Quotes

The following quotes, while not all by atheists, represent great thoughts on atheism, humanism, science and the recklessness of religion.

---

“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.” — Ferdinand Magellan

“If we are going to teach ‘creation science’ as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.” — Judith Hayes

“If God cannot be taken literally when He writes of the rising sun, then how can one insist that he be taken literally when writing of the rising of the Son?” — Gerardus Bouw

“Religion might be helpful in death, but education is helpful in life.” — Anonymous

“To err is human. To forgive is not our policy.” — Unknown

“Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself.” — George Carlin

“Imagine the ego of the human race, to consider themselves so grand, as to warrant a creator worthy of praise.” — Robert Brunswick Jr.

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there’s no place for it in the endeavor of science.” — Carl Sagan

“To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.” — David Brooks

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” — Paul of Tarsus, I Corinthians 13:11

“We would be 1,500 years ahead if it hadn’t been for the church dragging science back by its coattails and burning our best minds at the stake.” — Catherine Fahringer

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.” — Bernard Shaw

“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.” — Albert Einstein

“There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?” — Richard Dawkins

“Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.” — Carl Sagan

“Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.” — Penn Jillette

“Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.” — Chapman Cohen

“The inspiration of the bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it.” — Robert G. Ingersoll

“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.” — Robert Pirsig

“I wonder who got the shit job of scouring the planet for the 15000 species of butterfly or the 8800 species of ant they eventually took on board Noah’s Ark. But at least we got that magical rainbow for all their trouble.” — Azura Skye

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” — Mohandas K. Gandhi

“I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders.” — Robert Ingersoll

“There is no God. There’s no heaven. There’s no hell. There are no angels. When you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you.” — Madalyn Murray O’Hair

“Most people can’t bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?” — Mark Twain

“Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” — Thomas Jefferson

“I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.” — Bill Maher

“What happens when we’re dead? The irony is that all our questions wil be answered after we die. We spend our whole life trying to figure out the truth and the only way we’ll find out what it is, is to get hit by a bus. And the only comfort that religion offers is that God is driving that bus.” — John Ryman

“Atheism is a requirement for a complete human being. Religion is a crutch that is shackled to you, one you never really needed in the first place, but were convinced by others that you couldn’t live without. Once you discover it’s only an illusion, that it’s not even a real crutch, you discard it gladly.” — Brent Yaciw

“The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own.” — Frank Zappa

“It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.” — Ernestine Rose

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” — Epicurus

“A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it.” — David Stevens

“Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.” — Robert A Heinlein

“What has been Christianity’s fruits? Superstition, Bigotry and Persecution.” — James Madison

“If god is the alpha and the omega. The begining and the end, knows what has passed and what is to come, like it states in the bible, why do people pray and think it will make any difference.” — Mark Fairclough

“Religion is the opiate of the masses.” — Karl Marx

“If God created the world, then who created god? and who created whoever created god? So somewhere along the line something had to just be there. So why can’t we just skip the idea of god and go straight to earth?” — Ryan Hanson

“If we expect God to subscribe to one religion at the exclusion of all the others, then we should expect damnation as a matter of chance. This should give Christians pause when expounding their religious beliefs, but it does not.” — Sam Harris

“Animals do not have gods, they are smarter than that.” — Ronnie Snow

“I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.” — Daniel Boorstin

“I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake… Religion is all bunk.” — Thomas Edison

“Jesus hardly made the greatest sacrifice. He knew he would be resurrected anyway.” — Anonymous

“Religion is like a virus that affects the behaviour of its host in such a way as to propagate itself further.” — Jack Pritchard

“It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” — Carl Sagan

“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.” — Carl Sagan

“God made me an atheist. Who are you to question his wisdom?” — Anonymous

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect, had intended for us to forgo their use.” — Galileo Galilei

“Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing.” — Anonymous

“Today’s religion will be the future’s mythology. Both believed at one time by many; but proved wrong by the clever.” — Steven Crocker

“Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.” — H.L. Mencken

“We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.” — Gene Roddenberry

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” — Seneca the Younger

“When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.” — Sigmund Freud

“Atheism is a non-prophet organization.” — George Carlin

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” — Richard Dawkins

“People will then often say, ‘But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?’ This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)” — Douglas Adams

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” — Stephen Roberts

“Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.” — Anonymous

“If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.” — Isaac Asimov

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” — Steven Weinberg

“I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.” — Doug McLeod

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” — Susan B. Anthony

“The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.” — Delos B. McKown

“Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.” — Anonymous

“Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.” — Francis Bacon

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” — Richard Dawkins

“Organized religion: The world’s largest pyramid scheme.” — Bernard Katz

“Suppose we’ve chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we’re just making him madder and madder.” — Homer Simpson

“I’ve yet to find anything convincing about the arguments Christians make for the existence of this God chap, and feel, that if he does exist, events such as the Holocaust, Cambodian massacres and Limp Bizkit illuminate the fact that he’s been asleep at the wheel for quite some time.” — Wil Forbis

“It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.” — Ludwig Feuerbach

“Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence.” — Anonymous

“Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.” — Richard Dawkins

“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.” — Christopher Hitchens

“He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave.” — William Drummond

“Remember, Jesus would rather constantly shame gays than let orphans have a family.” — Steven Colbert

“Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, Controls people, Deludes people.” — Carlespie Mary Alice McKinney

“You do not need the Bible to justify love, but no better tool has been invented to justify hate.” — Richard A. Weatherwax

“What’s ‘God’? Well, you know, when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God’s the guy that ignores you.” — Steve Buscemi (From the movie “The Island”)

“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.” — Anonymous

“Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.” — Don Hirschberg

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” — Mark Twain

“Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived.” — Isaac Asimov

“If all the Christians who have called other Christians ‘not really a Christian’ were to vanish, there’d be no Christians left.” — Anonymous

“Gods dont kill people. People with Gods kill people.” — David Viaene

“Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions.” — Frater Ravus

“One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.” — Arthur C. Clarke

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.” - Albert Einstein

“Only the fool says in his heart: There is no god - The wise says it to the world.” — Anonymous

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” — Carl Sagan

“My spell-checker lacks the word ‘creationism’ in its dictionary, so each time that word is encountered, an alternative pops up at the bottom of my screen, ‘cretinism’” — E.T. Babinski

“There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.” — Richard Lederer

“An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.” - Madalyn Murray O’Hair

“Why be born again, when you can just grow up?” — Anonymous

“Power corrupts; Absolute power corrupts absolutely; God is all-powerful. Draw your own conclusions.” — Anonymous