Best 1717 quotes in «atheist quotes» category

Most people past college age are not atheists. It's too hard to be in society, for one thing. Because you don't get any days off. And if you're an agnostic you don't know whether you get them off or not.

Most sermons sound to me like commercials - but I can't make out whether God is the Sponsor or the Product.

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

My atheism doesn't define my day-to-day life at all. But I realize - and maybe it is because, unlike people who sort of stay comfortably in a religion, I had to do a lot of thinking and reading before I realized that I was an atheist.

My dad was a militant atheist, or is a militant atheist. My mum was sort of bought up in a religious family because she was a Protestant from Ireland but wasn't especially religious.

My dear friend, do not imagine that I am vain enough to ascribe our success [Revolution] to any superiority . . . If it had not been for the justice of our cause, and the consequent interposition of Providence, in which we had faith, we must have been ruined. If I had ever before been an atheist, I should now have been convinced of the being and government of a Deity!

My dog is an atheist: he no longer believes in me.

My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.

My father is an atheist. My mother is Buddhist. They encouraged my siblings and me to take the best part of other religions to make our own belief system.

My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks.

My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

My paternal grandmother would not light a fire on the Sabbath and piled all Sunday's washing-up in a bucket, to be dealt with on Monday morning, because the Sabbath was a day of rest--a practice that made my paternal grandfather, the village atheist, as mad as fire. Nevertheless, he willed five quid to the minister, just to be on the safe side.

My parents were secular. I am an atheist.

My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them.

My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them." I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits - the relevant fruits - are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends.

My studies in Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and science are all summed up in the image of a mouse called man running in and out of every hole in the Cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.

My question would be whether there is active persecution of atheists.

Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn't come right out and say there's nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism's answer to theism is not atheism but benign neglect. People are welcome to believe in God, though not a God who makes a difference in the natural order.

My wife and I have long discussions about [George] Carlin, and we refuse to accept that he died an atheist. It's just, confounding. When I talked to Kelly [George Carlin's daughter] about it, she said that George Carlin once took her at about 12 years old and said, "I've figured it out." And he says it in one of his specials sort of - he goes, "We're all energy and we're all connected. That goldfish you have, you, me, that boot laying in the street, we're all pieces of light to a giant electron.

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema.

[Nikola Tesla] said he had no interest in the spiritual. He didn't believe in telepathy, didn't believe in any of that stuff, didn't believe in any religion, and he just thought all these people were being superstitious and wanted them to go away. And in that way he was very close to H.P. Lovecraft, who was almost a believing atheist.

No atheist says there is no god!

No church property is taxed and so the infidel and the atheist and the man without religion are taxed to make up the deficit.

No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.

No man will say, "There is no God" 'till he is so hardened in sin that it has become his interest that there should be none to call him to account.

No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth". To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.

[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

None of the miracles with which ancient histories are filled, occurred under scientific conditions. Observation never once contradicted, teaches us that miracles occur only in periods and countries in which they are believed in and before persons disposed to believe in them.

Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

No one ever dies an atheist.

No one knows loneliness like an atheist. When an average person feels isolated, he can call through the depths of his soul to One who knows him and sense an answer. An atheist cannot allow himself that luxury, for he has to crush the urge and remind himself of its absurdity.

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.

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

Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.

Nothing draws people more quickly away from religion than an open mind.

Not only is this not love; I think it is the most diabolical unfairness that was ever taught or devised.

Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an atheist.

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.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

Objectivism advocates reason as man's sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that's all.

Obama has already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change the limits of what one can say publicly. His greatest achievement up to now is that, in his refined non-provocative way, he has introduced into public speech topics which had hitherto been de facto unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity to talk with "enemies" like Iran or Hamas, and so on. This is just what US politics needs today more than anything, if it is to break out of its gridlock: new words which will change the way we think and act.

Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a god.

Ok to appoint atheists or agnostics-no litmus test of faith.

Of all the major religions, or lack thereof, the atheist's is one of the best pretenders: his foundation for all existences, as well as moral behaviors for the permanent good of mankind, begins at science but ends at himself, the Napoleon complex of both intelligence and imagination. On the other hand the anti-theist wouldn't survive without a deity beyond himself to hunt. He doesn't pretend, he simply nullifies his own position.

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.