Atheism Quotes

#1. He who dishonors himself [by lying about his opinions] for the sake of being honored by others will find that two mistakes have been made - one by himself, and the other, by the people. #Quote by Robert Green Ingersoll

#2. Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, 'Where is it?' #Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#3. The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force. #Quote by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

#4. 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. #Quote by George Carlin

#5. Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth. #Quote by Ayn Rand

#6. 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. #Quote by Robert M. Price

#7. That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans. #Quote by C.S. Lewis

#8. There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who, when danger is pressing in, will not acknowledge the divine power. #Quote by Plato

#9. All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else. #Quote by Anthony Burgess

#10. So secular humanism is not a religion in any sense, legal or otherwise, and neither is atheism. Religion must include a professed conviction, and mythical characters hardly counts as that. So atheism alone is no more a religion than health is a disease. One may as well argue over which brand of car pedestrians drive. #Quote by Aron Ra

#11. The United States Constitutional Convention, except for three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary. #Quote by Benjamin Franklin

#12. I told my kids I just want three words on my tombstone, if I have one. I'll probably be cremated. One is "woman." I'm very comfortable in that role. I've loved being a woman, I've loved being a mother, I've loved being a grandmother. I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That's me. #Quote by Madalyn Murray O'Hair

#13. Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right. #Quote by Laurens Van Der Post

#14. Even those, who some time ago believed all the stories about God, that is who believed that divine power exists, have now come to be so ashamed of their own belief, hiding their ignorance, they are now struggling hard to prove those stories as scientifically true. #Quote by Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

#15. Christ preaches only servitude and dependence ... True Christians are made to be slaves. #Quote by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#16. 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. #Quote by Ludwig Feuerbach

#17. Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. #Quote by John Milton

#18. Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility." #Quote by H.L. Mencken

#19. 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. #Quote by Giordano Bruno

#20. Scriptures may have grains of historical truth within them, but there is also ample hyperbole, speculation and mythology. #Quote by Armin Navabi

#21. Today's zealots are mostly those pretending to be anti-religious. #Quote by Criss Jami

#22. Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag. #Quote by Mark Twain

#23. ...the naive forms of Christian moral motivation - bare threats of hell and the bribery of heaven - stunt moral growth by ensuring believers remain emotional children, never achieving the cognitive moral development of adults. Psychologists have established that mature adults are moral not because of bare threats and bribes (that stage of moral development typifies children, not adults), but because they care about the effects their behavior has on themselves and others. #Quote by Richard C. Carrier

#24. Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship. #Quote by Wendy Kaminer

#25. I don't think you can just choose to believe in God. You either do or you don't, and no matter what camp you're in, it would take something life-changing to truly lead you into the other one. #Quote by Paula Stokes

#26. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free
inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between
Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,
concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-
Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall
resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#27. God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist. #Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley

#28. The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural,Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible. #Quote by Dan Barker

#29. I despise those shallow religious comics. Dennis the Menace, for instance, is the most shallow. When they show him praying - I just can't stand that sort of thing, talking to God about some cutesy thing that he'd done during the day. I don't think Hank Ketcham has any deep knowledge of things like that. #Quote by Charles M. Schulz

#30. The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics. #Quote by Marvin Perry

#31. A magician wandered along the beach, but no one needed him. #Quote by Douglas Adams

#32. Every established fact which is too bad to admit of any other defence is always presented to us as an injunction of religion. #Quote by John Stuart Mill

#33. Leave!' Hazel Motes cried. 'Go ahead and leave! The truth don't matter to you. Listen,' he said, pointing his finger at the rest of them, 'the truth don't matter to you. If Jesus had redeemed you, what difference would it make to you? You wouldn't do nothing about it. Your faces wouldn't move, neither this way nor that, and if it was three crosses there and Him hung on the middle one, that wouldn't mean no more to you and me than the other two. Listen here. What you need is something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don't have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that's all man, without blood to waste, and it needs one that don't look like any other man so you'll look at him. Give me such a jesus, you people. Give me such a new jesus and you'll see how far the Church Without Christ can go! #Quote by Flannery O'Connor

#34. Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.
[Letter to William Bradford Jr. April 1 1774] #Quote by James Madison

#35. Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable. #Quote by H.L. Mencken

#36. 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. #Quote by Penn Jillette

#37. Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity. #Quote by Stephen Greenblatt

#38. The Universe is the most extraordinary masterpiece ever constructed by nobody. #Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton

#39. 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. #Quote by Victor J. Stenger

#40. Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid ... research and discussions ... with regard to the doctrine of evolution. #Quote by Pope Pius XII

#41. I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people. #Quote by Mother Teresa

#42. Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live. #Quote by Bertrand Russell

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

#44. 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. #Quote by John Lydon

#45. Again, I hear almost everyday from atheists who write off religion as primitive, premodern nonsense. I summon Aquinas, Augustine, Paul [of Tarsus], Teresa of Avila, Joseph Ratzinger, and Edith Stein-in all their intellectual rigor-as allies in the the struggle against this dismissive atheism. #Quote by Robert Barron

#46. Every time the sky cries, it is because an angel has died ... Lucifer started a war in Heaven, and it persists even now. So if God cannot keep his angels under control, what makes you believe that he can keep humanity under control? #Quote by Lionel Suggs

#47. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety. #Quote by E. O. Wilson

#48. You can say the dirty words now, but there is no content - political satire is limited to small podiums and little soap boxes. #Quote by Tommy Smothers

#49. Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked.
With your own voice,' he said. #Quote by Erica Jong

#50. Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout. #Quote by Andy Rooney

#51. In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross. #Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

#52. There lies the weaknesss of positivists and professional atheists who are elated because they feel that they have not only successfully rid the world of gods but "bared the miracles." (That is, explained the miracles. - ed.) Oddly enough, we must be satisfied to acknowledge the "miracle" without there being any legitimate way for us to approach it . I am forced to add that just to keep you from thinking that -weakened by age-I have fallen prey to the clergy ... #Quote by Albert Einstein

#53. The radical defect in Christianity is that it tried to win the world by a bribe, and it has become a nullity. #Quote by Ouida

#54. Only those who have lived all their lives under the dark clouds of vague, undefined fears can appreciate the joy of a doubting soul suddenly born into the kingdom of reason and free thought. #Quote by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#55. If the creation of the Universe was left up to a atheist, we would still have nothing. #Quote by Josko J. Sestan

#56. It was Christianity which first painted the devil on the worlds walls; It was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to it's deepest roots; but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exists. #Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

#57. 1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Studies have now shown that inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of the subject.

3. Myth: Atheists are immoral.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominantly non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by de #Quote by Matthew S. McCormick

#58. Jesus would pray to himself and cry. I often do the same. #Quote by Carl-John X. Veraja

#59. Self talk and self prayer: When you audible the first and correctly interpret, the white coats correct you in a nuthouse. When you audible the second and misinterpret, the dinner coats swear you to an oath in the White House. Does this make you nuts too? Then outfit your sanity seeking political asylum at my house. #Quote by Brian Spellman

#60. Ethical teaching is weakened if it is tied up with dogmas that will not bear examination. #Quote by Margaret E. Knight

#61. If this is the best God can do, I'm not impressed. #Quote by George Carlin

#62. [ ... ] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting. #Quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky

#63. The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests. #Quote by George Meredith

#64. The difference between God an I is that everyday, I too deal with people who don't love but I have no desire to kill them or wish them to suffer for all of eternity for it #Quote by Anonymous

#65. That stern and rockbound coast felt like an amateur when it saw how grim the puritans that landed on it were. #Quote by Don Marquis

#66. All Chaos was once yer kingdom; verily, held ye dominion over the entire Pentaverse, but today ye was sore afraid in dark coners, nooks, and sink holes. #Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

#67. Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life. #Quote by Cyril Connolly

#68. We are all tricked. We think that religion tells us what to believe; but it doesn't, it is telling us what not to believe. Atheism is not the absence of religion; atheism is the most undiluted form of religion: it tells us not to believe in anything at all. Atheists hate the religious and the religious hate atheists, but this is only a deception! We are all deceived! There is only one boat and we are all in it! All at the same time! #Quote by C. JoyBell C.

#69. The old faiths light their candles all about, but burly Truth comes by and puts them out. #Quote by Lizette Woodworth Reese

#70. When I finally applied logic to Religion that was when I quit paying after life insurance and quit going #Quote by Stanley Victor Paskavich

#71. Revealed religion has no weight with me. #Quote by Benjamin Franklin

#72. In short, the majority of men "without religion" still hold to pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies, There is nothing surprising in this, for, as we saw, profane man is the descendant of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history - that is, the behavior of his religious ancestors which has made him what he is today. This is all the more true because a great part of his existence is fed by impulses that come to him from the depths of his being, from the zone that has been called the "unconscious," A purely rational man is an abstraction; he is never found in real life. Every human being is made up at once of his conscious activity and his irrational experiences. #Quote by Mircea Eliade

#73. I have ever regarded the freedom of religious opinions and worship as equally belonging to every sect. #Quote by James Madison

#74. If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable. #Quote by John Shelby Spong

#75. Dr. King used Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and to passive resistance. #Quote by Al Sharpton

#76. Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness ... Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation. #Quote by Ouida

#77. Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. #Quote by Kurt Vonnegut

#78. It was about that time [415 BCE] that the poet Diagoras of Melos was proscribed for atheism, he having declared that the non-punishment of a certain act of iniquity proved that there were no gods. It has been surmised, with some reason, that the iniquity in question was the slaughter of the Melians by the Athenians in 416 BCE, and the Athenian resentment in that case was personal and political rather than religious. For some time after 415 the Athenian courts made strenuous efforts to punish every discoverable case of impiety; and parodies of the Eleusinian mysteries were alleged against Alcibiades and others. Diagoras, who was further charged with divulging the Eleusinian and other mysteries, and with making firewood of an image of Herakles, telling the god thus to perform his thirteenth labour by cooking turnips, became thenceforth one of the proverbial atheists of the ancient world, and a reward of a silver talent was offered for killing him, and of two talents for his capture alive; despite which he seems to have escaped. #Quote by J.M. Robertson

#79. Some Arrows slay but whom they strike - But this slew all but him - Who so appareled his Escape - Too trackless for a Tomb #Quote by Emily Dickinson

#80. Let me make this radiantly clear - if you believe in spirits and the metaphysical world, your biology will create the illusion that these things are real. #Quote by Christopher Zzenn Loren

#81. The vulgar modern argument used against religion, and lately against common decency, would be absolutely fatal to any idea of liberty. It is perpetually said that because there are a hundred religions claiming to be true, it is therefore impossible that one of them should really be true. The argument would appear on the face of it to be illogical, if anyone nowadays troubled about logic. It would be as reasonable to say that because some people thought the earth was flat, and others (rather less incorrectly) imagined it was round, and because anybody is free to say that it is triangular or hexagonal, or a rhomboid, therefore it has no shape at all; or its shape can never be discovered; and, anyhow, modern science must be wrong in saying it is an oblate spheroid. The world must be some shape, and it must be that shape and no other; and it is not self-evident that nobody can possibly hit on the right one. What so obviously applies to the material shape of the world equally applies to the moral shape of the universe. The man who describes it may not be right, but it is no argument against his rightness that a number of other people must be wrong. #Quote by G.K. Chesterton

#82. By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind. #Quote by Richard P. Feynman

#83. 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. #Quote by Ron Barrier

#84. That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#85. 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. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! #Quote by George Carlin

#86. New Atheism simplicity is the byproduct of collective groupthink, and the internalization of self-congratulatory jingoistic clichés and generalizations. They know because they know, and there's no reasoning with someone who knows."
- The New Atheist Threat: The Dangerous Rise of Secular Extremists #Quote by C.J. Werleman

#87. At least this is the way I see it. I am a physicist. I also consider myself a Christian. As I try to understand the nature of our universe in these two modes of thinking, I see many commonalities and crossovers between science and religion. It seems logical that in the long run the two will even converge. #Quote by Charles Hard Townes

#88. [Jehovah is] certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty. #Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

#89. If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [ ... ], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too. #Quote by Salman Rushdie

#90. 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. #Quote by Charles Bradlaugh

#91. Alright, let's admit it, we Jews killed Christ - but it was only for three days. #Quote by Lenny Bruce

#92. When socialism comes into power, the Roman Church will advocate socialism with the same vigor [with which] it is now favoring feudalism and slavery. #Quote by August Bebel

#93. Philosophy may serve as the bridge between theology and science. All atheism is a philosophy, but not all philosophy is atheism. Philosophy ('love of wisdom') is simply a tool depending on how one uses it, and in some cases, logically understanding the nature of God and existence. #Quote by Criss Jami

#94. 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?' #Quote by Isidor Isaac Rabi

#95. Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds. #Quote by Neal Stephenson

#96. How do you know it's not true if you don't believe in it? #Quote by Pete Hautman

#97. I've always been suspicious of TV, I've always found music and video to be an unhappy marriage. #Quote by Keith Richards

#98. Revelation is God's way of telling humanity that he is afraid of their possibility; the possibility of one day being able to surpass even him. #Quote by Lionel Suggs

#99. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought. #Quote by Mark Twain

#100. I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam
good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system. #Quote by Gore Vidal

#101. 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. #Quote by Michael Newdow

#102. 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. #Quote by Stephen Hawking

#103. I want to live my life taking the risk - all the time - that I don't know anything like-enough yet, that I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom ... Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#104. If you are offended by reading views that disagree with yours, then yes, you will be offended. However, it is not gratuitously offensive, it simply puts an argument, and if your views are strong enough, as I believe they are, you will be able to defend your views. You will not say, "Oh, it's offensive, it's offensive." You will say "No, you are wrong here and you are wrong here," and that's what you should do. #Quote by Richard Dawkins

#105. It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. #Quote by Richard Dawkins

#106. But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, 'most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.' You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. it's just their defencelessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden- the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.
"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with e #Quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#107. A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion. #Quote by Honore De Balzac

#108. I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill. #Quote by Thomas A. Edison

#109. The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms. #Quote by John B. S. Haldane

#110. 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. #Quote by Lucretius

#111. I whispered, under my breath, an atheist's prayer ... whatever the hell that is. #Quote by William Jiang

#112. 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. #Quote by David Hume

#113. 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. #Quote by Arthur Conan Doyle

#114. Let's Look at Subjective Religious Experiences This Way:
What if ten thousand people went up to a mountain top, saw something, and then they all disagreed with what they saw, even people who largely agreed with each other? Even with this best possible analogy to subjective religious experiences we would still have a reason to think the lack of oxygen caused them all to hallucinate. #Quote by John W. Loftus

#115. There was no plan for us. We are a misspelling being erased by Death in order for the story of total chaos to continue. #Quote by Keith Buckley

#116. The son of God is the same as the son of man; the son of man is the same as the son of God. God, the father, is the same as Christ, the son; Christ, the son, is the same as God, the father. This language may appear confused to unbelievers, but Christians will readily understand it. #Quote by Voltaire

#117. 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. #Quote by William Rainey Harper

#118. Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. #Quote by Ambrose Bierce

#119. So much enthusiasm about the non-existence of God is somewhat bewildering, as no one appears to be nearly as excited about a similar absence of belief in unicorns, vampires, werewolves, astrology, nation-building, or the Labor Theory of Value. Nor is anyone dedicating much of their time to writing books and giving speeches at universities and conferences with the avowed goal of convincing others not to believe in them either. #Quote by Vox Day

#120. When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in this stuff? #Quote by A.C. Grayling

#121. Atheism is a cruel long term business, and I have gone through it to the end. #Quote by Jean-Paul Sartre

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

#123. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth. #Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

#124. The God Delusion is a rather disorganized collage of arguments and pastiche of assertions which cannot be said to advance those ideas or enhance their critical edge, but rather harnesses them in the service of the advocacy of atheism. #Quote by Alister E. McGrath

#125. I believe religious indoctrination is child abuse. #Quote by Christopher Zzenn Loren

#126. We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them. #Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

#127. It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it. #Quote by James Boswell

#128. 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. #Quote by A.J. Ayer

#129. I am not afraid of the priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries, of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering, without being able to give me one moment of pain. #Quote by Thomas Jefferson

#130. Yes, I do not like people saying that atheism is based on science, because it's not. It's an alien invasion of science. #Quote by Carl Woese

#131. There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author. #Quote by Marquis De Sade

#132. Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent. #Quote by N. T. Wright

#133. 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? #Quote by Tom Shroder

#134. I do not mean that there is anything intellectually contemptible in being formally "godless"
that is, in rejecting all religious dogmas and in refusing to believe in the God those dogmas describe.
One might very well conclude, for instance, that the world contains far too much misery for the pious idea of a good, loving, and just God to be taken very seriously, and that any alleged creator of the universe in which children suffer and die hardly deserves our devotion.
It is an affective
not a strictly logical
position to hold, but it is an intelligible one, with a certain sublime moral purity to it; I myself find it deeply compelling; and it is entirely up to each person to judge whether he or she finds any particular religion's answer to the "problem of evil" either adequate or credible. #Quote by David Bentley Hart

#135. Gouverneur Morris had often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than did he himself. #Quote by Thomas Jefferson

#136. There is so much wrong with the world. (tanta stat praedita culpa) #Quote by Lucretius

#137. It is pointless and impossible to maintain a modern ideology based on inaccurate memories of a dead and distant past. #Quote by Yasin Al Hafiz

#138. This being busied with thoughts of immortality is for the noble classes and especially for women with nothing to do. A solid person, though, someone who already intends to be something worthy here, and who therefore has to strive daily, has to struggle and work, gives the world to come a rest. #Quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#139. My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission. #Quote by Emile M. Cioran

#140. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. #Quote by Douglas Adams

#141. When a mere girl, my mother offered me a dollar if I would read the Bible through; ... despairing of reconciling many of its absurd statements with even my childish philosophy, ... I became a sceptic, doubter, and unbeliever, long ere the 'Good Book' was ended. #Quote by Elmina Drake Slenker

#142. A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol #Quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#143. Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but … only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human[.] #Quote by Ludwig Feuerbach

#144. 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. #Quote by Ambrose Bierce

#145. 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? #Quote by Douglas Adams

#146. 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. #Quote by George W Truett

#147. All worry is atheism, because it is a want of trust in God. #Quote by Fulton J. Sheen

#148. If one thing frightens people, it is that so much happens, on earth and out in space, the reasons for which seem somehow to escape them, and they fill in the gap by putting it down to the gods. #Quote by Lucretius

#149. Until I was twenty I was sure there was a being who could see everything I did and who didn't like most of it. He seemed to care about minute aspects of my life, like on what day of the week I ate a piece of meat. And yet, he let earthquakes and mudslides take out whole communities, apparently ignoring the saints among them who ate their meat on the assigned days. Eventually, I realized that I didn't believe there was such a being. It didn't seem reasonable. And I assumed that I was an atheist.

As I understood the word, it meant that I was someone who didn't believe in a God; I was without a God. I didn't broadcast this in public because I noticed that people who do believe in a god get upset to hear that others don't. (Why this is so is one of the most pressing of human questions, and I wish a few of the bright people in this conversation would try to answer it through research.)

But, slowly I realized that in the popular mind the word atheist was coming to mean something more - a statement that there couldn't be a God. God was, in this formulation, not possible, and this was something that could be proved. But I had been changed by eleven years of interviewing six or seven hundred scientists around the world on the television program Scientific American Frontiers. And that change was reflected in how I would now identify myself.

The most striking thing about the scientists I met was their complete dedication to evidence. It reminded me of th #Quote by Alan Alda

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

#151. I am convinced that all our attempts to change the letter of the law and to reeducate people have been, and are, merely band-aid solutions for a fatal hemorrhage. The system will never change because our starting point is flawed. The secular view of man can neither give the grandeur that God alone can give, nor can it see the evil within the human heart that God alone can reveal and cure, for atheism implicitly denudes each individual of the grand image God has imprinted upon His creation. #Quote by Ravi Zacharias

#152. Love has no value in the absence of truth. #Quote by C.J. Anderson

#153. It was man who first made men believe in gods. #Quote by Critias

#154. I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life. #Quote by Salman Rushdie

#155. The believer claims to know, not just that God exists, but that his most detailed wishes are not merely knowable but actually known. Since religion drew its first breath when the species lived in utter ignorance and considerable fear, I hope I may be forgiven for declining to believe that another human being can tell me what to do, in the most intimate details of my life and mind, and to further dictate these terms as if acting as proxy for a supernatural entity. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#156. You know, they are fooling us, there is no God. #Quote by Joseph Stalin

#157. I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one's response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves. #Quote by David Bentley Hart

#158. 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. #Quote by Pierre Bayle

#159. Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile. #Quote by Noam Chomsky

#160. People thank God when God no longer sits on the throne. The angels descend down to deliver miracles because they are trying to maintain the face of God. In the end, you must place your hopes and prayers with the angels. It has become quite sad in Heaven without its puppet master. #Quote by Lionel Suggs

#161. 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. #Quote by Barbara Smoker

#162. [When asked 'Given the chance, how would you change the world?']
It's a big question. Getting rid of religion would be a good start, wouldn't it? It seems to be causing a lot of havoc. #Quote by Bjork

#163. Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any Manner contrary to their conscience. #Quote by James Madison

#164. There is no "religious language" or "scientific language". There is rather the international notation of mathematics and logic; and English, French, Spanish and the like. In short, "religious discourse" and "scientific discourse" are part of the same overall conceptual structure. Moreover, in that conceptual structure there is a large amount of discourse, which is neither religious nor scientific, that is constantly being utilized by both the religious man and the scientist when they make religious and scientific claims. In short, they share a number of key categories. #Quote by Kai Nielsen

#165. You may only get this one life – but lived free of submissive reverence – that is still a thing of rampant beauty. #Quote by Trevor Treharne

#166. 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. #Quote by Edwin Gaustad

#167. You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#168. In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived. #Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley

#169. When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. #Quote by Anais Nin

#170. The advent of militant atheism marks a reaction - a lurid but natural reaction - to the violence of the Islamic world. #Quote by David Berlinski

#171. We need strong Christians who can persevere against hardship, who can sustain hope through tragedy, who can lift others by their example and their compassion, and who can consistently overcome temptations. We need strong Christians who can make important things happen by their faith and who can defend the truth of Jesus Christ against moral relativism and militant atheism. What is the source of such moral and spiritual power, and how do we obtain it? The source is God. Our access to that power is through our covenants with Him. #Quote by D. Todd Christofferson

#172. Of the 417 commandments, only a single one of the 417 has found ministerial obedience; multiply and replenish the earth. To it sinner & saint, scholar & ignoramus, Christian & savage are alike loyal. #Quote by Mark Twain

#173. 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. #Quote by Emily Dickinson

#174. The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted. #Quote by Henry Steele Commager

#175. There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause, there is no First Cause. … This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized. #Quote by Robert Jastrow

#176. Fear paints pictures of ghosts and hangs them in the gallery of ignorance. #Quote by Robert Green Ingersoll

#177. I really don't put it down. I never have. It's just that I analyze it and look at it from a very rational point of view. I don't see it as coming from God and say that at a certain point the Holy Spirit zaps you with a super whammy on the head and you've "gone for tongues" and there is it. Tongues is a process that people build up to. Then, as you start to do something, just as when you practice the scales on the piano, you get better at it. #Quote by Marjoe Gortner

#178. Nothing draws people more quickly away from religion than an open mind. #Quote by Hemant Mehta

#179. There either is a god or there is not; there is a 'design' or not. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#180. The entire Jesus concept, that human sacrifice should be the substratum of a moral religion of love, strikes me as incongruous. God condemned us and Jesus saved us, and they are actually the same being? Christianity is the idea that you are so abhorrent that God had to kill himself. He had to embody the human form and send himself on a bizarre suicide mission just to revoke the disgustingness of the humans he created. I balk at suggestions that these ideas dictate to the concepts of morality and love. #Quote by Trevor Treharne

#181. Nothing in any religious teachings goes beyond Humanism, unless you add the supernatural...Make believe is the only difference between being human and being religious. #Quote by Travis Culliton

#182. Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books. #Quote by Hemant Mehta

#183. A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible. #Quote by Anthony Burgess

#184. Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people. #Quote by Voltaire

#185. 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. #Quote by Bill Hicks

#186. Religion fosters servility and solipsism. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#187. 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. #Quote by Francis Collins

#188. In theology we must consider the predominance of authority; in philosophy the predominance of reason. #Quote by Johannes Kepler

#189. I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don't buy the argument that, well, it's harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what's true. #Quote by Richard Dawkins

#190. There is this blessing, that while life has but one entrance, it has exits innumerable, and as I choose the house in which I live, the ship in which I will sail, so will I choose the time and manner of my death. #Quote by Seneca The Younger

#191. I'm 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. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#192. Every religion seems like a fantasy to outsiders, but as holy truth to those of the faith. #Quote by Isaac Asimov

#193. It can do truth no service to blind the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith. #Quote by John Stuart Mill

#194. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things. #Quote by G.K. Chesterton

#195. I can't believe in the God of my Fathers. If there is one Mind which understands all things, it will comprehend me in my unbelief. I don't know whose hand hung Hesperus in the sky, and fixed the Dog Star, and scattered the shining dust of Heaven, and fired the sun, and froze the darkness between the lonely worlds that spin in space. #Quote by Gerald Kersh

#196. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. #Quote by Richard Dawkins

#197. Sing then the core of dark and absolute oblivion where the soul at last is lost in utter peace. #Quote by D.H. Lawrence

#198. If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god. #Quote by Napoleon Bonaparte

#199. Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved. #Quote by Baruch Spinoza

#200. All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets,unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing. #Quote by D.H. Lawrence