Atheism Quotations | Page 2

The very idea of carrying my memory into eternity devastated me, and I took refuge in atheism.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

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.

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

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.

Don't use that foreign word 'ideals.' We have that excellent native word 'lies.'

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.

Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

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.

For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.

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.

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.

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.

Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.

What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

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.'

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

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.

The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is - a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.

If there is a supreme being, he's crazy.

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.

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

The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition.

It is extremely difficult for a Jew to be converted, for how can he bring himself to believe in the divinity of - another Jew?

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

Most atheists bristle at the thought that atheism has anything to do with faith, but not Penn Jillette.

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.

There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

Christ rode on an ass, but now asses ride on Christ.

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

Atheism has been on the rise for years now, and the Bible of the atheists is 'The Origin of Species.'

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

I've always been suspicious of TV, I've always found music and video to be an unhappy marriage.

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.

It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.

I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.

What has changed is that nothing has changed... that's what has made me more unhappy than everything else.

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

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.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

A man convinced against his will is not convinced.

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

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

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

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

No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.

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.

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.

True character arises from a deeper well than religion.

Well, you know, Thomas Jefferson, who was the author of the Declaration of Independence said he wouldn't have any atheists in his cabinet because atheists wouldn't swear an oath to God. That was Jefferson and we have never had any Muslims in the cabinet.

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.

The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

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.

It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature's God.

Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.

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

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

I'm constantly reading books on God or the absence of God and atheism.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

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

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

Irreligion - the principal one of the great faiths of the world.

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

Once you sacrifice your rights, it's hard to get those rights protected again.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

I am without religious feeling.

Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world's first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less.

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.

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

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

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?

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

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.