Atheism Quotations | Page 10

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.

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.

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?

The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself.

When they have opened a gap in the ... wall of separation between the Garden of the Church and the wildernes of the world, God hath ever ... made his Garden a Wildernesse.

Do not make gods in your own images.

The spirit of the times can haunt even the atheists.

Many who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lamppost.

Puritans should wear fig leaves on their eyes.

You cannot play the Song of Freedom on an instrument of oppression.

How many prison years in the years since Christ!

To god what is God's, to Caesar what is Caesar's. To humans - what?

What do I believe? I believe in God, if he exists.

Burning stakes do not lighten the darkness.

There are parodies of non-existent things.

"Oh to be old again," said a young corpse.

An error becomes an error when born as truth.

Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty.

Let him who is without guilt cast the first stone. A trap. Because then he will be no longer without guilt.

There is a dispute about the existence of God. Both sides try to hide that they killed Him - even before He came into being.

Witches admitted their relations with the devil. Our blood boils - how could they be forced to admit this when there is no devil. But reason tells us this is not true. The devil does exist and was in fact the inquisitor.

The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.

Do I believe? God only knows.

It is when we are in misery that we revere the gods; the prosperous seldom approach the altar.

Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe.

Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.

If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature.

Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.

On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.

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.

I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!

[C]reationists [and] other religious enthusiasts [are], in many parts of the world ..., the most dangerous adversaries of science.

This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition

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

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

On Earth, Discord! A gloomy Heaven above, opening her jealous gates to the nineteen thousandth part of the tithe of mankind! And below, an inescapable & inexorable Hell, expanding its leviathan jaws for the vast residue of Mortals!

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

Who knows most, doubts most.

'Tis well averred, A scientific faith's absurd.

The candid incline to surmise of late that the Christian faith proves false.

I love to consider an Infidel, whether distinguished by the title of deist, atheist, or free-thinker.

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.

Atheism is spreading like wildfire.

Without God there would be no freedom to believe what you want.

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

No fear... we are never sure of anything... fear never prevents [bad things] from happening.

If any religion allows the persecution of the people of different faiths, if any religion keeps women in slavery, if any religion keeps people in ignorance, then I can't accept that religion.

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.

Atheism: the religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority.

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

With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.

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.

The best men are the least suspicious of fraudulent purposes.

Heresy is a word which, when it is used without passion, signifies a private opinion. So the different sects of the old philosophers, Academians, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, &c., were called heresies.

No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute Knowledge of Fact.

Curiosity draws a man from consideration of the effect, to seek the cause.

Silence is sometimes an argument of Consent.

Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing.

In a Democracy, look how many Demagogs that is how many powerful Orators there are with the people.

I shall be glad then to find a hole to creep out of the world.

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.

Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, is religion; not allowed, superstition.

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.

I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.

Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved.

Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance.

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.

As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine; methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.

Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!

O how the darkness do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?

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.

Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye've been left to fight alone.

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.

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.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.

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

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.

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.

Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

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.

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.

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.

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

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it...

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

No other single innovation had so much impact on history.

People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don't value the cheapest ones the most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing.

... One thing about religious truths is that we have to take them on faith, and faith needs reassurance. What's more reassuring than noticing that some other people, whom you admire, are so certain that it's all true that they're willing to go the ultimate mile?

... All questions concerning the rise of Christianity are one: How was it done? How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization? Although this is the only question, it requires many answers - no one thing led to the triumph of Christianity.

Once we were driving in the midwest and we pulled into a McDonald's. Someone came up to me and asked me why I have Feynman diagrams all over my van. I replied, "Because I am Feynman!" The young man went, "Ahhhhh!"

No! Not for a second! I immediately began to think how this could have happened. And I realized that the clock was old and was always breaking. That the clock probably stopped some time before and the nurse coming in to the room to record the time of death would have looked at the clock and jotted down the time from that. I never made any supernatural connection, not even for a second. I just wanted to figure out how it happened.

As you know, a theory in physics is not useful unless it is able to predict underlined effects which we would otherwise expect.

I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.