Best 2951 quotes in «atheism quotes» category

Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.

Long time men lay oppress'd with slavish fear Religion's tyranny did domineer ... At length a mighty one of Greece began To assert the natural liberty of man, By senseless terrors and vain fancies let To slavery. Straight the conquered phantoms fled.

Look, I happen to agree with what George says about the interpretation of the New Testament, but I want to remind both of you to never play God.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

Lust is the cause of generation Appetite is the support of life Fear or timidity is the prolongation of life, and Fraud the preservation of its instruments.

Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith.

Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race.

Man appoints, and God disappoints.

Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.

Man is the measure of all things, of the reality of those which are, and of the unreality of those which are not.

Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so.

Many argue that Christianity is "different" from other religions - that it is primarily about love of one's fellow man. The Crusades, The Inquisition, Calvin's Geneva all prove that this is not the case. These events were pre-eminently about obedience to authority.

Many books have been written to show that Christianity has emasculated the world, that it shoved aside the enlightenment and wisdom of Hellas for a doctrine of superstition and ignorance.

Many humanists have argued that happiness involves a combination of hedonism and creative moral development; that an exuberant life fuses excellence and enjoyment, meaning and enrichment, emotion and cognition.

Many who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lamppost.

Many prominent scientists - including Darwin, Einstein, and Planck - have considered the concept of God very seriously. What are your thoughts on the concept of God and on the existence of God?

Marking dynamos for repair $10,000.00-2 hours labor $10.00; knowing where to mark $9,990.00.

Mark, therefore, the ordinary theory of practical religion, what it leads to. Charity is great, but the moment you say it is all, you run the risk of running into materialism. It is not religion. It is no better than atheism - a little less.

Meslier was the most singular phenomenon ever seen among all the meteors fatal to the Christian religion.

Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power.

Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian.

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.

Mass Man, the universal psychopath, is born when the individual ego is weakened to the point at which it loses separate identity and is forced, for security, to merge with the mass.

Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or oppressors.

Me pray? Never! I'm an atheist.

Mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty - to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it.

Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.

Misery motivates, not utopia.

Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.

Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.

Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete.

Monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more God and become atheism

Morality does not depend on religion.

Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.

Most successes are unhappy. That's why they are successes - they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.

Most true believers, when faced with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, will hold on to those beliefs even more strongly.

My answer would be definite yes! Destructive atheism, in my view and the view of the Church, is part of a much larger picture - cosmic warfare, that is, between God and Evil, between God and Satan.

Mr. Lincoln had no hope, and no faith, in the usual acceptation of those words.

My business in life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned. The freedom is itself a positive and never-failing enjoyment to me, after the bondage of my early life.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

My last fear, the fear of God, died with my faith.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there.

Nature is not personal. She is the compound of all these processes which move through the universe to effect the results we know as Life and of all the ordinances which govern that universe and that make Life continuous. She is no more the Hebrew's Jehovah than she is the Physicist's Force; she is as much Providence as she is Electricity; she is not the Great Pattern any more than she is the Blind Chance.

My reason is not framed to bend or stoop: my knees are.

Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason that he is a man.

My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can't.