Bertrand Russell Atheism Quotations

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell.

Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself.

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.

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

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

I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.

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

Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless.

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.

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.

[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.