Best 2951 quotes in «atheism quotes» category

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

Nonbelievers are protected by the religion clauses of the Constitution not because secular humanism is a religion, which it is not, but because when the government acts on the basis of religion it discriminates against those who do not "believe" in the governmentally favored manner.

Non-proliferation will only work if all states are willing to cooperate, and that will only happen if all feel they are being treated fairly.

No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.

No one ever dies an atheist.

No one of Lincoln's old acquaintances in this city ever heard of his conversion to Christianity by Dr. Smith or anyone else. It was never suggested nor thought of here until after his death.... I never saw him read a second of time in Dr. Smith's book on Infidelity. He threw at down upon our table - spit upon it as it were - and never opened it to my knowledge.

No other single innovation had so much impact on history.

No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.

No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.

No religion is suddenly rejected by any people; it is rather gradually outgrown. None sees a religion die; dead religions are like dead languages and obsolete customs: the decay is long and - like the glacier march - is perceptible only to the careful watcher by comparisons extending over long periods.

No sign of purpose can be detected in any part of the vast universe disclosed by our most powerful telescopes.

Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.

Not far from the invention of fire we must rank the invention of doubt.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, has a more direct bearing on the moral choices made by individuals or the purposes pursued by society than belief or disbelief in God.

Nothing could be more idiotic and absurd than the doctrine of the trinity.

Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God.

Nothing but free argument, raillery and even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.

Nothing enlarges the gulf of atheism more than the wide passage that lies between the faith and lives of men pretending to teach Christianity.

Nothing is bigger than life. There's nothing noble in death. What's noble about never seeing the sunshine again? What's noble about having your legs and arms blown off? What's noble about being an idiot? What's noble about being blind and deaf and dumb? What's noble about being dead?

Nothing is greater than to break the chains from the bodies of men, nothing nobler than to destroy the phantom of the soul.

Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced.

Nothing is more difficult and nothing requires more character than to find oneself in open opposition to ones time (and those one loves) and to say loudly: No!

Nothing is more logical than persecution. Religious tolerance is a kind of infidelity.

Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude.

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

Nowhere in the Gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue.

Now it seems that everything in the world stems from sources other than God, since the products of nature have their source in nature; deliberate effects can be traced back to human reason or will as their source. There is no need then to assume that God exists.

Obey; this may be right; but beware of reverence.... Government is nothing but regulated force; force is its appropriate claim upon your attention. It is the business of individuals to persuade; the tendency of concentrated strength, is only to give consistency and permanence to an influence more compendious than persuasion.

Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.

Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.

Obsolete misleading theologies bear the same relation to the essence of true religion that scarlet fever, mumps, and measles do to education.

Obviously, if theism is a belief in a God and atheism is a lack of a belief in a God, no third position or middle ground is possible. A person can either believe or not believe in a God. Therefore, our previous definition of atheism has made an impossibility out of the common usage of agnosticism to mean "neither affirming nor denying a belief in God.

Of the 417 commandments, only a single one of the 417 has found ministerial obedience; multiply and replenish the earth. To it sinner & saint, scholar & ignoramus, Christian & savage are alike loyal.

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.

Oh, that [his Thanksgiving Message] is some of Seward's nonsense, and it pleases the fools.

"Oh to be old again," said a young corpse.

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well.

Old godheads sink in space and drown Their arks like foundered galleons sucked down.

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.

On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.

Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism.

Once you sacrifice your rights, it's hard to get those rights protected again.

On Earth, Discord! A gloomy Heaven above, opening her jealous gates to the nineteen thousandth part of the tithe of mankind! And below, an inescapable & inexorable Hell, expanding its leviathan jaws for the vast residue of Mortals!

One can't logically argue that because something highly improbable happens, some occult force had to make it happen that way.

One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.