Portal:Atheism/Selected quotes
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[edit] Selected quotes by week
Week 1 view - talk - edit - history
- "I maintain that the opprobrium cast upon the word Atheism is a lie. I believe Atheists as a body to be men deserving respect... I do not care what kind of character religious men may put round the word Atheist, I would fight until men respect it." - Charles Bradlaugh
- "God is dead." - Friedrich Nietzsche
- "If we look back at the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom, respect and tyranny support them, in order to make the blindness of man serve their own interest. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them." - Baron d'Holbach
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Week 2 view - talk - edit - history
- "If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses." - Lenny Bruce
- "When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it." - Oscar Wilde
- ”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
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Week 3 view - talk - edit - history
- "You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world." - Bertrand Russell
- "We have become so accustomed to the religious lie that surrounds us that we do not notice the atrocity, stupidity and cruelty with which the teaching of the Christian church is permeated." - Leo Tolstoy
- "The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked..." - H. L. Mencken
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Week 4 view - talk - edit - history
- "If I thought the Jews killed God, I'd worship the Jews." - Bill Hicks
- "If we don't play God, who will?" - James Watson
- "And so to those of you who may be vitalists I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow." - Francis Crick
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Week 5 view - talk - edit - history
- “I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up -- they have no holidays.” - Henny Youngman
- “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile! “ - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
- “Atheism, a religion dedicated to its own sense of smug superiority.” - Stephen Colbert
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Week 6 view - talk - edit - history
- "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it 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
- "All the western theologies are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent." - Tennesee Williams
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Week 7 view - talk - edit - history
- “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” - Isaac Asimov
- “Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.” – Isaac Asimov
- “To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.” - Woody Allen
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Week 8 view - talk - edit - history
- “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true.” - Bertrand Russell
- “Faith is believing what you know ain't so.” - Mark Twain
- “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” - Denis Diderot
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Week 9 view - talk - edit - history
- “An atheist is a person with no invisible means of support” - John Buchan
- “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 F. Roberts
- “The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance…logic can be happily tossed out the window.” - Stephen King
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Week 10 view - talk - edit - history
- "I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in Nature." - Albert Einstein
- ”I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.” - Isaac Asimov
- “A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition." - José Bergamín
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Week 11 view - talk - edit - history
- “Atheism is a non-prophet organization.” - comedian George Carlin
- ”The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, then walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” - Brennan Manning
- “One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.” - Arthur C. Clarke
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Week 12 view - talk - edit - history
- “I'm a born-again atheist.” - Gore Vidal
- “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
- “Gods like atheists; it gives them something to aim at.” - Terry Pratchett
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Week 13 view - talk - edit - history
- “Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.” - Don Hirschberg
- “You show me a communist and I will show you someone who will be upset if I eat his sandwich. You show me an anarchist and I will show you someone who calls the cops when he finds me rooting through his closet at 3am. You show me an atheist and I will show you someone begging for God's forgiveness when they taste their own mortality.” - J. P. Chilensky
- “An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the god question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.” - John McCarthy
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Week 14 view - talk - edit - history
- "I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made." - Emma Goldman
- "Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds." - Madalyn Murray O'Hair
- “My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.” - George Santayana
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Week 15 view - talk - edit - history
- “Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. … Morality is then surrendered to the groundless arbitrariness of religion.” - Ludwig Feuerbach
- “Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not, but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.” - Sir Francis Bacon
- “Anyone can be an atheist -- God willing.” - Anon
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Week 16 view - talk - edit - history
- "I do not believe in any religion. I will have nothing to do with immortality. We are miserable enough in this life without speculating upon another." - Lord Byron
- "By simple common sense I don't believe in God." - Charlie Chaplin
- "God is an essence we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is gotten rid of there will never be any liberal science in the world." - John Adams
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Week 17 view - talk - edit - history
- "They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing." - Steven Weinberg
- "The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes, and they believe rightly." - Thomas Jefferson
- "My earlier views on the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation have become clearer and stronger with advancing years." - Abraham Lincoln
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Week 18 view - talk - edit - history
- "The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence, from Jerusalem, of a lunatic asylum." - Havelock Ellis
- "Certainly you don't believe in the gods? What's your argument? Where's your proof?" - Aristophanes
- "A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side." - Aristotle
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Week 19 view - talk - edit - history
- "In this subject of the nature of the gods, the first question is, do the gods exist or do they not? It is difficult, you eill say, to deny that they exist. I would agree if we were arguing the matter in a public assembly. But in a private discussion of this kind, it is perfectly easy to do so." - Cicero
- "Religion is considered by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." - Seneca
- "I do not believe in God, but as I sat there in the damaged [balloon] capsule, hopelessly vulnerable to the slightest shift in weather or mechanical fault, I could not believe my eyes." - Richard Branson
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Week 20 view - talk - edit - history
- "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philsophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." - Francis Bacon
- "Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people." - Voltaire, in Philosophical Dictionary
- "The moths & atheists are doubly divine." - Jim Morrison, An American Prayer
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Week 21 view - talk - edit - history
- "ATHEISM: A godless religion that retains all the dogmatic posturing of the faiths it so confidently denies, with few of the consolations." - Rick Bayan, The Cynic's Dictionary
- "I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel." - Thomas Henry Huxley, Essays on Controversial Questions
- "The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, 'here's a Chaplain who never visited the front.'" - Kurt Vonnegut in Hocus Pocus
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Week 37 view - talk - edit - history
- "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful." - Edward Gibbon
- "There are no atheists in foxholes isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes." - James Morrow
- "One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it." - Bertrand Russell
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Week 38 view - talk - edit - history
- "Crush the infamy!" (Écrasez l'infâme!) - Voltaire's signature in his letters and pamphlets
- "Thank God I'm an atheist." - Luis Buñuel
- "God is dead." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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Week 39 view - talk - edit - history
- "In reality there has only been one Christian, and he died on the cross." - Friedrich Nietzsche
- "It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand." - Mark Twain
- "The worst thing I can think to say about God is that he's an underachiever." - Woody Allen
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Week 40 view - talk - edit - history
- "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 God both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?" - Epicurus
- "Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion." - Steven Weinberg
- "The legitimate powers of government extend to only such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg." - Thomas Jefferson
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Week 41 view - talk - edit - history
- “’In God We Trust.’ I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.” - Mark Twain
- “The fool says in his heart: 'There is no God.' The Wise Man says it to the world.” - Troy Witte
- “Religions are all alike -- founded upon fables and mythologies.” - Thomas Jefferson
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Week 42 view - talk - edit - history
- “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
- "If I were not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasn't the forces of natural selection that designed fish, It must have been an Italian." - Douglas Adams
- "I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously." - Douglas Adams
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Week 43 view - talk - edit - history
- “In no instance have…the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.” - James Madison
- “The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.” - John Adams
- “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” - Benjamin Franklin
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Week 44 view - talk - edit - history
- "This is one of the great social functions of science—to free people from superstition." - Steven Weinberg
- "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." - former U.S. President George H. W. Bush
- "I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion." - James Buchanan
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Week 45 view - talk - edit - history
- “I think it better to keep a profound silence with regard to the Christian fables, which are canonized by their antiquity and the credulity of absurd and insipid people.” - Frederick the Great
- ”The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts:
Those with brains, but no religion,
And those with religion, but no brains.” - Al-Ma'arri
- ” I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.” - Katharine Hepburn
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Week 46 view - talk - edit - history
- “I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” - Albert Einstein
- “The question of the origin of the matter in the universe is no longer thought to be beyond the range of science -- everything can be created from nothing…it is fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch.” – Alan Guth
- “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. – Richard Dawkins
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Week 47 view - talk - edit - history
- [“N]either antiquity nor any other nation has imagined a more atrocious and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating God. This is how Christians treat the autocrat of the universe.” - Frederick the Great
- ”[Christianity] is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world”. - Voltaire
- “In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.” - Albert Einstein
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Week 48 view - talk - edit - history
- “What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.” - Christopher Hitchens
- “There is no need for that hypothesis.” - Pierre Simon Laplace in response to Napoleon's objection that he had omitted God from Celestial Mechanics.
- “Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not.” - Steven Weinberg
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Week 49 view - talk - edit - history
- "It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to Infidelity." - Abraham Lincoln
- "Now let it be written in history and on Mr. Lincoln's tombstone: `He died an unbeliever.'" - William H. Herndon
- "I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful." - Christopher Hitchens
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Week 50 view - talk - edit - history
- “If you do not believe in a personal God the question: "What is the purpose of life?" is unaskable and unanswerable.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
- "An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that a 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 am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don't find them believable. As for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the other foot. Atheists don't claim to know anything with certainty—it's the believers who know it all.” - Barbara Smoker
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Week 51 view - talk - edit - history
- “Which is more dangerous: fanaticism or atheism? Fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more deadly; for atheism inspires no bloody passion whereas fanaticism does; atheism is opposed to crime and fanaticism causes crimes to be committed.” - Voltaire
- “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” - Psalm 14:1
- "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." - Richard Dawkins
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Week 52 view - talk - edit - history
- "We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." - Carl Sagan in Cosmos (1980)
- "I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time." - Isaac Asimov, in Free Inquiry
- "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect." - James Madison
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