Atheism Quotations | Page 4

Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.

When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense.

The churches used to win their arguments against atheism, agnosticism, and other burning issues by burning the ismist, which is fine proof that there is a devil but hardly evidence that there is a God.

That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.

The word religion has such bad connotations for me, that it's been responsible for wars, and it shouldn't be that way at all, it's just the way the meaning of the word has evolved to me. I have to wonder what we did on this planet before religion.

When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, and would no doubt live a higher, happier life than if guided by theirs, it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves the earth.

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.

To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection.

I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.

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

Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.

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.

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.

Embrace truth as it is revealed to-day by human reason.

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.

I have endeavoured to dissipate these religious superstitions from the minds of women, and base their faith on science and reason, where I found for myself at last that peace and comfort I could never find in the Bible and the church.

Women are afraid. It is unpopular to question the bible. They are creatures of tradition. They fear to question their position in the testament, as they feared to advocate suffrage fifty years ago. Now they are quarreling as to which were among the first to advocate it. You see they are not used to abuse as I am. In Albany, fifty years ago, when I went before the legislature to plead for a married woman's right to her own property, the women whom I met in society crossed the street rather than speak to me.

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.

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.

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.

You need not value it yourself if you do not wish to; but you ought to allow it to us who do value it.

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.

The creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create... he discovers.

Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.

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

I'm not an athiest. How can you not believe in something that doesn't exist? That's way too convoluted for me.

We place no reliance On virgin or pigeon; Our Method is Science, Our Aim is Religion.

The Gods are but names for the forces of Nature themselves.

There will be certain things in a man that have to be won, not forced; inspired, not compelled.

The beast faith lives on its own dung.

This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty; such as lurks In some wild poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim.

But the churchmen fain would kill their church, As the churches have kill'd their Christ.

What! I should call on that Infinite Love that has served us so well? Infinite cruelty rather, that made everlasting hell, Made us, foreknew us, foredoom'd us, and does what he will with his own; Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan.

You, my Brown Guard, will regard it as a matter of course that this German people should go only by the way which Providence ordained for it when it gave to Germans the common language. So we go forward with the profoundest faith in God into the future. Would that which we have achieved have been possible if Providence had not helped us?

The fox remains always a fox, the goose remains a goose, and the tiger will retain the character of a tiger.

Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law - one may call it an iron law of Nature - which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind.

It matters not whether these weapons of ours are humane: if they gain us our freedom, they are justified before our conscience and before our God.

I believe in Providence and I believe Providence to be just. Therefore I believe that Providence always rewards the strong, the industrious, and the upright.

Help yourself, then God will also help you!

The Government of the Reich, who regard Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation, attach the greatest value to friendly relations with the Holy See and are endeavouring to develop them.

The principle applies here, help yourselves and Almighty God will not deny you his assistance.

This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief.

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.

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.

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

Only so you can appeal to your God and pray Him to support and bless your courage, your work, your perseverance, your strength, your resolution, and with all these your claim on life.

The National Socialist Movement has wrought this miracle. If Almighty God granted success to this work, then the Party was His instrument.

For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will.

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

In this world him who does not abandon himself the Almighty will not desert. Him who helps himself will the Almighty always also help; He will show him the way by which he can gain his rights, his freedom, and therefore his future.

What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.

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

The work that Christ started but could not finish, I - Adolf Hitler - will conclude.

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

Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.

Interviewer: "Didn't [Sagan] want to believe?" Druyan: "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know.

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.

In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual information, or more illuminating than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection, or as it has been popularly called, Darwinism.

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.

Sudden conversion ... is particularly attractive to the half-baked mind.

There are no atheists in the foxholes of Bataan...

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

Progress is a comfortable disease.

Blame is for God and small children.

Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed.

Old godheads sink in space and drown Their arks like foundered galleons sucked down.

I once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow's foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization.

That stern and rockbound coast felt like an amateur when it saw how grim the puritans that landed on it were.

I do not see why men sheould be so proud insects have the more ancient lineage according to the scientists insects were insects when man was only a burbling whatisit.

Just as soon as the uplifters get a country reformed it slips into a nose dive.

Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history

The sacrifice of Diogenes to all the gods.

I can definitely make an argument for atheism. I was very educated in scripture and dogma and the church, particularly the Catholic Church. I could not possibly know that I disagreed with religion unless I knew what I was disagreeing with.

That is the most frightening sight I have ever seen.

God is man idealized.

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.

Atheism. There is not a single exalting and emancipating influence that does not in turn become inhibitory.

Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

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.

Religion hides many mischiefs from suspicion.

Many argue that Christianity is "different" from other religions - that it is primarily about love of one's fellow man. The Crusades, The Inquisition, Calvin's Geneva all prove that this is not the case. These events were pre-eminently about obedience to authority.

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

The evaporation of 4 million who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place.

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.

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.

Then why did you tell me?

No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

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

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

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

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.

And of all plagues with which mankind are curst, Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.

Atheism, a term which will, I'm sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism...

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.

There's no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) 'Do you realize you've wasted your life?

Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ... Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate.

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.