Best 2951 quotes in «atheism quotes» category

Fear is the mother of all gods ... Nature does all things spontaneously, by herself, without the meddling of the gods.

Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, is religion; not allowed, superstition.

Fear paints pictures of ghosts and hangs them in the gallery of ignorance.

Few men are so obstinate in their atheism, that a pressing danger will not compel them to acknowledgment of a divine power.

Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.

Fifteen years of skepticism has done more for me than 20 years of force-fed religion and 30 years of indifference in between.

Fierce invectives against women form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers.

First, whenever a man talks loudly against religion, always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions, which have got the better of his creed. A bad life and a good belief are disagreeable and troublesome neighbors, and where they separate, depend upon it, 'Tis for no other cause but quietness sake.

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

Follow the argument wherever it leads.

For atheism and polytheism there is no special problem of suffering, nor need there be for every kind of monotheism.

Forbear to spew out reason from your mind, but rather ponder everything with keen judgment; and if it seems true, own yourself vanquished, but, if it is false, gird up your loins to fight.

For how can you compete Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbour's eyes?

For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will.

Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide.

For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.

For most cosmologists, a supernatural God is an unnecessary hypothesis. For most Americans, He is an unassailable fact. The American belief machine apparently has a fail-safe component. Nothing shuts it down.

For my part, I wish, with Mr. Howells, that the literature of the past might be purged of all that is ugly and barbarous in it, although I should object as much as any one to having these great works weakened or falsified.

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

For such is man: a Theological Dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times - provided however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as true. Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will. Fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system.

For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small.

For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.

For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic.

For the fundamentalist who wants to believe every word of the Bible, however, life is a house of cards, with each card a tenet of faith. If you remove one card, the entire house collapses.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

For truth is strong next to the Almighty. She needs no policies or stratagems or licensings to make her victorious. These are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power.

Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, "Adoption, not Abortion," although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.

For years I've been stressing with regard to UFOs that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy of superstition.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

Freethinkers reject faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Faith is the opposite of reason because reason imposes very strict limits on what can be true, and faith has no limits at all. A Great Escape into faith is no retreat to safety. It is nothing less than surrender.

From 1949 to the present, for every dollar the US spent on an African, it spent $250.65 on an Israeli, and for every dollar it spent on someone from the Western Hemisphere outside the US, it spent $214 on an Israeli.

Fundamentalists of different religions have more in common with each other than they do with the moderates of their own religions.

Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice - a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation's liberties.

From Apollonius I learned freedom of will and undeviating steadiness of purpose; and to look to nothing else, not even for a moment, except to reason.

From that day to this that religion has been the greatest curse that ever afflicted the earth.

Gayness is a non-issue.

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Give us a religion that will help us to live - we can die without assistance.

Gentleness and peacefulness regulate our proceedings; theirs are dictated by fury. We employ reason, they accumulate faggots. They preach nothing but love, and breathe nothing but blood. Their words are humane, but their hearts are cruel.

[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.

Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift I see the suns, I see the systems lift Their forms; and even the systems and the suns Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.

God help those who do not help themselves.

God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.

God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist.

God is man idealized.

God is dead, and no one cares! If there is a hell I'll see you there!

God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.