Best 2951 quotes in «atheism quotes» category

With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.

Within ten days thou wilt seem a god to those to whom thou art now a beast and an ape, if thou wilt return to thy principles and the worship of reason.

Within thy Grave! Oh no, but on some other flight - Thou only camest to mankind To rend it with Good night

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Without doubt you are not sane.

Without God there would be no freedom to believe what you want.

With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.

Without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise.

With regard to the alternatives, we already have them. The cellular and genetic lines of research in humans are the most promising. AIDS is caused by a virus, so it makes sense to study the virus, not chimpanzees. We have learned virtually nothing about AIDS from the chimpanzee. Every major advance in AIDS research ... has come from human studies.

With soap, baptism is a good thing.

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.

Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.

Women get more unhappy the more they try to liberate themselves.

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete.

Would the atheist continue such, let him beware how he admits Love into his breast: for God will surely come along with him.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and nonfiction. And even there, who can be sure?

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.

Years ago I was on television having a discussion with Billy Graham about atheism. He was saying, even if you're right and I'm wrong, and there's nothing after, I will have had a better life than you, because I do believe there was something. And I couldn't argue with that, even though I wanted to.

Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!

Yes, I do not like people saying that atheism is based on science, because it's not. It's an alien invasion of science.

Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.

"You ask me how I know he lives?" asks the revival chorus. "He lives within my heart." Exactly! A figment.

You are out of the way of temptation and out of the way of the tempter - I didn't mean to make you wicked - but I was - and am - and shall be - and I was with you so much that I couldn't help contaminate.

You accept the historical Jesus?

You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.

You can change your faith without changing gods, and vice versa.

You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient 'people say.'

You cannot ... transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word "God" to be its grammatical subject.

You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.

You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.

You can educate yourself right out of a relationship with God.

You cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time.

You cannot play the Song of Freedom on an instrument of oppression.

You can say the dirty words now, but there is no content - political satire is limited to small podiums and little soap boxes.

"You don't believe in God," I said to Stein. "God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus." "Santa Claus has had a tremendous influence, exist or not." "For children." "Lots of saints have died for God with a courage that's hardly childish." "That's part of the horror. It's all a fantasy. It's all for nothing.

You don't seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.

You keep accusing me of blasphemy all of the time, but I cannot be convicted of a victimless crime.

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?

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

Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.

You're like this little blip of light that lasts for a very brief time and you can shine as brightly as you choose.

According to the anthropic principle proponents, if the universal constants (e.g. gravitation, the strong force, etc.) were just a nose-hair off, the universe as we know it would not exist; stars wouldn't form and there would be no life and no us. That supposedly makes our universe truly special. To demonstrate just how ridiculous this fine-tuning argument is, consider the fact that no measurement in physics is perfect. All of them are approximations and have margins of error. That means the universal constants, that make our universe what it is, have some wiggle room. Within that wiggle room are an infinite quantity of real numbers. Each of those real numbers could represent constants that could make a universe like ours. Since there are an infinite number of potential constants within that wiggle room, there are an infinite number of potential universes, like ours, that could have existed in lieu of ours. Thus, there is really nothing special about our universe.

You see how wide the gulf that separates me from the Christian church.

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.

A Christian sits in his or her well and thinks that the whole world is his or her well. The Jew sits in his or her little well and thinks that it is the whole world. A Muslim sits cooped up in his or her tiny well and believes it to be the whole universe. The same goes for a Hindu and all others. Also, atheists are no different from all those orthodox believers.

A complete atheist stands on the next-to-last upper step to the most complete faith (he may or may not take that step), while the indifferent one has no faith, apart from a bad fear.

A couple of months ago I had a dream, which I remember with the utmost clarity. (I don't usually remember my dreams.) I dreamed I had died and gone to Heaven. I looked about and knew where I was-green fields, fleecy clouds, perfumed air, and the distant, ravishing sound of the heavenly choir. And there was the recording angel smiling broadly at me in greeting. I said, in wonder, "Is this Heaven?" The recording angel said, "It is." I said (and on waking and remembering, I was proud of my integrity), "But there must be a mistake. I don't belong here. I'm an atheist." "No mistake," said the recording angel. "But as an atheist how can I qualify?" The recording angel said sternly, "We decide who qualifies. Not you." "I see," I said. I looked about, pondered for a moment, then turned to the recording angel and asked, "Is there a typewriter here that I can use?" The significance of the dream was clear to me. I felt Heaven to be the act of writing, and I have been in Heaven for over half a century and I have always known this.

Action is a part of the very reality it transforms, just as the wave is a part of the ocean. The point is not to renounce action, but to act with serenity. Our action will be all the more effective, and all the happier.

You've got to be digging it while it's happening 'cause it just might be a one shot deal.