Best 2951 quotes in «atheism quotes» category

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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?'

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

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

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.

Prayer never changes the laws of nature.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Puritans should wear fig leaves on their eyes.

Question with boldness even the existence of a god.

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

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.

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.