. – Christopher Hitchens

Our contention is not for mere toleration, but for absolute liberty. There is a wide difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration implies that somebody falsely claims the right to tolerate. Toleration is a concession, while liberty is a right. Toleration is a matter of expediency, while liberty is a matter of principle. – George W Truett

Our English language really says if you’re not a theist, the only alternative is to be an atheist. What I’m trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism. – John Shelby Spong

Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. – Robert G. Ingersoll

Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist. – Robert Browning

Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism. – Vladimir Lenin

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature. – Maurice Maeterlinck

Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland! – Hans Schemm

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin. – Henri Frederic Amiel

Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Over our history there are always those who want to take this wall of separation and remove a brick here or there or damage it more than that. I think one has to be vigilant and constantly on the alert. – Harry A. Blackmun

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism. – Richard Dawkins

Parsons always seem to be specially horrified about things like sunbathing and naked bodies. They don’t mind poverty and misery and cruelty to animals nearly as much. – Susan Ertz

Pascal makes no attempt in this most famous argument to show that his Roman Catholicism is true or probably true. The reasons which he suggests for making the recommended bet on his particular faith are reasons in the sense of motives rather than reasons in the sense of grounds. Conceding, if only for the sake of the present argument, that we can have no knowledge here, Pascal tries to justify as prudent a policy of systematic self-persuasion, rather than to provide grounds for thinking that the beliefs recommended are actually true. – Antony Flew

People ask me what I think about that woman priest thing. What, a woman priest? Women priests. Great, great. Now there’s priests of both sexes I don’t listen to. – Bill Hicks

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy. – Mikhail Bakunin

People want to be at the center of the Universe…and they’re going to flock to anybody who tells them that. – Victor J. Stenger

People who don’t like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn’t have such funny beliefs. – Unknown

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it. – Giordano Bruno

Persecution on racial and religious grounds has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty. – Nicholas Murray Butler

Persistently leavening public opinion, in a grossly superstitious age, with the theological doctrine of popular preachers, that woman is a sex of superior wickedness and inferior mentality, could have but one general result throughout Christendom. – Ellen Battelle Dietrick

Personal religious convictions have no place in political campaigns or in dictating public policy. – Geraldine Ferraro

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. – Unknown

Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, ‘Will it bring you nearer to God?’ – Isidor Isaac Rabi

Piety’s hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man’s piety stinks. It’s insufferable. – Archibald MacLeish

Please, with the God talk. Hate to break it to you, but there is no God. – Howard Stern

Popular religion is a coping mechanism for the anxieties of a dysfunctional social and economic environment. – Gregory S. Paul

Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists. – Hu Shih

Pray to God, fine; but keep rowing to shore. – Russian Proverb

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. – Ambrose Bierce

Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way. – John Shelby Spong

Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument. – Samuel Johnson

Priests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians – all of them, down to the meanest grocer, repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him. – Mikhail Bakunin

Propaganda by censorship takes two forms: the selective control of information to favour a particular viewpoint, and the deliberate doctoring of information in order to create an impression different from that originally intended. – James A.C. Brown

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. – Isaac Asimov

Public schools are where the next generation of leaders are educated and where cultural exchange will take place. – Eugenie Scott

Real morality is possible when the sanctions for morality are also tangible and real. Therefore, atheism shifts the basis of morality from faith in god to obligations of social living. Moral conduct is not a passport to heaven; it is social necessity. – Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be. – Frank Zappa

Reason bases its decisions on evidence available to everyone, and allows people to disagree when evidence is lacking. Religion will never do that. – Richard Carrier

Regarding the convention that clergymen are more virtuous than other men. Any average selection of mankind, set apart and told that it excels the rest in virtue, must tend to sink below the average. – Bertrand Russell

Regardless of whether or not you belong to a majority religion, in the United States you may not impose your theology on civil law. – Lori Lipman Brown

Reincarnation? It may be that we have all lived before and died, and this is hell. – Unknown

Religion and science, then, in my analysis are the two great sister forces which have pulled, and are still pulling, mankind onward and upward. – Robert Andrews Millikan

Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies. – Thomas Jefferson

Religions have a strong binding function and a cohesive element. They emphasize the primacy of the community as opposed to the individual, and they also help set one community apart from another that doesn’t share their beliefs. – Frans de Waal

Religions have been universal in the sense that all the people we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless…. The older apologists for Christianity seem to have been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor, as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment. – John Dewey

Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young. – A.C. Grayling

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. – Martin Amis

Religious Cult: The church down the street from yours. – Johnny Hart

Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul. – George Santayana

Religious faith to W. H. Bragg was the willingness to stake his all on the hypothesis that Christ was right, and test it by a lifetime’s experiment in charity. – Guglielmo Marconi

Religious freedom in an open society has the best prospects of flourishing to the extent that it expresses itself as freedom of religious inquiry. – Sidney Hook

Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis. – James A. Michener

Religious wars are basically people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend. – Napoleon

Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning. – Michael Shermer

Rest, brother, rest. Have you done ill or well Rest, rest, There is no God, no gods who dwell Crowned with avenging righteousness on high Nor frowning ministers of their hate in hell. – Lucretius

Sadly, I have found that even evolution’s most staunch believers are afraid to debate, because they know that their case for atheism and evolution is less than extremely weak. – Ray Comfort

Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby. I’ve never been skiing. It’s my biggest hobby. I literally do it all the time. – Ricky Gervais

Scepticism, ironically, draws its life’s blood from claims to have a good deal of knowledge. For example, your friends claim to know, ‘Since every possible option has not been explored, nothing can be said for certain.’ That statement is itself a claim to knowledge! – William Lane Craig

Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul. – Miguel de Unamuno

Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing ‘Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!’ If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept. – Dan Barker

Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan – spoiled. – Israel Zangwill

Secular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from science, ethics, and philosophy. – Paul Kurtz

Secular humanism proposes … the complete implementation of the agenda of modernism … what is necessary for it to occur is a … New Enlightenment. – Paul Kurtz

Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without. – Joseph Wood Krutch

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. – Albert Camus

Seems as unfounded … to say there isn’t a God as to say there is. – James Agee

Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity. – Oscar Wilde

Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion. – Israel Zangwill

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. – Thomas Jefferson

She believed in nothing. Only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. – Jean-Paul Sartre

Since 1787 the principle of freedom of religion has been attacked but never overthrown. Keeping education in the United States free of sectarian influence has long been one of the primary struggles of believers in freedom of religion. – Joseph Leon Blau

Since ancient times, the philosophers’ secret has always been this: we know that God does not exist, or, at least, if he does, he’s utterly indifferent to our individual affairs–but we can’t let the rabble know that; it’s the fear of God, the threat of divine punishment and the promise of divine reward, that keeps in line those too unsophisticated to work out questions of morality on their own. – Robert J. Sawyer

Since I was both an atheist and an absurdist, I had decided that the most absurd thing I could do would be to develop an intimate relationship with the God I didn’t believe in. – Paul Krassner

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong. – Christopher Hitchens

Since no one really knows anything about God, those who think they do are just troublemakers. – Rabia Basri

Skepticism is my nature, freethought is my methodology, agnosticism is my conclusion after 25 years of being in the ministry, and atheism is my opinion. – Jerry DeWitt

Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all. – Heinrich Heine

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God. – Francis Bacon

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. – Bertrand Russell

So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake…Religion is all bunk. – Thomas A. Edison

So great was the preference given to sacred over profane learning that Christianity had been in existence fifteen hundred years, and had not produced a single astronomer. – John William Draper

So you really think that God would plant a bunch of bones in the earth to test your faith? Either you’re in denial or God has some serious self-esteem issues. – Coral Yoshi

So, of course, Gish’s presentation was well received, which it would have been the case had he only gotten up and said “praise the Lord” and sat back down. – Michael Shermer

Society must fight against this belief in God as it fought against idol worship and other narrow conceptions of religion. In this way man will try to stand on his feet. Being realistic, he will have to throw his faith aside and face all adversaries with courage and valour. – Bhagat Singh

Some are Atheists by Neglect; others are so by Affectation; they, that think there is no God at some times; do not think so at all times. – Benjamin Whichcote

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. – Ijeoma Oluo

Some atheists are quite explicit that their atheism comes first. One of the most famous is Richard Lewontin, a professor of genetics, who said it wasn’t science that compelled him to accept a materialistic explanation of the universe. It was an a priori materialism. – John Lennox

Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity. – James G. Frazer

Some people do not eat cow meat. I do so, provided it’s tender. – Yajnavalkya

Some theists, observing that all ‘effects’ need a cause, assert that God is a cause but not an effect. But no one has ever observed an uncaused cause and simply inventing one merely assumes what the argument wishes to prove. – Dan Barker

Somebody once asked me if I have anything like faith, and I said I have faith in the narrative. I have a belief in a narrative that is bigger than me, that is alive and I trust will work itself out. – Joss Whedon

Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then something awful happens. Some qualification is made…. We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God’s (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? – Antony Flew

Something which is against natural laws seems to me rather out of the question because it would be a depressive idea about God. It would make God smaller than he must be assumed. When he stated that these laws hold, then they hold, and he wouldn’t make exceptions. This is too human an idea. Humans do such things, but not God. – Max Born

Sometimes I feel like those born-again folk, always working on their faith, but I’m always working on my atheism. We all have our struggles. – Nathan Englander

Sometimes they reasoned thus: “The Messiah ought to do such a thing, now Jesus is the Messiah, therefore Jesus has done such a thing.” At other times, by an inverse process, it was said: “Such a thing has happened to Jesus; now Jesus is the Messiah; therefore such a thing was to happen to the Messiah.” – Ernest Renan

Sometimes when I’m faced with an atheist, I am tempted to invite him to the greatest gourmet dinner that one could ever serve, and when we have finished eating that magnificent dinner, to ask him if he believes there’s a cook. – Ronald Reagan

Spirituality authors, who are generally forgiving of most human foibles … take a hard line on intellectualism…. Skepticism they view with contempt, as the refuge of the unenlightened. – Wendy Kaminer

Standing above the crowd, He had a voice so strong and loud And I swallowed his façade ’cause I’m so Eager to identify with Someone above the ground, Someone who seemed to feel the same, Someone prepared to lead the way, with Someone who would die for me. – Maynard James Keenan

Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong… As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from… – Richard P. Feynman

Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength, not my weakness. – Amos Bronson Alcott

Stripped of the opportunities for satire which organised religion cannot help but supply, the case for atheism has very little substance. – Bill Saunders

Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that. – Mark Twain

Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States, the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history. – James Madison

Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder? – George Eliot

Sudden conversion … is particularly attractive to the half-baked mind. – E. M. Forster

Supposing all the great points of atheism were formed into a kind of creed, I would fain ask whether it would not require an infinite greater measure of faith than any set of articles which they so violently oppose. – Joseph Addison

Surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of prayer. – John Ruskin

Take a nation, tell the people there is no God, tell them there is nothing beyond the grave, and they will lose heart, lose their morale. They will become such a shiftless, lazy, apathetic, lethargic people that you won’t be able to get half of them to work. Many will not be motivated by anything. – Shelton Smith

Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. – Robert G. Ingersoll

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. – Herman Melville

Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid … research and discussions … with regard to the doctrine of evolution. – Pope Pius XII

Tears throw a veil over our faults and allow us to accuse fate without fear or contradiction. – Italo Svevo

Terror is everywhere the beginning of religion. – William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Thank God, I am still an atheist. – Luis Bunuel

Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important. – Christopher Hitchens

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject. – George Santayana

That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence. – Ben Hecht

That is what we have in revisionist historians. It starts with their own atheism, their own unbelief, and then they go back and attempt to revise and rewrite history in their own image. – D. James Kennedy

That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations. – Archibald MacLeish

That she does not crouch today where St Paul tried to bind her, she owes to the men who are grand and brave enough to ignore St Paul, and rise superior to his God. – Helen H. Gardener

That utterance of Jesus, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” is one of the most revolutionary and history-making utterances that ever fell from those lips divine. That utterance, once and for all, marked the divorcement of church and state. It marked a new era for the creeds and deeds of men. – George W Truett

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. – Christopher Hitchens

The “Creed of Christendom” is alien to my nature, both emotional and intellectual. – Herbert Spencer

The agnostic is gutless and prefers to keep one safe foot in the god camp. – Madalyn Murray O’Hair

The ameliorating march of the last few centuries has been initiated by the heretics of each age, though I concede that the men and women denounced and persecuted as infidels by the pious of one century are frequently claimed as saints by the pious of a later generation. – Charles Bradlaugh

The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted. – Henry Steele Commager

The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life… It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own. – W. Somerset Maugham

The atheist has no hope. – James Freeman Clarke

The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself; but is the Theist any other? Well, perhaps; for he has seen the shadow of God and clutched at it. – Sri Aurobindo

The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason. – Mary Wollstonecraft

The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke. – Victor J. Stenger

The Bible has noble poetry in it… and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies. – Mark Twain

The Bible is authoritative on everything of which it speaks. Moreover, it speaks of everything. – Cornelius Van Til

The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma. – Abraham Lincoln

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history. – Noam Chomsky

The Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any. – Thomas Paine

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals. – Christopher Hitchens

The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it. – Northrop Frye

The Bible, in which these things are taught, favors drunkenness, murder, slavery, lying, stealing and lechery. – Charles Chilton Moore

The Bible, itself the ultimate curse, is an in-depth profile of the divine spleen. – Ruth Hurmence Green

The big misconception about atheists and atheism is that we don’t believe in anything, or that we have no morals and that’s just not true. Most of us are very nice people. – Heather Henderson

The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don’t have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand. – James D. Watson

The bulk of the totalitarian-minded in the democratic societies are men and women who are attracted to this destructive way of life for inner emotional reasons unknown to themselves. – Joost Meerloo

The candid incline to surmise of late that the Christian faith proves false. – Robert Browning

The Catholic priest, from the moment he becomes a priest, is a sworn officer of the pope. – Otto von Bismarck

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

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore. – H. L. Mencken

The Christian religion is so manifestly contrary to the facts, belief in it can only be held with the most delusional gerrymandering imaginable. – Richard Carrier

The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world’s civilization. – Matilda Joslyn Gage

The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just. – Paul Feyerabend

The Church does not dictate the policies of the nation. The Church proclaims the truth of God to which all these policies must conform. – Frank Pavone

The church lives because it witholds the results of the historical Jesus-research from you. – Hans Conzelmann

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. – Ferdinand Magellan

The civil government … functions with complete success … by the total separation of the Church from the State. – James Madison

The clear and perfect truth no man has seen, nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all things…; for, however perfect what he says may be, yet he does not know it; all things are matters of opinion. – Xenophanes

The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question. – Harriet Martineau

The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, have in all modern countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of knowledge, the danger of which to their own profession they, by a certain instinct, seem always to have perceived. – Henry Thomas Buckle

The common belief that… the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility… is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability. – Colin Archibald Russell

The complete irresponsibility of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest drop which he who understands must swallow. – Friedrich Nietzsche

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. – Jiddu Krishnamurti

The creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create… he discovers. – Antonio Gaudi

The cruelty of a Fijian god, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small compared with the cruelty of a God who condemns men to tortures which are eternal. – Herbert Spencer

The current fashion in belligerent atheism usually involves flinging condemnation around with a kind of gallant extravagance, more or less in the direction of all faiths at once, with little interest in precise aim. – David Bentley Hart

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. – Thomas Jefferson

The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. – Aldous Huxley

The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition. – George Herbert

The Devil’s strategy for our times is to trivialize human existence and isolate us from one another while creating the delusion that the reasons are time pressures, work demands or economic anxieties. – Philip Zimbardo

The disconnection of Church and State was a master stroke for freedom and harmony. – Josiah Warren

The distrust and suspicion which men everywhere evidence toward their adversaries, at all states of historical development, may be regarded as the immediate precursor to the notion of ideology. – Karl Mannheim

The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact. – Leslie Stephen

The doctrine of the double motion of the earth about its axis and about the sun is false, and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture. – Pope Paul V

The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the stronger I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error. – Thomas B. Macaulay

The efficacy of religion lies precisely in what is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal; its efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion according as it demands more faith – that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the profane mind. – Henri Frederic Amiel

The essence of Christianity, as I see it, is love. The essence of Humanism (and I’m also a Humanist) is love. At that level, we’re not far apart. – Mark Thomas

The essential mark of the agitator is the high value he places on the emotional response of the public. Whether he attacks or defends social institutions is a secondary matter. – Harold Lasswell

The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. – Joseph Conrad

The evaporation of 4 million who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place. – Andrei Codrescu

The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed. – Carl Sagan

The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine. – Vera Kistiakowsky

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. – George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth. – W. Somerset Maugham

The fact that Christians exist is a proof that God does not exist. – Louis Scutenaire

The First Amendment of the US Constitution … is an eloquent repudiation of the First Commandment’s prohibition of religious freedom. It is also a repudiation of the Third Commandment’s prohibition of freedom of speech. The Thirteenth Amendment repudiates the institution of slavery which is so cozily assumed by the Fourth and Tenth Protestant Commandments. – Frank Zindler

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion. – Karl Marx

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth. – Mikhail Bakunin

The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see. – Huang Po

The freethinker has the same right to discredit the beliefs of Christians that the Orthodox Christians enjoy in destroying reverence, respect, and confidence in Mohammedanism, Mormonism, Christian Science, or Atheism. – Theodore Schroeder

The Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. – Richard Dawkins

The God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument. – George Carlin

The god most Americans say they believe in is just not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. – Stanley Hauerwas

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. – Richard Dawkins

The gods that we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee. – Christopher Hitchens

The Government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion. – John Adams

The graphic emphasis placed on those first lines is rather hard to square with the proposition that the monument expresses no particular religious preference. – John Paul Stevens

The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion. – Edward Gibbon

The greatest error of our time is not to proclaim that God is dead, but to believe that the devil has died. – Nicolas Gomez Davila

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable. – Brennan Manning

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. – Arthur C. Clarke

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought. – Peter Ustinov

The heavens declare the glory of Kepler and Newton. – Auguste Comte

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator. – Marcel Proust

The history of all times and nations teaches us that exactly in the naïve, unshakable belief, furnished by religion in active life of believers, originate the most intense motives for the most significant creative performance, not only in the field of arts and sciences but also in politics. – Max Planck

The history of atheism matters. It matters not just for intellectual reasons—that is, because it behooves us to understand the past as fully as we can—but also on moral, indeed political grounds. History confers authority and legitimacy. This is why authoritarian states seek to deny it to those thy do not favor, destroying historic sites and outlawing traditional practice. Atheist history is not embodied in buildings or rituals in quite the same way, but the principle is identical. If religious belief is treated as deep and ancient and disbelief as recent, then atheism can readily be dismissed as faddish and inconsequential. Perhaps, even, the persecution of atheists can be seen as a less serious problem than the persecution of religious minorities. The deep history of atheism is then in part a human rights issue: it is about recognizing atheists as real people deserving of respect, tolerance, and the opportunity to live their lives unmolested. – Tim Whitmarsh

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish. – Evelyn Waugh

The human race is guided by its own ideas, and only by its ideas. If thought were left perfectly free from ban of legislative or ecclesiastical censor, the best thoughts would as naturally prevail over the worst as the best seeds of the forest naturally triumph over the worst seeds. – Ellen Battelle Dietrick

The hypocrite, certainly, is a secret atheist; for if he did believe there was a God, he durst not be so bold as to deceive Him to His face. – Thomas Adams

The idea of a Japanese comedian was not only a rarity, it was non-existent. – Pat Morita

The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence, and I cannot accept it. – Herbert Spencer

The ideal of progress, freedom of thought, and the decline of ecclesiastical power go together. – J. B. Bury

The ignorant are a reservoir of daring. It almost seems that those who have yet to discover the known are particularly equipped for dealing with the unknown. The unlearned have often rushed in where the learned feared to tread, and it is the credulous who are tempted to attempt the impossible. They know not whither they are going, and give chance a chance. – Eric Hoffer

The images evoked by words being independent of their sense, they vary from age to age and from people to people, the formulas remaining identical. Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them up. – Gustave Le Bon

The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority. – Archibald MacLeish

The influence of the leaders is due in very small measure to the arguments they employ, but in a large degree to their prestige. The best proof of this is that, should they by any circumstance lose their prestige, their influence disappears. – Gustave Le Bon

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains. – Al-Maʿarri

The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations. – Arthur Koestler

The insistence on truthfulness does not disturb the freedom of the individual. The social obligation implied in Satyagraha turns the freedom of the individual into moral freedom. An atheist is free to say or to do what he likes, provided he does what he says and says what he does. So, in the context of social relations, the freedom of the individual is moral freedom. – Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

The inspiration of the bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it. – Robert G. Ingersoll

The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium. – Raymond Aron

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. – Delos B. McKown

The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries – as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them – but because it was far more poetical. – H. L. Mencken

The language of theism which was familiar to the people, gave Gandhi the advantage of easy communication with the people, but it is atheistic in principle. It could have been the starting point for the atheistic movement in the modern age. – Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

The largest party in America, by the way, is neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. It’s the party of non-voters. – Robert Reich

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. – Chuck Palahniuk

The legitimate powers of government extend to only such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God. – Thomas Jefferson

The lesson taught us by these kindly commentators on my present experience is that dogmatic faith compels the best minds and hearts to narrowness and insolence. – Harriet Martineau

The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected. – William O. Douglas

The liberty of conscience, which above all other things ought to be to all men dearest and most precious. – John Milton

The loneliest moment in life is when you have just experienced that which you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has just let you down. – Ravi Zacharias

The love of individual freedom has stood in the way of the appreciation of social obligations. – Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance. – Robert Bork

The majority has no right to impose its religion on the rest. That’s a tradition as sacred as the Constitution itself to this country. – William Rainey Harper

The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests. – George Meredith

The minister today preached about death and judgment, and what would become of those who behaved improperly — and somehow it scared me. He preached such an awful sermon I didn’t think I should ever see you again until the Judgment Day. The subject of perdition seemed to please him somehow. – Emily Dickinson

The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity. – John Shelby Spong

The mixing of government and religion can be a threat to free government, even if no one is forced to participate…. When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion, it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some. – Harry A. Blackmun

The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed. – Garrett Hardin

The more a nation gets into darkness, the more it’s going to hate the light. The more it’s going to run from the light. And we have a generation of people who have given themselves to darkness, and they’ve embraced atheism, because it gets them away from moral responsibility to God. – Ray Comfort

The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there’s any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all. – Neil deGrasse Tyson

The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. Science brings men nearer to God. – Louis Pasteur

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief. – Sigmund Freud

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. – Steven Weinberg

The more thoroughly I conduct scientific research, the more I believe that science excludes atheism. – Lord Kelvin

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. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

The most henious and the must cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives. – Mohandas Gandhi

The most malicious kind of hatred is that which is built upon a theological foundation. – George Sarton

The most popular argument in all these papers was the assertion … that Christianity had grown and prospered in spite of the opposition of the State. – H. J Eckenrode

The movement of comets is part of the ordinary works of nature which, without regard to the happiness or misery of mankind, are transported from one part of the heavens to another by virtue of the general laws of motion. – Pierre Bayle

The mysteries of the faith are not to [be] explained rashly to anyone. Usually in fact, they cannot be understood by everyone but only by those who are qualified to understand them with informed intelligence. The depth of the divine Scriptures is such that not only the illiterate and uninitiated have difficulty understanding them, but also the educated and the gifted. – Pope Innocent III

The natural is so awesome that we need not go beyond it. – Ruth Hurmence Green

The notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true, and therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense. – C.S. Lewis

The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable. – Karl Rahner

The observations and experiments of science are so wonderful that the truth that they establish can surely be accepted as another manifestation of God. God shows himself by allowing man to establish truth. – Derek Barton

The old faiths light their candles all about, but burly Truth comes by and puts them out. – Lizette Woodworth Reese

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 counter-attractions of cinema, motor-bicycle and golf course. – A. A. Milne

The one function that most gods seem to have in common is to give human existence some ultimate purpose – and, while it is not possible to disprove an ultimate purpose, there does not seem to be any evidence for it. This is not to say, of course, that there is no purpose in life at all: we all make our own purposes as we go through life. And life does not lose its value simply because it it not going to last forever. – Barbara Smoker

The only person who is a worse liar than a faith healer is his patient. – Abraham Lincoln

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha’s atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah. – Walter Kaufmann

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. – Eric Hoffer

The orthodox faith painted God as a revengeful being, and yet people talk about loving such a being. – P. T. Barnum

The party is not concerned with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, providing that the hierarchical structure always remains the same. – George Orwell

The path from Christianity to Atheism is a long one, and its first steps are very rough and very painful; the feet tread on the ruins of the broken faith, and the sharp edges cut into the bleeding flesh; but further on the path grows smoother, and presently at its side begins to peep forth the humble daisy of hope that heralds the springtide, and further on the roadside is fragrant with all the flowers of summer, sweet and brilliant and gorgeous, and in the distance we see the promise of the autumn, the harvest that shall be reaped for the feeding of man. – Annie Besant

The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism. – George Jean Nathan

The People will not allow themselves to be changed into hogs by the Circes of Atheism. Their souls will flash indignation against their transformers. A day will come when they will see that they are impoverished under the pretext of being enriched; that, when they are robbed of their souls and of God, both their titles to liberty are stolen from them. – Alphonse de Lamartine

The perpetual enemy of faith in the true God is not atheism (the claim that there is no God), but rather Gnosticism (the claim that God is known). – Martin Buber

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers. – Denis Diderot

The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation. – Emma Goldman

The piety of “having a personal relationship with Christ” … is alien to the New Testament… but evangelicals elevate it to the shibboleth of salvation! Unless you have a personal relationship with Jesus, buster, one day you will be boiling in Hell. Sheesh! Talk about the fury of a personal savior scorned! – Robert M. Price

The place whereon the priest formerly raveled out the small intestine of the sacrificial victim for purposes of divination and cooked its flesh for the gods. The word is now seldom used, except with reference to the sacrifice of their liberty and peace by a male and a female fool. – Ambrose Bierce

The possession of unlimited power corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding. – Lord Acton

The prayer of the agnostic: “O God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul.” – Ernest Renan

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it. – Terry Pratchett

The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality. – Herbert Spencer

The priest, realistically considered, is the most immoral of men, for he is always willing to sacrifice every other sort of good to the one good of his arcanum – the vague body of mysteries that he calls the truth. – H. L. Mencken

The problem when arguing with those who believe in atheistic evolution is that they move goal posts by redefining atheism or evolution or the word ‘species.’ – Ray Comfort

The purpose prong of the Lemon test requires that a government activity have a secular purpose. That requirement is not satisfied, however, by the mere existence of some secular purpose, however dominated by religious purposes… The proper inquiry under the purpose prong of Lemon, I submit, is whether the government intends to convey a message of endorsement or disapproval of religion. – Sandra Day O’Connor

The Queen of England is Defender of the Faith but the President of the United States is Defender of the Constitution, which defends all faiths. – Walter F. Mondale

The real oppressor, enslaver, and corrupter of the people is the Bible. – Robert Green Ingersoll

The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is because vampires are allergic to bullshit. – Richard Pryor

The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed. – Bartolome de las Casas

The religious hypothesis, therefore, must be considered only as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe: but no just reasoner will ever presume to infer from it any single fact, and alter or add to the phenomena, in any single particular. – David Hume

The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child. – Sigmund Freud

The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn’d, Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep They told their comrades, and to Sleep return’d. – Omar Khayyam

The Revolutionary’s Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age… All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers’ blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text. – Arthur Koestler

The right to religious freedom has its foundation, not in the church or society or the state, but in the very dignity of the human person. – John Courtney Murray

The sailor does not pray for wind, he learns to sail. – Gustaf Lindborg

The scent of frying astronomers long ago ceased to ascend to Yahweh. – H. L. Mencken

The scientific-religious conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified. – John Dewey

The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof. – Ashley Montagu

The separation of Church and State in everything relating to taxation should be absolute. – James A. Garfield

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, “There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front. – Kurt Vonnegut

The significance and joy in my science comes in those occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, ‘So that’s how God did it.’ My goal is to understand a little corner of God’s plan. – Henry F. Schaefer, III

The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty. And this shift from infallibilism to fallibilism has profound consequences not only for toleration, but also for the subordination of faith to reason and theology to philosophy. – George H. Smith

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. – Paul Kurtz

The sole purpose and effect of it is to exclude persecution and to secure the important right of religious liberty. – Oliver Ellsworth

The sooner the doctrine of original sin disappears, the better it is for theology. – Georgia Harkness

The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches. – Jeremy Bentham

The state authorities have no place in the church of God, no right to control and persecute the conscience. – Hans Denck

The statement that ‘God is dead’ comes from Nietzsche and has recently been trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians. But the good Lord has not died of this; He who dwells in the heaven laughs at them. – Karl Barth

The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged “truth” which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought. – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The struggle against atheism is foremost and of necessity a struggle against the inadequacy of our own theism. – Karl Rahner

The supernatural Christ of the New Testament, the god of orthodox Christianity, is dead. But priestcraft lives and conjures up the ghost of this dead god to frighten and enslave the masses of mankind. The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused. The darkest wrongs are still inspired by it. The wails of anguish that went up from Kishenev, Odessa, and Bialystok still vibrate in our ears. – John Remsburg

The supreme religious test of our social order is the hideous commerce of prostitution. – Jane Addams

The theist can only find meaning by leaving this life for a transcendental world beyond the grave. The human world as he finds it is empty of ‘ultimate purpose’ and hence meaningless. Theism thus is an attempt to escape from the human condition; it is a pathetic deceit. – Paul Kurtz

The theist must present an intelligible description of god. Until he does so, god makes no more sense than unie; both are cognitively empty, and any attempt at proof is logically absurd. – George H. Smith

The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words ‘true’ or ‘false’. – C. S. Lewis

The thing framed says that nothing framed it; the tongue never made itself to speak, and yet talks against him that did; saying that which is made, is, and that which made it, is not. But this folly is infinite as hell, as much without light or bound as the chaos or the primitive nothing. – Jeremy Taylor

The time has come for honest men to denounce false teachers and attack false gods. – Luther Burbank

The time has come to knock off this religion business in American politics. There’s no end to the mischief that can occur. It is like putting nitroglycerine in a Waring blender. – Lowell P. Weicker, Jr.

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis. – Sigmund Freud

The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. – George F. Kennan

The truth is that the whole system of beliefs which comes in with the story of the fall of man … is gently falling out of enlightened human intelligence. – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The truth wears longer than all the gods; for it is only in the truth’s service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last God himself. “The truth” outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods; it is Deity itself. – Max Stirner

The Typical American? He is sent to school Little or much, where he imbibes the rule Of safety first and comfort; in his youth He joins the church and ends the quest of truth. – Edgar Lee Masters

The union of church and state put the church under a political control… The church was thoroughly subordinated to the state. – H. J Eckenrode

The United States furnishes the first example in history of a government deliberately depriving itself of all legislative control of religion. – Philip Schaff

The United States is not a Christian nation. It is a great nation with Christians, among others, in it. But our greatness is based on the fact that there is no official religion. – Lowell P. Weicker, Jr.

The universe displays no proof of an all-directing mind. – Auguste Comte

The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. – Lawrence M. Krauss

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours. – Bertrand Russell

The use of violence is justified only under a tyranny which makes reforms without violence impossible, and should have only one aim, that is, to bring about a state of affairs which makes reforms without violence possible. – Karl Popper

The use or abuse of Christianity in contradiction to the very message of the gospel reveals not the gospel for what it is, but the heart of man. That is why atheism is so bankrupt as a view of life, for it miserably fails to deal with the human condition as it really is. – Ravi Zacharias

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen. – Aldous Huxley

The very admission of the need to harmonize is an admission that the burden of proof is on the narratives, not on those who doubt them. What harmonizing shows is that despite appearances, the texts still might be true. – Robert M. Price

The very idea of carrying my memory into eternity devastated me, and I took refuge in atheism. – Taylor Caldwell

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike…Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish. – C. S. Lewis

The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible. – John Shelby Spong

The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason: The Morning Daylight appears plainer when you put out your Candle. – Benjamin Franklin

The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love. That’s the message we’re brought up with isn’t it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options. – Bill Hicks

The whole story is about change. We are very lucky that the earth’s history is recorded in fossilized remains. And we can see the changes. Unfortunately, there will always be gaps in our knowledge, but there is no doubt that we and everything living today has evolved. – Richard Leakey

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. – Albert Einstein

The work that Christ started but could not finish, I — Adolf Hitler — will conclude. – Adolf Hitler

The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done. – Emma Goldman

The world allured me & in an unguarded moment I listened to her siren voice. From that moment I seemed to lose interest in heavenly things. Friends reasoned with me & told me of the danger I was in. I felt my danger & was alarmed, but I had rambled too far to return & ever since my heart has been growing harder. – Emily Dickinson

The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him. – Claude Levi-Strauss

The world holds two classes of men – intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence. – Abu’l-Ala al Ma’arri

The world looks like it was designed. Of course, the Sun also looks like it goes around the Earth. It is only thru science that we know that both of these perceptions are wrong. – Mark Thomas

The World to Bacon does not only owe it’s present knowledge, but its future too. – John Dryden

The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank. – Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity. – John E. Jones III

Their moral influence will then do infinitely more to advance the true interests of religion, than any measures which they may call on Congress to enact. – Richard Mentor Johnson

Theism is so confused and the sentences in which “God” appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible. – A.J. Ayer

Theism tells men that they are the slaves of a God. Atheism assures men that they are the investigators and users of nature. – E. Haldeman-Julius

Theism, as a way of conceiving God, has become demonstrably inadequate, and the God of theism not only is dying but is probably not revivable. If the religion of the future depends on keeping alive the definitions of theism, then the human phenomenon that we call religion will have come to an end. If Christianity depends on a theistic definition of God, then we must face the fact that we are watching this noble religious system enter the rigor mortis of its own death throes. – John Shelby Spong

Theist and Atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name. – Samuel Butler

Theologians are all alike, of whatever religion or country they may be; their aim is always to wield despotic authority over men’s consciences; they therefore persecute all of us who have the temerity to tell the truth. – Frederick The Great

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything. – Robert A. Heinlein

There are a lot of legislators who are afraid that kids will learn science and lose their faith. – Lawrence M. Krauss

There are a lot of very brilliant scholars who believe the reason we have incomplete science on evolution is that there is a higher power involved in this. – Bill O’Reilly

There are good reasons to believe in God, including the existence of mathematical principles and order in creation. They are positive reasons, based on knowledge, rather than default assumptions based on a temporary lack of knowledge. – Francis Collins

There are many who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God anymore. – Arthur Miller

“There are no atheists in foxholes” isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes. – James K. Morrow

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. – Hannah Arendt

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism. – Daniel Dennett

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel. – Vladimir Lenin

There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. – C. S. Lewis

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them. – Werner Heisenberg

There are those who feel an imperative need to believe, for whom the values of a belief are proportionate not to its truth, but to its definiteness. Incapable of either admitting the existence of contrary judgments or of suspending their own, they supply the place of knowledge by turning other men’s conjectures into dogmas. – C. E. M. Joad

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God. – Simone Weil

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and at the same time, all-powerful being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be. – Arthur Schopenhauer

There can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven. – Robert Green Ingersoll

There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable. – Elias Canetti

There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it. – Albert Camus

There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten. – Indira Gandhi

There is a court to which I shall appeal: the court of public opinion. – Charles Bradlaugh

There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion. – Havelock Ellis

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God. – Primo Levi

There is in the clergy of all Christian denominations a time-serving, cringing, subservient morality, as wide from the spirit of the gospel as it is from the intrepid assertion and vindication of truth. – John Quincy Adams

There is little difference in the knowledge held by those who can’t learn and those who won’t. – Mark Thomas

There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things. – Giordano Bruno

There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted receiver the mind cannot use its wings, – the clearest proof that it is out of its element. – Augustus Hare

There is no doctrine of Christianity but what has been anticipated by the Vedas. – Horace Greeley

There is no evidence for a god, no coherent definition of a god, no good argument for a god, good positive arguments against a god, no agreement among believers about the nature or moral principles of a god, and no need for a god. We can live happy, moral, productive lives without such belief, and we can do it better. – Dan Barker

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author. – Marquis de Sade

There is no gospel of atheism. Atheists don’t pray at the altar of a Richard Dawkins poster. – Gad Saad

There is no ground for supposing that matter and energy existed before [the Big Bang] and were suddenly galvanized into action. For what could distinguish that moment from all other moments in eternity? It is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo-Divine will constituting Nature from nothingness. – E. T. Whittaker

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being. – James Joyce

There is no indisputable proof for the big bang,” said Hollus. “And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard? – Robert J. Sawyer

There is no intercessor, angel, mediator, between man and God; for man can speak and God hear, each for himself. He requires no advocates to plead for men. – Theodore Parker

There is no more harm in adultery than in rubbing one’s hands together. – Pope Boniface VIII

There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan. – C. S. Lewis

There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad. – Mark Twain

There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality. – Jeremy Bentham

There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite good reasons for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren’t so tragic. – Richard Dawkins

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion. – Will Durant

There is no sphere in which a human being can be supposed to act where one mode of reasoning will not, in every given instance, be more reasonable than any other mode. That mode the being is bound by every principle of justice to pursue. – William Godwin

There is no way you can harmonize neo-Darwinism and Christianity. – Lee Strobel

There is nothing so revered yet so reviled as war; for even as it brings out the worst in men, it also brings out the best in them. – Neil Lowe

There is nothing that can be said by mathematical symbols and relations which cannot also be said by words. The converse, however, is false. Much that can be and is said by words cannot successfully be put into equations, because it is nonsense. – Clifford Truesdell

There is only one blasphemy, and that is the refusal to experience joy. – Paul Rudnick

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

There was a time when religion ruled the world. It was known as the Dark Ages. – Ruth Hurmence Green

There will be certain things in a man that have to be won, not forced; inspired, not compelled. – Alfred Whitney Griswold

There’s a bait and switch going on here because the critics want the textbooks to question whether evolution occurred. And of course they don’t because scientists don’t question whether evolution occurred. – Eugenie Scott

There’s a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire – poison and antidote. – Bertrand Russell

There’s a phrase we live by in America: “In God We Trust”. It’s right there where Jesus would want it: on our money. – Bill Maher

There’s no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) ‘Do you realize you’ve wasted your life? – Daniel Dennett

There’s no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible. – Sean O’Casey

Therefore coercion of the non-invasive, when justifiable at all, is to be justified on the ground that it secures, not a minimum of ‘ invasion, but a minimum of pain. – Benjamin Tucker

Therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself, above human frailty. – Francis Bacon

There’s a phrase we live by in America: “In God We Trust”. It’s right there where Jesus would want it: on our money. – Steven Colbert

There’s no reason for me to believe that God exists, so I don’t. – Victor J. Stenger

Thermodynamics, correctly interpreted, does not just allow Darwinian evolution; it favors it. – Ludwig Boltzmann

They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called “Let’s Pretend.” Let’s pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our unbroken apostolic traditions. – John Shelby Spong

They are deceived who flatter themselves that the ignorant and debased slave has no conception of the magnitude of his wrongs. They are deceived who imagine that he arises from his knees with back lacerated and bleeding, cherishing only a spirit of meekness and forgiveness. A day may come – it will, if his prayer is heard. A terrible day of vengeance when the master in his turn will cry in vain for mercy. – Solomon Northup

They are mostly Americans and almost all are Protestant. Many have a strong grounding in the Bible. In Jerusalem, they suddenly take off their clothes or shout prophecies on street corners, only to revert to normal after a few days’ treatment. – Amos Elon

They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors. – Maurice Maeterlinck

They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it’s a good thing. – Steven Weinberg

They give unexplainable answers to unanswerable questions and call it faith and religion… – Daniel Seker

They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility, for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature. – Francis Bacon

They told me to use the brain God gave me. I did. Now I’m an Atheist. Ironic, isn’t it? – Unknown

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? – Carl Sagan

This atheism concerning the gods of men pertains hereafter to any possible faith – Paul Ricoeur

This hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any belief in the history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was taught unambiguously by Jesus. – Margaret E. Knight

This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief. – Adolf Hitler

This is regrettable indeed for a nation that aspires to teach democracy to other nations, because, as Burke said: “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” – J. William Fulbright

This religion and the Bible require of woman everything, and give her nothing. They ask her support and her love, and repay her with contempt and oppression. – Helen H. Gardener

This sense of wonder leads most scientists to a Superior Being – der Alte, the Old One, as Einstein affectionately called the Deity – a Superior Intelligence, the Lord of all Creation and Natural Law. – Abdus Salam

This world is like Noah’s Ark. In which few men but many beasts embark. – Samuel Butler

Thomas Paine needs no monument made with hands; he has erected a monument in the hearts of all lovers of liberty. – Andrew Jackson

Thomson’s views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles. – Charles Darwin

Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. – John Locke

Those things that are in the light we behold from darkness. – Lucretius

Those to whom his word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses. There wasn’t anyone else around when Mohammed got the word either. Mormon Joseph Smith and Christian Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy, had exclusive audiences with God. We have to trust them as reporters -and you know how reporters are. They’ll do anything for a story. – Andy Rooney

Those who accept freedom of religion as a right are obligated by this acceptance to take the maintenance of freedom of religion as a duty. – Joseph Leon Blau

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. – Voltaire

Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed. – Dorothy Day

Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up. – Wilson Mizner

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves. – Lord Byron

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it… – Richard Dawkins

Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere “opiate of the people” have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor. – C.S. Lewis

Though a man declares himself an atheist, it in no way alters his obligations. – Henry Ward Beecher

Though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with. – Christopher Hitchens

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do. – Joseph Wood Krutch

Thought is powerless, except it make something outside of itself: the thought which conquers the world is not contemplative but active. – William Kingdon Clifford

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with. – Christopher Hitchens

Thy Banners gleam a little, and are furled; Against thy turrets surge His phantom tow’rs; Drugged with his Opiates the nations nod, Refusing still the beauty of thine hours; And fragile is thy tenure of this world Still haunted by the monstrous ghost of God. – George Sterling

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny. – Joseph Addison

To claim “humanitarian motives” when the motive is envy and its supposed appeasement, is a favorite rhetorical device of politicians today, and has been for at least a hundred and fifty years. – Helmut Schoeck

To deny me the right to err is therefore to deny me the right to believe. – Sidney Hook

To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion. – Richard Dawkins

To discover the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods. They need but common sense. They have only to look within themselves, to reflect upon their own nature, to consult their obvious interests, to consider the object of society and of each of the members who compose it, and they will easily understand that virtue is an advantage, and that vice is an injury to beings of the species. – Jean Meslier

To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy. – David Brooks

To fill a world with … religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used. – Richard Dawkins

To give religion two minutes a day, in its own space, isn’t exactly selling general morality or atheism short. – Melvyn Bragg

To have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit. – David Hume

To imagine that “God moves in mysterious ways” is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts. – Barbara Smoker

To its adherents, it is the antidote to centuries of ignorance and superstition, but to its detractors it is the product of latter-day decadence and materialism. But a new Cambridge University study argues that atheism is in fact one of the world’s oldest beliefs — long predating Christianity and Islam. The belief that there were no gods was common in the ancient world, research by Professor Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge, concludes. But “ancient atheism” was effectively written out of history when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century, heralding a new era of state-imposed belief. – Unknown

To kill someone, even treacherously is more manly than to wound a friend by betraying his confidence. – Italo Svevo

To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance. – Eric Hoffer

To me it is unthinkable that a real atheist could be a scientist. – Robert Andrews Millikan

To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible. – St. Thomas Aquinas

To proclaim himself an agnostic, while to some it might appear more respectable and cautious, would be to say in effect that he hadn’t decided what to believe. – E. Haldeman-Julius

To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler. Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it. – D. James Kennedy

To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage. – James Randi

To reorganize society without God or King, by the systematic culture of Humanity. – Auguste Comte

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. – Geoff Mather

To see rare effects, and no cause; a motion, without a mover; a circle, without a centre; a time, without an eternity; a second, without a first: these are things so against philosophy and natural reason, that he must be a beast in understanding who can believe in them. The thing formed, says that nothing formed it; and that which is made, is, while that which made it is not! This folly is infinite. – Jeremy Taylor

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. – Isaac Asimov

To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, “I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge.” – Ravi Zacharias

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world? – Christopher Hitchens

To want to renounce the illusions concerning our proper situation implies that we renounce the situation that needs such illusions. The critique of religion demands the critique of the valley of tears of which religion is the aureola… The critique of religion must rid man of his illusions in order that he may think, act and build his reality as a being who has finally become reasonable, in order that his world rotate about himself, that is to say, about only true sun. Religion is merely a illusory sun. – Karl Marx

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down — they are truly down. – Joseph McCarthy

Today when the Fundamentalists are once more insisting that the fundamentals of fundamentalism are fundamental to our being No. 1 on the Lord’s totem pole, it’s very brave of you to invite the “resident atheist” of mid-Missouri to share her thoughts with you. – Ruth Hurmence Green

Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world’s first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less. – Al Ries

Today, the religion clauses of the First Amendment do not need to be fixed; they need to be followed. – Walter F. Mondale

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles. – James D. Watson

Today’s religion will be the future’s mythology. Both believed at one time by many; but proved wrong by the clever. – Steven Crocker

Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism. – Baron d’Holbach

Too often in time past, religion has brought forth criminal and shameful actions… How many evils has religion caused? – Lucretius

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay. – Jiddu Krishnamurti

True believers are continually shown by reality that their god doesn’t exist, but have developed extensive coping mechanisms to deal with this cognitive dissonance. – Mark Thomas

true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one’s own hopes or conceptual limitations. – David Bentley Hart

True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind. – Lucretius

Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer. – Unknown

Under the rubric of religious freedom, we respect the right to worship differently much more than the right to worship not at all. – Wendy Kaminer

Unfortunately, the average guy on the street believes that studying evolution leads to atheism. – Greg Graffin

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

Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe. – C.S. Lewis

Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless. – Bertrand Russell

Until the content of a belief is made clear, the appeal to accept the belief on faith is beside the point, for one would not know what one has accepted. The request for the meaning of a religious belief is logically prior to the question of accepting that belief on faith or to the question of whether that belief constitutes knowledge. – William Blackstone

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: “My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.” This stranger is a theologian. – Denis Diderot

Wanna know the funniest thing about people who call people like me Satanists? They believe in Satan, and I don’t. – Unknown

We aim in the domain of politics at republicanism; in the domain of economics at socialism; in the domain of what is today called religion, at atheism. – August Bebel

We all behave as though what we think is true, is true. – Mark Thomas

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. – Thomas Jefferson

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. – Richard Dawkins

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong. – Arthur Eddington

We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. We can never have enough of nature. – Henry David Thoreau

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship. – George Wald

We are weak little Davids. But we are stronger than the Goliath of atheism, because God is on our side. The truth belongs to us. – Richard Wurmbrand

We are well aware that religion is not as bad an influence as it was a short time ago, as history is counted. But it is a sufficiently bad influence even in modern times, and its reduced viciousness (in practice) is due plainly enough to its reduced power. – E. Haldeman-Julius

We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed. – Richard Dawkins

We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world. – Chapman Cohen

We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There’s not much personal about the laws of physics. – Stephen Hawking

We don’t need a constitutional amendment for kids to pray. – William J. Clinton

We grovel and “worship” and pray to God to do what we ourselves ought to have done a thousand years ago, and can do now, as soon as we choose. – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper. – Sam Harris

We have a right to know or may lawfully know any truth. And a right to know any truth whatsoever implies a right to think freely. – Anthony Collins

We have followed a path of moderation, development is our priority, national unity, good community relations, Muslims and non Muslims, this is what has given us the advantage. – Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid. – Christopher Hitchens

We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it. So there is a chance that the best of all possible mathematics will be created out of physicists’ attempts to describe nature. – Alexander Markovich Polyakov

We know that no one should tell a woman she has to bear an unwanted child. We know that religious beliefs cannot define patriotism. – Walter Cronkite

We know that there is no absolute knowledge, that there are only theories; but we forget this. The better educated we are, the harder we believe in axioms. – Lincoln Steffens

We live our lives for our life’s sake, rather than for illusions about rewards and satisfaction after we’re dead. – PZ Myers

We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses – in short, from fewer premises. – Aristotle

We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don’t stand up to experimentation, Buddha’s own words must be rejected. – Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama, 1988

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. – Gene Roddenberry

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. – H. L. Mencken

We need to be skeptical of utopianists who offer unreliable totalistic visions of other worlds and strive to take us there. We need some ideals, but we also need to protect ourselves from the miscalculations and misadventures of visionaries. – Paul Kurtz

We place no reliance On virgin or pigeon; Our Method is Science, Our Aim is Religion. – Aleister Crowley

We seek to create a united Democratic and non-racial society. – Oliver Tambo

We tend to see atheism as an idea that has only recently emerged in secular Western societies. The rhetoric used to describe it is hyper-modern. In fact, early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal. Rather than making judgements based on scientific reason, these early atheists were making what seem to be universal objections about the paradoxical nature of religion — the fact that it asks you to accept things that aren’t intuitively there in your world. The fact that this was happening thousands of years ago suggests that forms of disbelief can exist in all cultures, and probably always have. – Tim Whitmarsh

We then examine a particular coding system in DNA and discover that UI [universal information] is conveyed within the genes. Using this DNA evidence and scientific laws governing UI as premises, we are able to develop sound, logical deductions. This leads us to the following conclusion: the God of the Bible exists and He is responsible for originating and embedding Universal Information into biological life. – Werner Gitt

We weep over the graves of infants and the little ones taken from us by death; but an early grave may be the shortest way to heaven. – Tryon Edwards

We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don’t have to bother saying so. – Richard Dawkins

We’re dealing with whether we’re going to accept the idea of socialism and Marxism and atheism. Or go back to the American way, Judeo-Christian values, which meritocracy is part of it. The idea that content and character and talent are colorblind. – Burgess Owens

We’re fighting against humanism, we’re fighting against liberalism…we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today…our battle is with Satan himself. – Jerry Falwell

What can be accomplished by a few principles is not effected by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle, which is nature, and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle, which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God’s existence. – Thomas Aquinas

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. – Christopher Hitchens

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster! – Jeremy Taylor

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy? – George Orwell

What good deed can government do for religion? The best deed of all: leave it free and unencumbered, burdened by neither enmity nor amity. – Edwin Gaustad

What has been [Christianity’s] fruits? Superstition, Bigotry and Persecution. – James Madison

What has changed is that nothing has changed… that’s what has made me more unhappy than everything else. – Willie Nelson

What I find funny about promoting atheism is that atheists are doing the same thing many religions do. They are literally advocating for their (non)beliefs. And doing that with so much passion, trying to convince people to give up their faith, working that hard to prove everyone that your standpoint is the right one and that everyone around who don’t believe in the same thing you do are stupid … there is something religious about it. – Nina Zdinjak

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of “humility.” This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. – Albert Einstein

What is Atheism? In itself nothing; a denial of a positive idea. Every negation involves a position. And if every positive idea be a reality, a negation is nothing. – Sabine Baring-Gould

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176) – Stephen Batchelor

What is the ultimate solution to the origin of the Universe? The answers provided by the astronomers are disconcerting and remarkable. Most remarkable of all is the fact that in science, as in the Bible, the world begins with an act of creation. – Robert Jastrow

What is the use of assuring Fundamentalists that science is compatible with religion. They retort at once, Certainly not with our religion. – Luther Burbank

What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem. – Bertrand Russell

What makes our opponents useful is that they allow us to believe that without them we would be able to realize our goals. – Jean Rostand

What men deny is not God, but some preposterous idol of the imagination. – George Tyrell

What sort of god would deliberately create a world in which his creatures must eat one another to live? – Nel Noddings

What we call ‘morals’ is simply blind obedience to words of command. – Havelock Ellis

What we need in America today is a vigorous return to the god of our fathers and a most vigorous defense against the minion of godlessness and atheism. – J. Edgar Hoover

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women? – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Whatever may be God’s future, we cannot forget His past. – William Hurrell Mallock

What’s “God”? Well, you know, when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God’s the guy that ignores you. – Steve Buscemi (From the movie “The Island”)

When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life. – Sigmund Freud

When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. – Benjamin Franklin

When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion. – Phyllis McGinley

When church and state are separate, the effects are happy, and they do not at all interfere with each other: but where they have been confounded together, no tongue nor pen can fully describe the mischiefs that have ensued. – Isaac Backus

When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange coincidences of nature, it’s very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am sure many physicists want to. I only wish they would admit it. – Tony Rothman

When discord dreadful bursts her brazen bars, And shatters locks to thunder forth her wars. – Horace

When he said we were trying to make a fool of him, I could only murmur that the Creator had beat us to it. – Ilka Chase

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. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free — free to think, to express my thoughts — free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination’s wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself. . . I was free! – Robert Green Ingersoll

When I meet a man, I am not concerned about his opinions. I am concerned about the man. – Martin Buber

When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it. – Oscar Wilde

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, “Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?” – Quentin Crisp

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me. – Emo Philips

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks… But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable. – George Meredith

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. – Bill Maher

When men live as if there were no God, it becomes expedient for them that there should be none. – John Tillotson

When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. – Umberto Eco

When one person is delusional, it’s called insanity. When many people are delusional, they call it religion. – Unknown

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a religion. – Robert M. Pirsig

When people talk about their God, it is difficult to know what they actually mean, and when people talk about their atheism, it is usually incomprehensible also. – Michael Leunig

When reputable scientists correct flaws in an experiment that produced fantastic results, then fail to get those results when they repeat the test with flaws corrected, they withdraw their original claims. They do not defend them by arguing irrelevantly that the failed replication was successful in some other way, or by making intemperate attacks on whomever dares to criticize their competence. – Martin Gardner

When scriptural laws conflict with what is righteous and just, there written text loses its relevance. – Chanakya

When the Amherst sphinx styled herself a pagan, she meant she didn’t believe in the biblical God. What sort of deity, if any, she did believe in is hard to pinpoint. – Gary Sloan

When the masses become better informed about science, they will feel less need for help form supernatural Higher Powers. The need for religion will end when man becomes sensible enough to govern himself. – Francesc Ferrer i Guardia

When the whole world doesn’t believe in God, it will be a great place. – Philip Roth

When their god and his exploiters cease to be adored and served, we shall live like comrades in mutual affection. – Francesc Ferrer i Guardia

When they asked me what my religion was. I said I was Non-Delusional. – Unknown

When, in my philosophical disquisitions, I deny a providence and a future state, I undermine not the foundations of society, but advance principles, which they themselves, upon their own topics, if they argue consistently, must allow to be solid and satisfactory. – David Hume

Whence it follows that God is absolutely perfect, since perfection is nothing but magnitude of positive reality, in the strict sense, setting aside the limits or bounds in things which are limited. – Gottfried Leibniz

Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist. – H. L. Mencken

Whenever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result. – William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s? – Friedrich Nietzsche

While science continually uncovers new mysteries, it has removed much of what was once regarded as deeply mysterious. Although we certainly do not know the exact nature of every component of the universe, the basic principles of physics seem to apply out to the farthest horizon visible to us today. – Victor J. Stenger

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. – Henri-Dominique Lacordaire

Who made God? Doesn’t matter. We are not responsible to a hypothetical maker of God but to our maker – God. – Walter Martin

Why am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don’t find them believable. – Barbara Smoker

Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not? – Epicurus

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d Of the Two Worlds so wisely – they are thrust Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn Are scattered, and their mouths are stopped with Dust. – Omar Khayyam

Will any one, save the most bigoted, contend, that it is not certain gain to humanity to spread unbelief in the terrible doctrine that eternal torment is the probable fate of the great majority of the human family? – Charles Bradlaugh

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. – Spencer Kassimir

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. – Steven Weinberg

With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher. – Thomas B. Macaulay

Within ten days thou wilt seem a god to those to whom thou art now a beast and an ape, if thou wilt return to thy principles and the worship of reason. – Marcus Aurelius

Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open. – Emma Goldman

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete. – Raoul Vaneigem

Would the atheist continue such, let him beware how he admits Love into his breast: for God will surely come along with him. – Richard B. Garnett

Years ago I was on television having a discussion with Billy Graham about atheism. He was saying, even if you’re right and I’m wrong, and there’s nothing after, I will have had a better life than you, because I do believe there was something. And I couldn’t argue with that, even though I wanted to. – Woody Allen

Yes, but we do not see the votive pictures of all those who suffered shipwreck and perished in the waves. – Diagoras of Melos

Yes, I do not like people saying that atheism is based on science, because it’s not. It’s an alien invasion of science. – Carl Woese

You can say the dirty words now, but there is no content – political satire is limited to small podiums and little soap boxes. – Tommy Smothers

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream. – Frank Zappa

You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe. – Carl Sagan

You can’t really be scientifically literate if you don’t understand evolution. And you can’t be an educated member of society if you don’t understand science. – Eugenie Scott

You cannot … transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word “God” to be its grammatical subject. – Antony Flew

You cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time. – Albert Mohler

You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe. – Carl Sagan

You do not need the Bible to justify love, but no better tool has been invented to justify hate. – Richard A. Weatherwax

You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion. – L. Ron Hubbard

“You don’t believe in God,” I said to Stein. “God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus.” “Santa Claus has had a tremendous influence, exist or not.” “For children.” “Lots of saints have died for God with a courage that’s hardly childish.” “That’s part of the horror. It’s all a fantasy. It’s all for nothing.” – Peter De Vries

You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better. – Daniel Dennett

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”. – Penn Jilette

You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t determine right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion. – Unknown

You explain right well, and you shew that you understand argument and are not a mere sophist since you accept that which cannot be denied. – Giordano Bruno

You get born and you try this and you don’t know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way. – William Faulkner

You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist. – Studs Terkel

You have the right to believe in what you want. I have the right to believe it’s ridiculous. – Ricky Gervais

You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time, but I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime. – Dan Barker

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. – Aldous Huxley

You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. – Margaret Atwood

You talked about hell as if you’re born and raised there. – Mark Gungor

You won’t be surprised that the Pew Research Center, in a survey released today, found that atheism is still the biggest political liability a candidate could have. – Hemant Mehta

You’ll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [….] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance. – Ayaan Hirsi Ali

You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend. – Richard Jeni

You’ve got to be digging it while it’s happening ’cause it just might be a one shot deal. – Frank Zappa

You’ve got your phenomenon on one hand. Concrete and knowable. On the other hand you’ve got the incomprehensible. You call it God, but to me, God or no, it remains just that, the unknowable. – Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess

Your dunce who can’t do his sums always has a taste for the infinite. – George Eliot

Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery. – Cormac McCarthy

Quotes From Wikiquote About Atheism

• If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god — in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague, wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague, wishy-washy Agnosticism — both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much.
  People will then often say, “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I would choose not to worship him anyway.)
  • Douglas Adams, in David Silverman (Winter 1998), “Life, the Universe, and Everything: An Interview with Douglas Adams”, The American Atheist37 (1), Archived from the original on 2007-12-28, later published in The Salmon of Doubt (2002).

• Government has no right to hurt a hair on the head of an Atheist for his Opinions. Let him have a care of his Practices.
  • John Adams to John Quincy Adams, June 16, 1816. Adams Papers (microfilm), reel 432, Library of Congress. James H. Hutson (ed.), The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 20.

• After having treated of these false Zealots in Religion, I cannot forbear mentioning … the Zealots in Atheism. One would fancy that these Men, tho’ they fall short, in every other Respect, of those who make a Profession of Religion, would at least outshine them in this Particular, and be exempt from that single Fault which seems to grow out of the impudent Fervours of Religion: But so it is, that Infidelity is propagated with as much Fierceness and Contention, Wrath and Indignation, as if the Safety of Mankind depended upon it.
  • Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No 185 (2 October 1711).

• I would fain ask one of these bigotted Infidels, supposing all the great Points of Atheism … were laid together and formed into a kind of Creed, according to the Opinions of the most celebrated Atheists; I say, supposing such a Creed as this were formed, and imposed upon any one People in the World, whether it would not require an infinitely greater Measure of Faith, than any Set of Articles which they so violently oppose.
  • Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No 185 (2 October 1711)
  • Often misquoted as “To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.”

• The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts:
  Those with brains, but no religion,
  And those with religion, but no brains.
  • Abu’l-`Ala’ al-Ma`arri (973–1058) (Arabic: أبو العلاء المعري), poet of Ma`arra, quoted in Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1989) by Amin Maalouf

• To you I’m an atheist; to God I’m the loyal opposition.
  • Woody Allen, Stardust Memories (1980).

• Some highly religious people are outraged that atheists would publicly declare their lack of faith. Accordingly many of the people who belong to atheist associations hide their beliefs from most others, knowing from experience it could affect their employment, membership in other clubs, and social connections. It reminds me of the reaction of many high RWAs when homosexuals began to come out: “Don’t these people know they’re supposed to be ashamed of what they are?” That in turn reminded me of the reaction of many White supremists to the civil rights movement: “Don’t these n—— know they’re inferior and should never be treated as our equals?” Fortunately, eventually, minorities can overcome these reactions.
  • Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians (2006), p. 160

• A great man is the unbelieving man; he is without spiritual sight or spiritual hearing; his glory is in understanding his own understanding. It is he who subdues the forest, tames the beasts of the field to service. He goes alone in the dark, unafraid. He follows no man’s course, but, searches for himself; the priests cannot make him believe, nor the angels of heaven; none can subdue his judgment. He says: why permit others even priests, to think for you? Stand on your own feet – be a man. Through his arm are tyrants and evil kings overthrown. Through him are doctrines and religions sifted to the bottom and the falsehood and evil in them cast aside. Who but the Creator could have created so great a man as the unbeliever?
  • Kenneth Arnold’s paraphrasing of a section from Oahspe: A New Bible by John Ballou Newbrough (1828–1891), p. 361, which he handed out as his “philosophy card”.

• I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.
  • Isaac Asimov, Free Inquiry, Vol. 2, Spring 1982, p. 9.

• God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.
  • Sir Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), 16, “Of Atheism”

• The Scripture saith, The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God; it is not said, The fool hath thought in his heart; so as he rather saith it by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it, or be persuaded of it; for none deny there is a God, but those for whom it maketh that there were no God. It appeareth in nothing more that atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man by this, that atheists will ever be talking of that their opinion, as if they fainted in it within themselves, and would be glad to be strengthened by the consent of others; nay more, you shall have atheists strive to get disciples, as it fareth with other sects; and, which is most of all, you shall have of them that will suffer for atheism, and not recant; whereas, if they did truly think that there were no such thing as God, why should they trouble themselves?
  • Sir Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), 16, “Of Atheism”.

• The causes of atheism are: divisions in religion, if they be many; for any one main division addeth zeal to both sides; but many divisions introduce atheism. Another is, scandal of priests; when it is come to what St Bernard saith, non est jam dicere, ut populus sic sacerdos; quia nec sic populus ut sacerdos [One cannot now say, the priest is as the people, for the truth is that the people are not so bad as the priest]. A third is, custom of profane scoffing in holy matters; which doth, by little and little, deface the reverence of religion.
  • Sir Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), 16, “Of Atheism”.

• They that deny a God, destroy man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts, by his body; and if he be not kin to God, by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.
  • Sir Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), 16, “Of Atheism”.

• Therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself, above human frailty.
  • Sir Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), 16, “Of Atheism”.

• Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy, in the minds of men.
  • Sir Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), 17, “Of Superstition”.

• Elizabeth had fallen victim to the greatest cosmic prank of all time, the flu that had swept across the world in the spring and summer of 1918, as if the bloody abattoir in the trenches hadn’t been evidence enough of humanity’s divine disfavor. That’s what Elizabeth had called it in the last letter he’d ever had from her: God’s judgment on a world gone mad. Garner had given up on God by then: he’d packed away the Bible Elizabeth had pressed upon him after a week in the field hospital, knowing that its paltry lies could bring him no comfort in the face of such horror, and it hadn’t. Not then, and not later, when he’d come home to face Elizabeth’s mute and barren grave.
  • Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud, The Crevasse in Paula Guran (ed.), New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, p. 105 (originally published in Lovecraft Unbound, 2009)

• Une societé d’athées inventerait aussitôt une religion.
  • Translation: A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
  • Honoré de Balzac, Le catéchisme social (c. 1840–1842). Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1933, p. 137.

• Experience is, in fever and anguish, the putting into question (to the test) of that which a man knows of being. Should he in this fever have any apprehension whatsoever, he cannot say: “I have seen God, the absolute, or the depths of the universe”; he can only say “that which I have seen eludes understanding”—and God, the absolute, the depths of the universe are nothing if they are not categories of the understanding.
  If I said decisively, “I have seen God,” that which I see would change. Instead of the inconceivable unknown—wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it—there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian, to which the unknown would be subjugated.
  • Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (1954), L. Boldt, trans. (1988), p. 4.

• A religion may be discerned in capitalism—that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.
  • Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion” (1921), translated by Rodney Livingstone in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1 (Harvard: 1996)

• Empty-brained triflers who have never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions, speak of atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires.
  • Annie Besant. In Annie Besant: An Autobiography, p. 89

• God is denied either because the world is so bad or because the world is so good.
  Original: Бога отрицают или потому, что мир так плох, или потому, что мир так хорош. [1]
  • Nikolai Berdyaev, Self-knowledge (Самопознание), 1940.

• Today’s secularists too often have very little accurate knowledge about religion, and even less desire to learn. This is problematic insofar as their sense of self is constructed in opposition to religion. Above all, the secularist is not a Jew, is not a Christian, not a Muslim, and so on. But is it intellectually responsible to define one’s identity against something that one does not understand?
  • Jacques Berlinerblau, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 1

• Knowledge of Karma gives the conviction that if … Virtue in distress, and vice in triumph Make atheists of mankind,(Dryden) it is only because mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that man is himself his own saviour and his own destroyer.
  • H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, p. 707 (1888)

• The light of Christianity has only served to show how much more hypocrisy and vice its teachings have begotten in the world since its advent, and how immensely superior were the ancients over us in every point of honor.. .The clergy, by teaching the helplessness of man, his utter dependence on Providence, and the doctrine of atonement, have crushed in their faithful followers every atom of self-reliance and self-respect. So true is this, that it is becoming an axiom that the most honorable men are to be found among atheists and the so-called “infidels”… Their system breeds atheism, nihilism, despair, and crime…
  • H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol. 2, p. 1104, (1877)

• There were no Atheists in those days of old; no disbelievers or materialists, in the modern sense of the word, as there were no bigoted detractors. He who judges the ancient philosophies by their external phraseology, and quotes from ancient writings sentences seemingly atheistical, is unfit to be trusted as a critic, for he is unable to penetrate into the inner sense of their metaphysics.
  • H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol. 2, p. 1278, (1877)

• There is no proselyter half so energetic as the hard-shelled atheist.
  • Heywood Broun, “A New Preface to an Old Story”, Broun’s Nutmeg, August 19, 1939.

• Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.
  • Heywood Broun, Collected Edition of Heywood Broun, compiled by Heywood Hale Broun. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1941, p. 26.

• I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.
  • John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, speaking to the Law Society of Upper Canada, (21 February 1936); published in Canadian Occasions (1940), p. 201.
  • Buchan’s source remains unknown. The witticism was repeated by Harry Emerson Fosdick in his On Being a Real Person (1943), ch. 1, with acknowledgement to Buchan, and was again used by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen in Look magazine (December 14, 1955). Credit for this line is therefore often wrongly given to Fosdick or to Sheen. Credit has also been given to the conductor Walter Damrosch (1862-1950).
  • This is a play on words commonly used in vagrancy statutes to define a vagrant or bum as having “no visible means of support” financially.

• Je suis toujours athée, gràce á Dieu.
  • Translation: I’m still an atheist, thank God.
  • Luis Buñuel, in Michèle Manceaux, “Luis Buñuel: athée gràce á Dieu”, L’Express, May 12, 1960, p. 41. See “On Luis Buñuel’s Aphorism ‘Thank God I’m an Atheist'”, Aphelis.
  • Seventeen years later, Buñuel expressed a different attitude in another interview: “I’m not a Christian, but I’m not an atheist either,” he says. “I’m weary of hearing that accidental old aphorism of mine “I’m not an atheist, thank God.” It’s outworn. Dead leaves. In 1951, I made a small film called ‘Mexican Bus Ride,’ about a village too poor to support a church and a priest. The place was serene, because no one suffered from guilt. It’s guilt we must escape, not God.” (Penelope Gilliat, “Long Live the Living!”, The New Yorker, December 5, 1977, p. 54) As Aphelis notes, “There’s most likely a small confusion when Buñuel quotes his own aphorism: instead of ‘I’m not an atheist, thank God’ — which doesn’t correspond [to] what he said in 1960 — one should read ‘I’m an atheist, thank God.’ That’s the aphorism Buñuel didn’t agree with anymore in 1977.”
  • Although the aphorism is associated with Buñuel, it did not originate with him. Samuel Butler (1835–1902) mentions in his Note-Books having heard of a man exclaiming “I am an atheist, thank God!” Even earlier, there is a rather similar aphorism by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799).

• We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if, in the moment of riot, and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilization amongst us, and among many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition, might take place of it.
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Paras. 150–174, Para. 152.

• Boldness formerly was not the character of Atheists as such. … But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.
  • Edmund Burke, “Thoughts on French Affairs” (December, 1791), in Three Memorials on French Affairs (1797), p. 53

• I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will then say that you’re not equally as patriotic if you’re not a religious person… I’ve never said that. I’ve never acted like that. I think that’s just the way it is.
  • George W. Bush, quoted in “President outlines role of his faith”, Washington Times, 12 January 2005.

• I have heard of a man exclaiming “I am an atheist, thank God!”
  • Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler: Selections arranged and edited by Henry Festing Jones (1912). New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1917, p. 315.

• Theist and Atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.
  • Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, p. 337.

• Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!. . . But He loves you!
  • George Carlin, “George Carlin On Religion” (1999).

• Mon chien est athée: il ne crois plus en moi.
  • Translation: My dog is an atheist: he no longer believes in me.
  • François Cavanna, L’almanach-agenda de Cavanna 1985 (1985). Paris: Belfond.

• Religion assures us that our afflictions shall have an end; she comforts us, she dries our tears, she promises us another life. On the contrary, in the abominable worship of atheism, human woes are the incense, death is the priest, a coffin the altar, and annihilation the Deity.
  • François-René de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity (1802), Part I, Book VI, Chapter V. Translated by Charles I. White, D.D. Baltimore: John Murphy, 1871, p. 202.

• Atheism can benefit no class of people; neither the unfortunate, whom it bereaves of hope, nor the prosperous, whose joys it renders insipid, nor the soldier, of whom it makes a coward, nor the woman whose beauty and sensibility it mars, nor the mother, who has a son to lose, nor the rulers of men, who have no surer pledge of the fidelity of their subjects than religion.
  • François-René de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity (1802), Part IV, Book VI, Chapter XII. Translated by Charles I. White, D.D. Baltimore: John Murphy, 1871, p. 665.

• Atheism is, I suppose, the supreme example of a simple faith.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Where All Roads Lead (1922).

• If there were not God, there would be no atheists.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Where All Roads Lead (1922).
  • Frequently misquoted, with “not”, which grammatically implies monotheism, being replaced by the vaguer “no”.

• Atheists aren’t angry because we’re selfish, or bitter, or joyless. Atheists are angry because we have compassion. Atheists are angry because we have a sense of justice. Atheists are angry because we see millions of people being terribly harmed by religion, and our hearts go out to them, and we feel motivated to do something about it. Atheists aren’t angry because there’s something wrong with us. Atheists are angry because there’s something right with us.
  • Greta Christina, speaking at Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC, 2012-03-24

• The habit of arguing in support of atheism, whether it be done from conviction or in pretense, is a wicked and impious practice.
  • Cicero, De Natura Deorum [On the Nature of the Gods] (45 BCE), vol. II.

•   bold with joy,
  Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place
  (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism,
  Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon,
  Drops her blue-fringed lids, and holds them close,
  And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven,
  Cries out, “Where is it?”
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Fears in Solitude” (April 1798), ll. 80–86.

• Most atheists, if they worship anything, worship something which really exists but is not worthy of worship.
  • Andrew Collier, in Transcendence: Critical Realism and God (2013), p. 84

• In order for capitalism to have a clear path, it needs to profane all that is sacred; there must be no limits to what is saleable. The totalitarian commercialism which is now the established Church throughout the West has come close to achieving this.
  • Andrew Collier, in Transcendence: Critical Realism and God (2013), p. 85

• I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked “What do you believe, doctor?”, I began searching for answers.
  • Francis Collins, a geneticist who led the U.S. government’s effort to decipher the human genome (DNA). cnn.com

• Atheism can never be an institution; … it can never be more than a destitution.
  • Robert Collyer, sermon reported in “Yesterday in the Pulpit”, The New York Times, March 6, 1882.

• It is hard to see how a great man can be an atheist. Without the sustaining influence of faith in a divine power we could have little faith in ourselves. We need to feel that behind us is intelligence and love. Doubters do not achieve; skeptics do not contribute; cynics do not create. Faith is the great motive power, and no man realizes his full possibilities unless he has the deep conviction that life is eternally important, and that his work, well done, is part of an unending plan.
  • Calvin Coolidge, “Telephone Remarks to a Group of Boy Scouts: ‘What it Means to Be a Boy Scout'”, July 25, 1924.

• Very often atheists themselves admit that they have no evidence of God’s absence, but they try to put a different spin on it. They’ll tell you, “No one can prove a universal negative” (like “There is no God”). They think this somehow excuses them from needing evidence against God’s existence. But not only is it false that you can’t prove a universal negative (all you have to do is show something is self-contradictory), but more importantly, this claim is really an admission that it’s impossible to prove atheism! Atheism involves a universal negative, you can’t prove a universal negative, therefore, atheism is unprovable. It turns out that it is the atheist who is believing a view for which there is and can be no evidence.
  • William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (2010), p. 149

• Even the Atheists … readily acknowledge it for an indubitable truth, that there must be something … which was never made or produced — and which therefore is the cause of those other things that are made, something … whose existence must needs be necessary…. Wherefore all the question now is, what is this … self-existent thing, which is the cause of all other things that are made. Now there are two grand opinions opposite to one another concerning it; for, first, some contend, that the only self-existent, unmade and incorruptible thing is senseless matter…. But because this is really the lowest and most imperfect of all beings, others on the contrary judge it reasonable, that the first principle and original of all things should be that, which is the most perfect … not senseless matter, but a perfect conscious understanding nature, or mind. And these are they, who are strictly and properly called Theists, who affirm, that a perfectly conscious understanding being, or mind, existing of itself from eternity, was the cause of all other things; and they, on the contrary, who derive all things from senseless matter, as the first original, and deny that there is any conscious understanding being self-existent and unmade, are those that are properly called Atheists.
  • Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Vol. I, London, 1678. New York: Gould & Newman, 1837, pp. 266–267.

• If this be not atheism, to acknowledge no other deity besides dead and senseless matter, then the word hath no signification.
  • Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Vol. I, London, 1678. New York: Gould & Newman, 1837, p. 425.

• There are no atheists in foxholes.
  • Father William Thomas Cummings, Field Sermon on Bataan (1942), quoted in I Saw the Fall of the Philippines by Carlos P. Romulo; also attributed to Lieut. Col. Warren J. Clear, “Bataan Defenders’ Suffering Related,” The Los Angeles Times, 13 April 1942, Pg. 3.

• Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
  • Richard Dawkins (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. ISBN 0393315703.

• It is often said, mainly by the ‘no-contests’, that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal’s wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
  • Richard Dawkins, speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, 1992-04-15, quoted in “A scientist’s case against God”. The Independent (London): p. 17. April 20, 1992.

• We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
  • Richard Dawkins (2006) The Root of All Evil television programme.

• Diderot paid a visit to the Russian Court at the invitation of the Empress. He conversed very freely, and gave the younger members of the Court circle a great deal of lively atheism. The Empress was much amused, but some of her councillors suggested that it might be desirable to check these expressions of doctrine. The Empress did not like to put a direct muzzle on her guest’s tongue, so the following plot was contrived. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician was in possession of an algebraic demonstration of the existence of God, and would give it him before all the Court, if he desired to hear it. Diderot gladly consented…. [T]he mathematician … was Euler. He advanced towards Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: Monsieur, (a+bⁿ)/n=x, donc Dieu existe; répondez! Diderot, to whom algebra was Hebrew, was embarrassed and disconcerted; while peals of laughter arose on all sides. He asked permission to return to France at once, which was granted.
  • Augustus De Morgan (1872). A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II, edited by David Eugene Smith. 2^nd edition, 1915, p. 4.

• At the end of Being and Nothingness, … Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being; and this totality of beings, in which they were effected, itself was linked up to itself, relating and appearing to itself, by means of the essential project of human-reality. What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure.
  • Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” Margins of Philosophy, tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie). p. 116.

• Laissez-nous donc tout confondre, amour, religion, génie, et le soleil et les parfums, et la musique et la poésie: il n’y a d’athéisme que dans la froideur, l’égoïsme, la bassesse.
  • Translation: Let us then mingle everything, love, religion, genius, with sunshine, perfume, music, and poetry. Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness.
  • Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, Corinne, or Italy (Corinne, ou l’Italie, 1807), Book X, Chapter V. Translated by Sylvia Raphael. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 273.

• “Skepticism is my nature. Freethought is my methodology. Agnosticism is my conclusion. Atheism is my opinion. Humanitarianism is my motivation.”
  • Jerry DeWitt of Recovering from Religion, on Twitter, April 2012.

• It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian ‘become an Atheist,’ but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pinned his faith in a negation. Such is our anguish of thirst!
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1869), translated by Eva Martin. Part IV, Chapter 7, p. 626

• The overwhelming majority of countries fail to respect the rights of atheists and freethinkers although they have signed U.N agreements to treat all citizens equally.
  • Sonja Eggerickx on the The Freethought Report 2013 report issued by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). As quoted in Atheists face death in 13 countries, global discrimination: study (December 10, 2013) by Robert Evans, Reuters

• The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
  • Albert Einstein, Gutkind Letter (3 January 1954), “Childish superstition: Einstein’s letter makes view of religion relatively clear”. The Guardian. 13 May 2008.

• Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
  • Albert Einstein, in “Religion and Science” in New York Times Magazine (9 November 1930).

• It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. … Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
  • Albert Einstein, in “Religion and Science” in New York Times Magazine (9 November 1930).

• In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.
  • Albert Einstein, quoted in Towards the Further Shore (1968) by Prince Hubertus Zu, p. 156.

• It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
  • Albert Einstein, quoted in Dukas, Helen (ed.) and Banesh Hoffman (ed.) (1981). Albert Einstein: The Human Side. Princeton University Press.

• Atheism should always be encouraged (i.e. rationalistic not emotional atheism) for the sake of the Faith.
  • T.S. Eliot, in a letter to Richard Aldington (24 February, 1927). The Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1926-1927 p. 424.

• Not the person who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them is truly impious. For the utterances of the multitude about the gods are not true preconceptions but false assumptions.
  • Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

• The Gods exist but they are not what the hoi polloi [the multitude] suppose them to be. He is not an infidel or atheist who denies the existence of Gods whom the multitude worship, but he is such who fastens on the Gods the opinions of the multitude.
  • Epicurus, quoted by H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol 3. (1888)

• If there are none [no gods], what need to toil?
  • Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis (c. 405 BCE), l. 1035. Translated by Edward P. Coleridge, 1891.
  • Translated by Charles R. Walker, 1958, as “If there are none, all our toil is without meaning.”
  • Translated by W. S. Merwin and George E. Dimock, Jr., 1978, as “If there are none, what does anything matter?”

• God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven’t figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don’t believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don’t think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
  • Richard Feynman, quoted in Davies, P. C. W.; J. Brown (1988). Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?. pp. pp. 208-209. ISBN 0-521-35741-1.

• God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.
  • Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the essence of religion. Transl. Ralph Manheim. New York: Harper & Row. 1967. p. 187. German: Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion. Leipzig: Wigand. 1851. p. 241.

• By positing God as unknowable, man excuses himself to what is still left of his religious conscience for his oblivion of God, his surrender to the world. He negates God in practice – his mind and his senses have been absorbed by the world – but he does not negate him in theory. He does not attack [God’s] existence; he leaves it intact. But this existence neither affects nor incommodes him, for it is only a negative existence, an existence without existence; it is an existence that contradicts itself – a being that, in view of its effects, is indistinguishable from non-being. The negation of determinate, positive predicates of the Divine Being is nothing else than the negation of religion, but one which still has an appearance of religion, so that it is not recognized as a negation – it is nothing but a subtle, sly atheism. The alleged religious horror of limiting God by determinate predicates is only the irreligious wish to forget all about God, to banish him from the mind.
  • Ludwig Feuerbach, Introduction to The Essence of Christianity (1843), Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 112

• A true atheist, that is, an atheist in the ordinary sense, is therefore he alone to whom the predicates of the Divine Being – for example, love, wisdom, and justice – are nothing, not he to whom only the subject of these predicates is nothing.
  • Ludwig Feuerbach, Introduction to The Essence of Christianity (1843), Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 119

• The atheist buses touring London are quite revealing. “There’s probably no God,” reads the hoarding. “Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” There you have it: what is stopping people enjoying life is apparently not war, famine, unemployment, murderous social inequality, or the uncertainty and unfairness that arises from a system of global exploitation, but a misplaced belief in God. Some materialism, that!
  • George Galloway, “What God means to me”, New Statesman, 9 April 2009.

• Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby. I’ve never been skiing. It’s my biggest hobby. I literally do it all the time.
  • Ricky Gervais, quoted in “Does God Exist? Ricky Gervais Takes Your Questions” (2010-10-22), Speakeasy, Wall Street Journal

• Atheism. There is not a single exalting and emancipating influence that does not in turn become inhibitory.
  • André Gide, Journals, January 13, 1929. Translated by Justin O’Brien.

• Whatever an atheist who denies God and the prophet is, one who murders a human is equivalent to that.
  • Fethullah Gülen, Interview with Nuriye Akman, Zaman, 23 March 2004.

• The question of the origin of the matter in the universe is no longer thought to be beyond the range of science — everything can be created from nothing…it is fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch.
  • Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (1998) ISBN 0201328402

• Settle it therefore in your minds, as a maxim never to be effaced or forgotten, that atheism is an inhuman, bloody, ferocious system, equally hostile to every useful restraint and to every virtuous affection; that, leaving nothing above us to excite awe, nor round us to awaken tenderness, it wages war with heaven and with earth: its first object is to dethrone God, its next to destroy man.
  • Rev. Robert Hall, sermon to Baptist meeting, Cambridge, quoted in Charles George Sommers, William R. Williams, Levi L. Hill, ed (1843). The Baptist Library: a republication of standard Baptist works. 2. p. 108.

• It is striking that the idea of a moral being without ordinary human limitations as the source of the moral demand survived in 20th century moral philosophy even in theories that do not posit the existence of such a being. … In R. B. Brandt’s Ethical Theory, there is a position for an ideal observer. In R. M. Hare, there is an archangel, with full command of the facts and of logic. In John Rawls, there is the person behind the veil of ignorance, who does not know what position she occupies in the situation for which she is prescribing. In all these last three cases, there is the postulation, as the source of the moral demand, of a being who is without ordinary human limitations, and it is plausible to suggest that these are all survivals of a worldview in which it was God who played this role.
  • John E. Hare, “Ethics and Religion: Two Kantian Arguments,” Philosophical Investigations, vol. 34, no. 2 (April 2011), pp. 158-159

• Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist.” We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.
  • Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), p. 51.

• Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason; because, though rational argument may take us to the edge of belief, we require a “leap of faith” to jump the chasm.
  • Sydney J. Harris, in “Atheists, Like Fundamentalists, are Dogmatic” in Pieces of Eight (1982).

• All thinking men are atheists.
  • Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929). Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 13.
  • The speaker is an Italian major who is baiting a priest.

• I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.
  • Katharine Hepburn, in Myrna Blyth, “Kate Talks Straight”, Ladies’ Home Journal, 1991-10-01, p. 215.

• Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.
  • Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001).

• I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case.
  • Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001).

• Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.
  • Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007).

• The universe, that is, the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body; and hath the dimensions of magnitude, namely length, breadth and depth:[…] consequently every part of the universe is body, and that which is not body is no part of the universe: and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently, nowhere. Nor does it follow from hence that spirits are nothing: for they have dimensions and are therefore really bodies; though that name in common speech be given to such bodies only as are visible or palpable; that is, that have some degree of opacity: but for spirits, they call them incorporeal, which is a name of more honour, and may therefore with more piety be attributed to God Himself; in whom we consider not what attribute expresseth best His nature, which is incomprehensible, but what best expresseth our desire to honour Him.
  • Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan Part IV, chapter iii (1651)
  • Misquoted in Jonathan Miller, Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (2004), as “The universe, the whole mass of all things that are, is corporeal, that is to say body, and hath dimensions of magnitude, length, breadth and depth. Every part of the universe is body and that which is not body is not part of the universe. And because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing. Consequently, nowhere.”

• The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
  • Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements (1951) Section 62.

• Tous les enfans ſont des athées; ils n’ont aucune idée de Dieu: ſont-ils donc criminels à cauſe de cette ignorance?
  • Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry (baron d’) (1772). Le Bon-Sens, ou, Idées Naturelles Opposées aux Idées Surnaturelles. London: Marc-Michel Rey. p. 22.
  • Translation: All children are Atheists; they have no idea of God. Are they then criminal on account of their ignorance?
    • Good Sense: or Natural Ideas Opposed to Ideas that are Supernatural. London: Richard Carlile. 1826. p. 12.
  • Translation: All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God. Are they then criminal on account of their ignorance?
    • Good Sense without God: or Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas. London: W. Stewart. c. 1900.

• Ce n’eſt qu’en écartant ſes nuages & ſes phantômes que nous découvrirons les ſources du vrai, de la raiſon, de la morale, & les motifs réels qui doivent nous porter à la vertu.
  • Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry (baron d’) (1772). Le Bon-Sens, ou, Idées Naturelles Opposées aux Idées Surnaturelles. London: Marc-Michel Rey. p. 315.
  • Translation: It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover the sources of Truth, Reason and Morality, and the real motives that should incline us to Virtue.
    • Good Sense: or Natural Ideas Opposed to Ideas that are Supernatural. London: Richard Carlile. 1826. p. 169.
  • Translation: It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason and Morality.
    • Good Sense without God: or Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas. London: W. Stewart. c. 1900.

• The only religion of Albania is Albanianism.
  • Enver Hoxha, promoting atheism, as quoted in The New York Times Book Review, Vol. 2 (1977); this is actually derived from a secularly nationalistic slogan “The true religion of Albania is Albanianism”, originally intended to ease the strife of sectarian divisions while being respectful of them, which was created by the Roman Catholic Pashko Vasa, in the form: “The religion of Albania is Albanianism” — as quoted in Catholicism and Politics in Communist Societies (1990) by Sabrina P. Ramet, p. 236.

• Atheist: Any man who does not believe in himself.
  • Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927). New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., p. 187.

• There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.
  • Victor Hugo, Les Misérables Volume II, Book 7 “Parenthesis”, Chapter vi (1862).

• His [God’s] power we allow is infinite: whatever he wills is executed: but neither man nor any other animal is happy: therefore he does not will their happiness…. Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?
  • David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Part X (1789).

• I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel.
  • Thomas Henry Huxley, letter to Charles Kingsley, May 6, 1863.

• The watch argument was Paley’s greatest effort. A man finds a watch and it is so wonderful that he concludes that it must have had a maker. He finds the maker and he is so much more wonderful than the watch that he says he must have had a maker. Then he finds God, the maker of the man, and he is so much more wonderful than the man that he could not have had a maker. This is what the lawyers call a departure in pleading.

According to Paley there can be no design without a designer—but there can be a designer without a design. The wonder of the watch suggested the watchmaker, and the wonder of the watchmaker, suggested the creator, and the wonder of the creator demonstrated that he was not created—but was uncaused and eternal.

• Robert G. Ingersoll, “Why I Am Agnostic” (1896), 8.

• For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which we may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight — as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfullnesses, are needed to redeem: and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheism and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted.
  • William James, The Will to Believe (1897), p. 61.

• The legitimate powers of government extend to only such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg.
  • Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), Query XVII.

• 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”.
  • Jillette, Penn (16 August 2011), God, No! : Signs you may already be an atheist and other magical tales, New York: Simon & Schuster, p. xiii, LCCPN6231.R4 J55 2011, ISBN 978-1451610369

• Atheism is the only real hope against terrorism.

• Penn Jillette [2]

• Here falling Houses thunder on your Head,
  And here a female Atheist talks you dead.
  • Samuel Johnson, “London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal” (1738), ll. 17–18.

• It has long been observed, that an atheist has no just reason for endeavouring conversions; and yet none harass those minds which they can influence, with more importunity of solicitation to adopt their opinions. In proportion as they doubt the truth of their own doctrines, they are desirous to gain the attestation of another understanding: and industriously labour to win a proselyte, and eagerly catch at the slightest pretence to dignify their sect with a distinguished name.
  • Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Sir Thomas Browne, Kt., M.D.” (1756), written as a preface for an edition of Browne’s Christian Morals (1716).

• Godlessness is a kind of shameless wickedness which bids defiance to the punishments that the idea of God inspires in us.
  • Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics as transcribed by Georg Ludwig Collins (Cambridge University Press: 1997), p. 111.

• The Koran! well, come put me to the test—
  Lovely old book in hideous error drest—
  Believe me, I can quote the Koran too,
  The unbeliever knows his Koran best.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.
  • Omar Khayyám, Rubaiyat, translation by Richard Le Gallienne.

• If you have a sloppy religion you get a sloppy atheism.
  • Ronald Knox, quoted in Penelope Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers (1977), Ch. IV.

• If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded — or even if it suspects — that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe.
  • Irving Kristol, “The Future of American Jewry”, Commentary (August 1991).

• Religious leaders must face the reality that here in Nigeria and elsewhere around the world, millions of people are leaving Christianity and Islam. While we are busy building walls of division with the blocks of prejudice, our members are becoming atheists but we prefer to pretend that we do not see this. We cannot pretend not to hear the footsteps of our faithful who are marching away into atheism and secularism. No threats can stop this, but dialogue can open our hearts.

• • ~ Matthew Hassan Kukah, T0 mend a broken nation: the Easter metaphor, premiumtimesng.com (@ Diocese of Sokoto, April 17th, 2022)

• Un dévot est celui qui, sous un roi athée, serait athée.
  • Translation: A man who parades his piety is one who, under an atheist king, would be an atheist.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle (1688), Ch. XIII “De la mode”.
• I had no need of that hypothesis.
  • Pierre-Simon Laplace, in response to Napoleon’s objection that Laplace had omitted God from Celestial Mechanics (Boyer 1968, p. 538)
  • There is no contemporary source for this version of Laplace’s interaction with Napoleon. It is not mentioned in the only eye-witness account of the event (see Daniel Johnson, 2007), and Hervé Faye was told by François Arago that Laplace had sought his help in a failed attempt to get the story removed from an unauthorized biography (Faye, Sur l’origine du monde, Paris, 1884, pp. 109–111). Scholars believe the hypothesis Laplace was referring to was Newton’s notion that God had to intervene periodically to prevent secular perturbations from destroying the solar system. By demonstrating mathematically that the solar system was stable, Laplace eliminated any need for that hypothesis. (See, besides Faye and Johnson, Cajori’s History of Mathematics, 1991 edn, p. 262, and Hawking, 1999).

• Hesiod, the oldest author to have written on theogony, asserted that the gods and men are created by unknown natural forces. We can therefore consider paganism as a superstitious form of atheism.
  • Pierre-Simon Laplace, “On Causality” (manuscript), in Roger Hahn, Pierre-Simon Laplace,1749–1827: A Determined Scientist. Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 232.

• Atheist ist nur der, der sich auch aus dem Atheismus keinen Gott macht.
  • Translation: The only atheist is someone who does not make a God even out of atheism itself.
  • Gabriel Lauber, Denken verdirbt den Charakter: Alle Aphorismen (1984). Munich: Carl Hauser Verlag, p. 37.

• Für diejenigen, die schon in den Atheismus hineingeboren wurden, ist es ein Glaube wie jeder andere. Ein wirklicher Atheist ist nur ein ehemaliger Gläubiger.
  • Translation: For those who are born into atheism, it’s a faith like any other. The only real atheist is an ex-believer.
  • Gabriel Lauber, Denken verdirbt den Charakter (1984), p. 39.

• As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say to hell with it.
  • Henry Drummond character in Inherit the Wind (1960 film), written by Jerome Lawrence (play), Robert E. Lee (play), Nedrick Young, and Harold Jacob Smith

• Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardor of a religious sentiment, and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult.
  • Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), Book I, Chapter IV, p. 67.

• Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on their view, exist…
  • Variant: “Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist.”
  • C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940), Chapter VI.

• … und ich dank es dem lieben Gott tausendmal, daß er mich zum Atheisten hat werden lassen.
  • Translation: And I thank the Lord a thousand times that he let me become an atheist.
  • Georg Christoph Lichtenberg as quoted in Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions. Reconstructed from his Aphorisms and Reflections by J. P. Stern. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1959, p. 249. Original source: Entsprechend SB (= Sudelbücher) 3. 403.

• Lastly, Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God. Promises, Covenants, and Oaths, which are the Bonds of Humane Society, can have no hold upon an Atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. Besides also, those that by their Atheism undermine and destroy all Religion, can have no pretence of Religion whereupon to challenge the Privilege of a Toleration.
  • John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689-10-03).

• 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.
  • H. P. Lovecraft letter to Robert E. Howard (August 16, 1932), in Selected Letters 1932-1934 (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1976), p. 57.

• Having insured the moderation of a fanatical rabble, by giving out among them the savage war-whoop of atheism, he (Edmund Burke) already fancies himself in full march to Paris.
  • James Mackintosh, Vindiciæ Gallicæ: Defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers against the Accusations of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (London, 1791), “Introduction”

• 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.
  • Bill Maher, Real Time With Bill Maher (HBO) (2012-02-03), quoted in “Maher’s New Rule: Atheism And Religion Are ‘Not Two Sides Of The Same Coin’”, Mediaite, 3 February 2012, retrieved on 2012-09-07
• But 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.
  • Bill Maher, Real Time With Bill Maher (HBO) (2012-02-03).

• Największą wiarę mają ateiści: wierzą, że Boga nie ma.
  • Translation: The atheists have the greatest faith: they believe that God does not exist.
  • Andrzej Majewski, Aphorisms: Magnum in Parvo (2000). Warsaw: KiW.

• The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
  • Brennan Manning, as quoted in “The Ragamuffin Legacy” (16 April 2013), by Ben Simpson, Relevant Magazine

• People like Dawkins are the public face of atheism. And that public face is one that is defensively and irrationally sexist. It’s not only turning women away from atheism, it’s discrediting the idea that atheists are actually people who argue from a position of rationality. How can they be, when they cling to the ancient, irrational tradition of treating women like they aren’t quite as human as men?
  • Amanda Marcotte quoted by journalist Kimberly Winston, The Washington Post (November 18, 2014) [3]

• Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment.
  • Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason (1952), Chapter 8. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 106.

• Some people say God died during the Partition in 1947. He may have died in 1971 during the war. Or he may have died yesterday here in Pondicherry in an orphanage. That’s what some people say, Pi. When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day, ‘Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?’ God never came. It wasn’t God who saved me—it was medicine. Reason is my prophet and it tells me that as a watch stops, so we die. It’s the end. If the watch doesn’t work properly, it must be fixed here and now by us. One day we will take hold of the means of production and there will be justice on earth.
  • Yann Martel (2001). Life of Pi. p. 34. ISBN 9780151008117.

• I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!” — and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.
  • Yann Martel (2001). Life of Pi. pp. 80-81. ISBN 9780151008117.

• 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.
  • John McCarthy, “Agnostics and Atheists” (1992-07-23), rec.arts.books

• The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have… whether you like it or not.
  • Josh McDowell Kumar, Anugrah (2011-07-16). “Apologist Josh McDowell: Internet the Greatest Threat to Christians”. Christian Post. Retrieved on 2011-10-21.

• Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 44

• The philosopher … is well able to understand religion as one of the expressions of the central phenomenon of consciousness. But the example of Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy (Chicago: 1963), p. 45

• No hay arte ateo. Aunque no ames el Creador, lo afirmarás creando a su semejanza.
  • Translation: There is no atheist art. Even if you do not love the Creator, you will affirm him, creating in his likeness.
  • Gabriela Mistral, “Decálogo del artista” (“Decalogue of the Artist”), Desolación (1922).

• In the unlikely event of losing Pascal’s Wager, I intend to saunter in to Judgement Day with a bookshelf full of grievances, a flaming sword of my own devising, and a serious attitude problem.
  • Rick Moen, “TAN: Mormons” 1997-10-11, rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan

• I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked with her (George Eliot) once in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May, and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men — the words God, Immortality, Duty — pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing Law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a sibyl’s in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fate. And when we stood at length and parted amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls — on a Sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God.
  • Frederic William Henry Myers, “George Eliot”, Century Magazine, November 1881.

• Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowells) & just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom & the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, & within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle & a pupil before the Lens all of them so truly shaped & fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eys of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These & such like considerations always have & ever will prevail with man kind to believe that there is a being who made all things & has all things in his power & who is therfore to be feared.
  • Sir Isaac Newton in “A short Schem of the true Religion” (post-1710).

• You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood more rigorously, the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), as translated by Walter Kaufmann, § 357

• Your petitioners are Atheists and they define their beliefs as follows. 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 a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
  • Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Petition for Relief (1959), Murray v. Curlett, quoted in “Why I am an Atheist” (1966).

• He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him).
  • George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Chapter XXX

• Athéisme, force de l’esprit, mais jusq’à un certain degré seulement.
  • Translation: Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1669), 225

• Objection des athées: “Mais nous n’avons nulle lumière.”
  • Translation: Objection of atheists: “But we have no light.”
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1699; transaltion 1869), 228
  • In another pensée Pascal writes: “There is enough light for those who only desire to believe, and enough obscurity for those of a contrary disposition.” (430).

• No one is so much alone in the universe as a denier of God. With an orphaned heart, which has lost the greatest of fathers, he stands mourning by the immeasurable corpse of nature, no longer moved and sustained by the Spirit of the universe.
  • Jean Paul, Blumen- Frucht- und Dornenstücke, oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten Siebenkäs (1796), translated as E. H. Noel (tr.), Flower, fruit and thorn pieces: or, The married life, death, and wedding of the advocate of the poor Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs (1845), p. 276.

• On second thought, maybe the atheist cannot find God, for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman.
  • Laurence J. Peter (1977). Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Times. p. 44.
  • Sometimes misattributed to Francis Thompson, whose quote “An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident” Peter was commenting on.

• He who tries to flee from God takes refuge in himself.
  • Philo, Legum allegoriarum (Allegorical Interpretation), Book III, 29 (1st century).

• By definition, that is, by its very stance, atheism denies or ignores the creatureliness and thus also the provisionality [Entwurfscharakter] of the world and man — with the consequence that atheists must explain man’s moral failure as, at most, inappropriate behavior, or perhaps as an error of judgment, or, even more tepidly, as an inability to adapt to society.
  • Josef Pieper, The Concept of Sin (1977), translated by Edward T. Oakes, S.J. South Bend, Indiana: St Augustine’s Press, 2001, p. 39.

• If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward then, brother, that person is a piece of shit. And I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible. You gotta get together and tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day? What’s that say about your reality?
  • “Rust” Cohle, as interpreted by Matthew McConaughey in True Detective, “The Locked Room”, written by Nic Pizzolatto.

• If religion has no intrinsic content and value, and is only a fraud, then its interest to scholarship should be marginal. Yet research institutes publishing houses, journals and thousands of PhDs and other scholars are engagd in nothing other than a systematic lifetime study of religion and its refutation. But if millions of roubles and man-hours of Soviet scholars are spent on the study of religion, then the subject is worthy of scholarly pursuit, and must be in itself a scholarly discipline, not simply a fraud or opiate. In other words, its study required an objective, open-ended approach. Yet Soviet scholars are oblidged to approach the suject with a predetermined conclusion: whatever they discover about religion and the believers, their conclusion must be negative, it must lead to only one single definition of religion, namely that it is a fraud and a delusion. In these circumstances all Soviet atheistic scholarship becomes nothing but support for the main thesis. This obligatory thesis, the condemnation of religion as fraud and believers as vicctims of fraud perpetuated by a clergy who are either clever swindlers or fools, has to be made in such a way as to appear as fresh and new as possible.
  • Dimitry V. Pospielovsky, “A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer”, Vol 3: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies, St Martin’s Press, New York (1987), pp. xvi-xvii.

• A textbook, Foundation of Scientific Atheism, defined atheism as:
  ‘a system of materialistic scientifically based views, rejecting any faith in go (or gods), in supernatural powers and any religion whatsoever…Atheism…is one of the essential and most important aspects of materialistic philosophy.’
  Religion in the same book is described as ‘a form of social consciousness… a perverse, fantastic reflection of reality in the consciousness of men’. This, of course, is straight out of Engels. All religious philosophy is described as a class philosophy. Hence Plato, for instance, is said to ‘represent the interest of the slave-owning aristocracy’. But then it has to be shown that atheism, has always been a major school of thought wherefore moralists, such as Lao-Tse, and pantheists, such as Spinoza are presented, or rather misrepresented, as atheists.
  • Dimitry V. Pospielovsky, “A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer”, Vol 3: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies, St Martin’s Press, New York (1987), pp. xvii-xviii.

• Atheists put on a false courage and alacrity in the midst of their darkness and apprehensions, like children who, when they fear to go in the dark, will sing for fear.
  • Alexander Pope, “Thoughts on Various Subjects” (1727), Miscellanies in Verse and Prose, Vol. II.

• The believer in God has to account for one thing, the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist, however, has to account for the existence of everything else.
  • Dennis Prager paraphrasing Milton Steinberg in a debate (2008) with Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. A slightly different version (‘must’ twice instead of ‘has to’ and ‘evil’ instead of ‘unjust suffering’) is found in Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, The Nine Questions People ask about Judaism (1981), Question 1.

• God can stand being told by Professor Ayer and Marghanita Laski that He does not exist.
  • J. B. Priestley, The Listener (1 July 1965).

• Il n’est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
  Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun.
  • There are no supreme saviors
    Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.
  • Eugène Edine Pottier, The Internationale (1871)

• I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion — I am fighting for reason.
  • Ayn Rand (1963), in Michael S. Berliner, ed., Letters of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1995), p. 606.

• There is no ‘law’ in heaven or earth that man must needs obey! Take what you can, and all you can; and take it while you – may.
  Let not the Jew-born Christ ideal unnerve you from the fight. You have no ‘rights’ except the rights you win by – might.
  There is no justice, right, nor wrong; no truth, no good, no evil. There is no ‘man’s immortal soul,’ no fiery, fearsome devil.
  There is no ‘heaven of glory:’ No! – no ‘hell where sinners roast.’ There is no ‘God the Father,’ No! – no Son, no ‘Holy Ghost.’
  The world is no Nirvāna where joy forever flows. It is a grewsome butcher shop where dead ‘lambs’ hang in rows.
  Man is the most ferocious of all the beasts of prey. He rageth round the mountains, to love, and feast, and – slay.
  He sails the stormy oceans, he gallops o’er the plains, and sucks the very marrow-bones of captives held in – chains.
  Death endeth all for every man, – for every ‘son of thunder;’ Then be a lion (not a ‘lamb’) and – don’t be trampled under.
  • Ragnar Redbeard (probably Arthur Desmond), Might is Right: The Survival of the Fittest (1890).

• Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.
  • Wilhelm Reich, in James Lee Christian Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, (2005), p. 556.

• I contend 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.
  • Stephen F. Roberts. See his “Brief History of the Quote” or Alex Colias, “No Theist is Atheist Towards Anything”.
  • Misattributed to Stephen Henry Roberts (1901–71) by Sam Harris in his article “10 Myths — and 10 Truths — about Atheism”, Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2006.

• Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a Great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular. The people, the unfortunate, will always applaud me; I shall find detractors only among the rich and the guilty.
  • Maximilien Robespierre, “Address to the Jacobin Club” (November 21, 1793), in Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1910–1967), vol. 10, p. 195.
  • Slavoj Žižek writes that for Robespierre atheism was “the ideology of the cynical-hedonistic aristocrats who had lost all sense of historical mission” (In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2008, p. 499).

• In this actual world a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoff at or ignore their religious needs, is a community on the rapid down grade. It is true that occasional individuals or families may have nothing to do with church or with religious practices and observances and yet maintain the highest standard of refined ethical obligation. But this does not affect the case in the world as it now is, any more than the fact that exceptional men and women under exceptional conditions have disregarded the marriage tie without moral harm to themselves interferes with the larger fact that such disregard if at all common means the complete moral disintegration of the body politic
  • Theodore Roosevelt, The Foes of Our Own Household (1917).

• I’m not an atheist because I just can’t be that certain.
  • Mike Rosen in The Mike Rosen Show on news/talk radio station 850 KOA (December 19, 2007, 10:56 am).

• Stripped of the opportunities for satire which organised religion cannot help but supply, the case for atheism has very little substance.
  • Bill Saunders, “Sunlight on dungheaps”, Independent on Sunday, 10 June 2001.

• Atheism is an old idea, probably as old as humanity, and it has always justified its case by its superior understanding of nature. Unfortunately, as scientific knowledge has become more sophisticated over the past three centuries, all the scientific ideas which support atheism have evaporated into murky puddles of water, when they have not actually dried up entirely. It is now clear that the Universe has not always been here, it has a beginning. Everything is not made of indestructible atoms. Life is not caused by sunlight on dungheaps, and so on.
  • Bill Saunders, “Sunlight on dungheaps”, Independent On Sunday, 10 June 2001.

• I have concluded, through careful empirical analysis and much thought, that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought, giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I’m capable of. I believe they know everything that I do and think and they still love me, and I have concluded after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me.
  • Adam Savage, speaking at Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC, 2012-03-24

• You don’t have to believe in atheism, because atheism is based on REASON.
  • Manfred F. Schieder, in “Rebirth of Reason”

• Nee, ich trinke keinen Tee, ich bin Atheist.
  • Translation: Nah, I don’t drink tea, I’m an atheist.
  • Helge Schneider, Jazzclub — Der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm (2004), a film he wrote, directed, acted in and composed the music for.

• The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
  • George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion (1913), Preface: The Importance of Hell in the Salvation Scheme

• “The reality of God is dead.” Here we come to an important point. These are real atheists who say that. This kind of atheism is not born of the intellect. It is born of the will. They will that God does not exist.
  • Fulton J. Sheen, “The Death of God” (1966). The quote begins at around 12 min 10 sec.
  • In support of his assertion, Sheen goes on to quote Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, the fictional atheist Kirillov from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils, and an unnamed American writer.

• There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
  • Ariane Sherine, in her Atheist Bus Campaign (2008).

• Atheists in foxholes, some say they are myths,
  Creations of the mind who just don’t exist.
  Yet, they answered the call to defend, with great pride.
  With reason their watchword, they bled and they died.
  • Alice Shiver, “Atheists-in-Foxholes” monument, dedicated on 4 July 1999.

• Nationwide, the nonreligious population is both the fastest growing, and the most despised. I ask you all, why is that? Why are we hated, when we endorse no violence, incite no racism or hatred, and demand nothing more than equal treatment? I’ll tell you why: It’s easy to hate what you don’t know, and the theists don’t know us. Well, actually, they do know us, but they don’t know they know us, because most atheists in this country are closeted. Bigotry is born of ignorance, but ignorance can be cured. If the atheists weren’t closeted, it would be harder to hate us, because in the end, you can’t hate what you already love.
  • David Silverman, speaking at Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC, 2012-03-24

• What Jupiter? Do not trifle. There is no Jupiter.
  • Socrates (character) in Aristophanes’ The Clouds (5th c. BCE, tr. Hickie 1853, vol. 1, Perseus).

• In the first place, it is clear that by self-existence we especially mean, an existence independent of any other — not produced by any other: the assertion of self-existence is simply an indirect denial of creation…. Self-existence, therefore, necessarily means existence without a beginning; and to form a conception of self-existence is to form a conception of existence without a beginning. Now by no mental effort can we do this…. To this let us add, that even were self-existence conceivable, it would not in any sense be an explanation of the Universe…. Thus the Atheistic theory is not only absolutely unthinkable, but, even if it were thinkable, would not be a solution. The assertion that the Universe is self-existent does not really carry us a step beyond the cognition of its present existence; and so leaves us with a mere restatement of the mystery.
  • Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862). London: Williams and Norgate, pp. 32–33.

• As was proved at the outset of the argument, self-existence is rigorously inconceivable; and this holds true whatever be the nature of the object of which it is predicated…. Thus these three different suppositions [atheism, pantheism, theism] respecting the origin of things, verbally intelligible though they are, and severally seeming to their respective adherents quite rational, turn out, when critically examined to be literally unthinkable. It is not a question of probability, or credibility, but of conceivability. Experiment proves that the elements of these hypotheses cannot even be put together in consciousness; and we can entertain them only as we entertain such pseud-ideas as a square fluid and a moral substance — only by abstaining from the endeavour to render them into actual thoughts. Or, reverting to our original mode of statement, we may say that they severally involve symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate and illusive kind. Differing so widely as they seem to do, the atheistic, the pantheistic, and the theistic hypotheses contain the same ultimate element. It is impossible to avoid making the assumption of self-existence somewhere; and whether that assumption be made nakedly, or under complicated disguises, it is equally vicious, equally unthinkable.
  • Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862), pp. 36–37.

• Passing over the consideration of credibility, and confining ourselves to that of conceivability, we see that Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism, when rigorously analyzed, severally prove to be absolutely unthinkable.
  • Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862), pp. 44–45.

• Leaving out the accompanying moral code, which is in all cases a supplementary growth, a religious creed is definable as a theory of original causation…. [E]ven that which is commonly regarded as the negation of all Religion — even positive Atheism, comes within the definition; for it, too, in asserting the self-existence of Space, Matter, and Motion, which it regards as adequate causes of every appearance, propounds an à priori theory from which it holds the facts to be deducible.
  • Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862), p. 45.

• You know, they are fooling us, there is no God.
  • Joseph Stalin, to a fellow student while studying to become a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church; quoted in Landmarks in the Life of Stalin (1942) by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, p. 9.

• We had many interesting conversations and he introduced me to his young wife. He confided to me that he had married her because she was a fanatical atheist. Atheism was the main topic of their conversations. Such fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion. The truly convinced atheist does not emphasize his atheism. He does not talk about it and is careful to avoid blasphemies.
  The man was interested in dreams and each morning he related several of his dreams. They were full of religious symbols. I was cautious not to reveal to him the meaning of his dreams; such off-hand analyses are always dangerous…. The banker did not want to be disturbed in his supposed atheism…. His atheism was a reaction formation established upon an ineradicable religious belief.
  • Wilhelm Stekel, “Autobiography” [serialized], American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. II (1948); The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel: The Life Story of a Pioneer Psychoanalyst (1950), translated and edited by E. A. Gutheil, New York: Liveright. See full extract in “Wilhelm Stekel on Atheism and Telepathy”. The man. Stekel’s fellow-passenger on a transatlantic liner, was a prominent New York banker on his way to Europe to attend an international banking conference.
  • Often quoted as “Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.”

• Nothing enlarges more the gulf of atheism, than that wide passage, which lies between the faith and lives of men pretending to be Christians.
  • Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacræ (1663). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1797, p. x.

• Atheists keep up their scoffing at the higher being, which was also honoured under the name of the ‘highest’ or être suprême, and trample in the dust one ‘proof of his existence’ after another, without noticing that they themselves, out of need for a higher being, only annihilate the old to make room for a new.
  • Max Stirner, The Ego and its Own (1845). Cambridge 1995, p. 38-39

• Including, I suppose, death. … It’s an interesting view of atheism, as a sort of crutch for those who can’t bear the reality of God.
  • Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (1972).

• As an atheist, I believe that all life is unspeakably precious, because it’s only here for a brief moment, a flare against the dark, and then it’s gone forever. No afterlives, no second chances, no backsies. So there can be nothing crueler than the abuse, destruction or wanton taking of a life. It is a crime no less than burning the Mona Lisa, for there is always just one of each. So I cannot forgive.
  • J. Michael Straczynski, Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 : “Passing Through Gethsemane : jms speaks” (13 July (2004).

• The thing framed says that nothing framed it; the tongue never made itself to speak, and yet talks against him that did; saying that which is made, is, and that which made it, is not. But this folly is infinite as hell, as much without light or bound as the chaos or the primitive nothing.
  • Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), Discourses on Various Subjects, Sermon XX, p. 376.
  • Misquoted in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, p. 18, as “The thing formed says that nothing formed it; and that which is made is, while that which made it is not! The folly is infinite.”

• “Is there a God?” I said. “I mean, are you in touch, telepathically, with any kind of God?”
  “No. I’m not in touch with anything like that. As far as I know, there is no God.”
  “Oh,” I said.
  “It doesn’t bother you,” the voice said. “You may think it does; but it doesn’t. You’re really on your own. You’ve been learning that.”
  • Walter Tevis, Mockingbird (1980), ISBN 978-1-4072-3376-5, p. 251

• An Atheist is a man who believes himself an accident.
  • Francis Thompson, “Paganism: Old and New”, A Renegade Poet and Other Essays (1910), p. 47.

• When men live as if there were no God, it becomes expedient for them that there should be none; and then they endeavour to persuade themselves so, and will be glad to find arguments to fortify themselves in this persuasion.
  • John Tillotson, “The Folly of Scoffing at Religion” (1671), in Works, Volume I, Edinburgh, 1748, p. 58.

• In former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages.
  • Leo Tolstoy, Golenishtchev in Anna Karenina (1877), C. Garnett, trans. (New York: 2003), Part 5, Chapter 9, p. 434

• What men deny is not God, but some preposterous idol of the imagination.
  • George Tyrrell, Autobiography (1912), p. 71.

• The parasites which live in the intestines of higher animals, feeding upon the nutritive juices which these animals supply, do not need either to see or hear, and therefore for them the visible and audible world does not exist. And if they possessed a certain degree of consciousness and took account of the fact that the animal at whose expense they live believed in a world of sight and hearing, they would perhaps deem such belief to be due merely to the extravagance of its imagination. And similarly there are social parasites, as Mr. A. J. Balfour admirably observes, who, receiving from the society in which they live the motives of their moral conduct, deny that belief in God and the other life is a necessary foundation for good conduct and for a tolerable life, society having prepared for them the spiritual nutriment by which they live. An isolated individual can endure life and live it well and even heroically without in any sort believing either in the immortality of the soul or in God, but he lives the life of a spiritual parasite.
  • Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (1913)

• Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?
  • John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989), ch. 4.

• For entirely savage races,… one cannot count them among either the atheists or the theists. Asking them their belief would be like asking them if they are for Aristotle or Democritus: they know nothing; they are not atheists any more than they are Peripatetics.
  • Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), “Atheism”, Section I

• Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent persons, and superstition is the vice of fools.
  • Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), “Atheism”, Section I.

• The atheists are for the most part impudent and misguided scholars who reason badly, and who, not being able to understand the creation, the origin of evil and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypotheses of the eternity of things and of inevitability.
  • Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), “Atheism”, Section II

• I would not wish to have to deal with an atheist prince, who would find it in his interest to have me ground to powder in a mortar: I should be quite certain of being ground to powder. If I were a sovereign, I would not wish to have to deal with atheist courtiers, whose interest it would be to poison me: I should have to be taking antidotes every day. It is therefore absolutely necessary for princes and for peoples, that the idea of a Supreme Being, creator, ruler, rewarder, revenger, shall be deeply engraved in people’s minds.
  • Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), “Atheism”, Section II.

• The Caffres, the Hottentots, the Topinambous, and many other small nations, have no God: they neither deny nor affirm; they have never heard speak of Him; tell them that there is a God: they will believe it easily; tell them that everything happens through the nature of things: they will believe you equally. To claim that they are atheists is to make the same imputation as if one said they are anti-Cartesian; they are neither for nor against Descartes. They are real children; a child is neither atheist nor deist, he is nothing.
  • Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), “Atheism”, Section II.

• What conclusion shall we draw from all this? That atheism is a very pernicious monster in those who govern; that it is also pernicious in the persons around statesmen …; that, if it is not so deadly as fanaticism, it is nearly always fatal to virtue.
  • Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), “Atheism”, Section II.

• If there are atheists, whom must one blame if not the mercenary tyrants of souls, who, making us revolt against their knaveries, force a few weak minds to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?
  • Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), “Atheism”, Section II.

• Men fattened on our substance cry to us: “Be persuaded that a she-ass has spoken (Balaam’s ass); believe that a fish has swallowed a man and has given him up at the end of three days safe and sound on the shore (Jonah); have no doubt that the God of the universe ordered one Jewish prophet to eat excrement (Ezekiel), and another prophet to buy two whores and to make with them sons of whoredom (Hosea).” These are the very words that the God of truth and purity has been made to utter…. These inconceivable absurdities revolt weak and rash minds, as well as wise and resolute minds. They say: “Our masters paint God to us as the most insensate and the most barbarous of all beings; therefore there is no God;” but they should say: “Our masters attribute to God their absurdities and their furies; therefore God is the contrary of what they proclaim, therefore God is as wise and good as they make him out mad and wicked.” It is thus that wise men account for things.
  • Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), “Atheism”, Section II.

• Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. What is most repellent in [Holbach’s] The System of Nature — after the recipe for making eels from flour — is the audacity with which it decides that there is no God, without even having tried to prove the impossibility. There is some eloquence in the book: but much more rant, and no sort of proof.
  • Voltaire, letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia (28 November 1770), in S. G. Tallentyre (ed.), Voltaire in His Letters. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919, p. 232.

• The study of anthropology … confirmed my atheism, which was the faith of my fathers anyway. Religions were exhibited and studied as the Rube Goldberg inventions I’d always thought they were.
  • Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “Interviews: Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64”, The Paris Review (Spring 1977) No. 69.

• The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, “There’s a Chaplain who never visited the front.”
  • Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Hocus Pocus (1990); 1997 reprint, page 180.

• If we don’t play God, who will?
  • James D. Watson (1996), in The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities, [4] New York; Simon and Schuster.

• One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love — to serve the loved one without his knowing it — is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.
  • Simone Weil, Last Notebook (1942).

• In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled — that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist.
  • Simone Weil, Last Notebook (1942).

• No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. Consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater — unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
  • Simone Weil, Last Notebook (1942).

• There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (La Pesanteur et la grâce, 1947). Routledge Classics, 2002, p. 114.

• Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be atheistic with the part of me which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.
  • Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947), Routledge Classics, 2002, p. 115; also in George A. Panichas (ed.), The Simone Weil Reader (1977). New York: David McKay, p. 417.

• As in the West, the word God, taken in its usual meaning, signifies a Person, men whose attention, faith and love are almost exclusively concentrated on the impersonal aspect of God can actually believe themselves and declare themselves to be atheists, even though supernatural love inhabits their souls.
  • Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest (Lettre a un religieux, 1951), translated by A. F. Wills, Section 12. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953, pp. 35–36
  • Often misquoted as “An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.”

• Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not.
  • Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (1993), pp. 257-258. See also positiveatheism.org’s Weinberg quotations.

• The aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.
  • Steven Weinberg, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (2001), p. 242.

• As a born-again atheist, I now knew exactly what satisfactions were on offer. For the first time in my 38 years I was at one with my own generation…. If I bumped into Richard Dawkins (an old colleague from Oxford days) or had dinner in Washington with Christopher Hitchens …, I did not have to feel out on a limb. Hitchens was excited to meet a new convert to his non-creed and put me through a catechism before uncorking some stupendous claret. “So – absolutely no God?” “Nope,” I was able to say with Moonie-zeal. “No future life, nothing ‘out there’?” “No,” I obediently replied. At last! I could join in the creed shared by so many (most?) of my intelligent contemporaries in the Western world – that men and women are purely material beings (whatever that is supposed to mean), that “this is all there is” (ditto), that God, Jesus and religion are a load of baloney: and worse than that, the cause of much (no, come on, let yourself go), most (why stint yourself – go for it, man), all the trouble in the world, from Jerusalem to Belfast, from Washington to Islamabad.
  • A. N. Wilson, “Why I believe again”, New Statesman, 2 April 2009.

• Given your premises, you will have to come up with a different reason for rejecting Christ as you do. But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.
  • Douglas Wilson to Christopher Hitchens, “Is Christianity Good for the World?” (part 5), Christianity Today (2007-05-25)
  • Often paraphrased as “There are two tenets of atheism: One, there is no God. Two, I hate him.”

• Atheism is speculatively as unfounded as theism, and practically can only spring from bad motives.
  • Chauncey Wright, letter to Francis Allingwood Abbot (October 28, 1867). Letters of Chauncey Wright, ed. James Bradley Thayer. Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson, 1878, p. 133
  • Wright had earlier written to Abbot that “about what we really know nothing we ought not to affirm or deny anything” (August 13, 1867). Letters of Chauncey Wright, p. 109.

• By night an atheist half believes in God.
  • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1743), “Night Two”, p. 292.

• Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.
  • Slavoj Žižek in Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (2012), translated by Ellen Elias Bursac. New York: Seven Stories Press.