Best 2951 quotes in «atheism quotes» category

Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead.

Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific - that is, truthful - must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

Other world? There is no other world; here or nowhere is the whole fact.

Our Constitution... has not left the religion of its citizens under the power of its public functionaries, were it possible that any of these should consider a conquest over the conscience of men either attainable or applicable to any desirable purpose.

Our contention is not for mere toleration, but for absolute liberty. There is a wide difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration implies that somebody falsely claims the right to tolerate. Toleration is a concession, while liberty is a right. Toleration is a matter of expediency, while liberty is a matter of principle.

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.

Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.

Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland!

Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

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.

Over our history there are always those who want to take this wall of separation and remove a brick here or there or damage it more than that. I think one has to be vigilant and constantly on the alert.

Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism.

Parsons always seem to be specially horrified about things like sunbathing and naked bodies. They don't mind poverty and misery and cruelty to animals nearly as much.

Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other.

Pascal makes no attempt in this most famous argument to show that his Roman Catholicism is true or probably true. The reasons which he suggests for making the recommended bet on his particular faith are reasons in the sense of motives rather than reasons in the sense of grounds. Conceding, if only for the sake of the present argument, that we can have no knowledge here, Pascal tries to justify as prudent a policy of systematic self-persuasion, rather than to provide grounds for thinking that the beliefs recommended are actually true.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

People are bursting out of the closet, rejecting their parents' wishes to keep the faith. Atheism is becoming mainstream.

People want to be at the center of the Universe...and they're going to flock to anybody who tells them that.

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.

People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don't value the cheapest ones the most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing.

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

People who commit crimes should be responsible for those crimes. It doesn't matter whether they're priests or ministers or atheists.

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

Persecution on racial and religious grounds has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty.

Perhaps God chose me to be an atheist?

Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy.

Personal religious convictions have no place in political campaigns or in dictating public policy.

Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.

Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, 'Will it bring you nearer to God?'

Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.

Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.

Please, with the God talk. Hate to break it to you, but there is no God.

Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.

Popular religion is a coping mechanism for the anxieties of a dysfunctional social and economic environment.

Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.

Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists.

Prayer never changes the laws of nature.

Praying is begging for an unseen deity to alter the laws of nature for someone admittedly unworthy.

Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail.

Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others.

Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.

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.

Precisely this is godliness--that there are gods, but no God.

Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag.

Propaganda by censorship takes two forms: the selective control of information to favour a particular viewpoint, and the deliberate doctoring of information in order to create an impression different from that originally intended.