Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular.
No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
Obsolete misleading theologies bear the same relation to the essence of true religion that scarlet fever, mumps, and measles do to education.
God's existence needs to be established independently before he can be brought into account for causation; it cannot be assumed at the start.
Faith is essentially intolerant ... essentially because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one's cause is also God's cause.
The story of the creation and similar things in it did not impress me very much, but on the contrary made me incline somewhat towards atheism.
Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.
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.
The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.
Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?
Nothing enlarges the gulf of atheism more than the wide passage that lies between the faith and lives of men pretending to teach Christianity.
The United States furnishes the first example in history of a government deliberately depriving itself of all legislative control of religion.
I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits... Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum.
Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.
The loneliest moment in life is when you have just experienced that which you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has just let you down.
The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.
I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.
Cultivate an intellectual habit of subordinating one's opinions and wishes to objective evidence and a reverence for things as they really are.
Religion and science, then, in my analysis are the two great sister forces which have pulled, and are still pulling, mankind onward and upward.
The Queen of England is Defender of the Faith but the President of the United States is Defender of the Constitution, which defends all faiths.
We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world.
To fill a world with ... religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
To have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit.
None deserve praise for being good who have not the spirit to be bad: goodness, for the most part, is nothing but indolence or weakness of will.
A proponent of the big bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the matter of the universe came from nothing and by nothing.
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.
If you're going to get into big time religion, these are the games you have to play. You go into it as a business and you work it as a business.
It takes five years for a willing person's mind to change. Have patience with yourself and others when treading in an area protected by a taboo.
Look, I happen to agree with what George says about the interpretation of the New Testament, but I want to remind both of you to never play God.
Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship.
The Christian religion is so manifestly contrary to the facts, belief in it can only be held with the most delusional gerrymandering imaginable.
Instead of establishing facts, we have to overthrow errors; instead of ascertaining what is, we have to chase from our imaginations what is not.
To imagine that "God moves in mysterious ways" is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts.
I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world ... profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove.
He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity - a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.
The star of the Magi which pointed so unerringly to the cradle of Christ points not less unerringly to one of the sources from which Christ came.
If, unable to solve the mysteries of Providence, we plunge into Atheism, we only increase a thousand fold the darkness by which we are surrounded
Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power.
[G]et two-thirds of the states to alter the Constitution; come out with their national religion, and then let the people get their throats ready.
The essence of Christianity, as I see it, is love. The essence of Humanism (and I'm also a Humanist) is love. At that level, we're not far apart.
I am certain and have always stressed that the destination of mankind is to become more and more humane. The ideal of humanity has to be revived.
What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)
I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.
No man has ceased to believe in God before having decided that he should not exist; no book would produce atheism, and no book can restore faith.
In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.
Yeah, I tell them to change the channel if they see some guy in a brown suit with a telephone number at the bottom of the screen asking for money.
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.
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.