Best 2951 quotes in «atheism quotes» category

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

Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy.

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

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

Prayer never changes the laws of nature.

Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail.

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

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 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.

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.

[priests are] the pretenders to power and dominion, and to a superior sanctity of character, distinct from virtue and good morals.

Priests ... these turkey-cocks of God.

Priests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians - all of them, down to the meanest grocer, repeat in chorus the words of Voltaire, that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him.

Probably in all history there is no instance of a society in which ecclesiastical power was dominant which was not at once stagnant, corrupt and brutal.

Proclaim a theology of divine righteousness which demands justice, respect, tolerance, compassion, inclusiveness, trust in the ultimate efficacy of divine zeal, and the rigorous pursuit of peace in the midst of competing interests and faith claims.

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.

Public schools are where the next generation of leaders are educated and where cultural exchange will take place.

Pure truth, like pure gold, has been found unfit for circulation because men have discovered that it is far more convenient to adulterate the truth than to refine themselves.

Puritans should wear fig leaves on their eyes.

Question with boldness even the existence of a god.

Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.

Rationalizing is the self-exculpation which occurs when we feel ourselves, or our group, accused of misapprehension or error.

Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.

Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there wouldn't be religious people.

Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be.

Real life is about accepting ups and downs, the good and the bad, the possibility of failure as well as the ambition to succeed. Atheism speaks to the truth about our human nature because it recognizes all this and does not seek to shield us from the truth by myth and superstition

Real morality is possible when the sanctions for morality are also tangible and real.

Real morality is possible when the sanctions for morality are also tangible and real. Therefore, atheism shifts the basis of morality from faith in god to obligations of social living. Moral conduct is not a passport to heaven; it is social necessity.

Reason can never prove the existence of God.

... reason accepts no commandments.

Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.

Reason bases its decisions on evidence available to everyone, and allows people to disagree when evidence is lacking. Religion will never do that.

Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.

Refer me to one atheist who denies the existence of God.... Etymologically, as well as philosophically, an atheist is one without God. That is all the 'A' before 'Theist' really means.

[Regarding] the convention that clergymen are more virtuous than other men. Any average selection of mankind, set apart and told that it excels the rest in virtue, must tend to sink below the average.

Regardless of whether or not you belong to a majority religion, in the United States you may not impose your theology on civil law.

Relativity. Gravity. Quantum. Electrodynamics. Evolution. Each of these theories is true, whether or not you believe in them.

Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ.

Religion and liberty are inseparable. Religion is voluntary, and cannot, and ought not to be forced. This is a fundamental article of the American creed, without distinction of sect or party. Liberty, both civil and religious, is an American instinct. Such liberty is impossible on the basis of a union of church and state, where the one of necessity restricts or controls the other. It requires a friendly separation, where each power is entirely independent in its own sphere.

Religion is like a virus that affects the behaviour of its host in such a way as to propagate itself further.

Religion and science, then, in my analysis are the two great sister forces which have pulled, and are still pulling, mankind onward and upward.

Religion cannot and should not be replaced by atheism. Religion needs to go away and not be replaced by anything. Atheism is not a religion. It's the absence of religion, and that's a wonderful thing.

Religion glorifies the dogma of a despotic, mythical God. Atheism ennobles the interests of free and progressive Man. Religion is superstition. Atheism is sanity. Religion is medieval. Atheism is modern.

Religion hides many mischiefs from suspicion.

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith ; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.