Best 1717 quotes in «atheist quotes» category

Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It's because I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: 'Well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.'

Question with boldness even the existence of a god.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books.

Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness.

Reading the Bible is the fast track to atheism. Reading the Bible means starting at "In the beginning..." and throwing it down with disgust at "...the grace of the lord Jesus be with all. Amen." I'm sure there are lots of religious people who've read the Bible from start to finish and kept their faith, but in my self-selected sample, all the people I know who have done that are atheists.

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

Recently , crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world - burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people - in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper. When was the last atheist riot?

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.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Religion is based ... mainly upon fear ... fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. 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.

Religion is a group of scam artists that sell the calming idea that your body is a temple of God, while your mind belongs to them.

Religion is like drugs, it destroys the thinking mind.

Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.

Religion is against women's rights and women's freedom. In all societies women are oppressed by all religions.

Religion is an act of sedition against reason. Whatever religion is most seductive and likely to draw in victims to surrender their skepticism is the worst.

Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.... During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

Religion is like an ice cold whiskey on a hot day.

Religious leaders will always avail themselves of public ignorance for their own purpose.

Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

Religious liberty in a nation is as real as the liberty of its least popular religious minority. Look not to the size of cathedrals or even to the words on the statute books for proof of the reality of religious freedom. Ask what is the fate of the Protestant in Spain, the Jew in Saudi Arabia, the Arab in Israel, the Catholic in Poland or the atheist in the United States.

Religious believers of the world, you are free to continue to debate the simple, narrow question that divides you from atheists, but you have no right, in so doing, to treat the Humanists of the world with contempt. You owe them a deep debt of gratitude, for not only have they shed much light on a naturally dark world but they have very probably helped civilize your own specific religion.

Religious faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws, moreover the former is never made a condition for the knowledge they teach, but there are always scrupulously careful to take into consideration the possibility that by reason both the agnostic and atheist may attain truth in their own way. Such tolerance may be surprising to religious believers in the West, but it is an integral part of Vedantic belief.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing.

Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need.

Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn't argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we're doing is, we're presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain.

Remember, Jesus would rather constantly shame gays than let orphans have a family.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies.

Rincewind shivered. He was not, of course, an atheist; on the Disc the gods dealt severely with atheists. On the few occasions when he had some spare change he had always made a point of dropping a few coppers into a temple coffer, somewhere, on the principle that a man needed all the friends he could get. But usually he didn't bother the Gods, and he hoped the Gods wouldn't bother him. Life was quite complicated enough.

Richard Dawkins is arguably England's most pious atheist.

Richard Dawkins says he can't be sure God doesn't exist. Well, you know what I do when I'm not sure about something? I go on a big crusade about it and write a bunch of books on the subject. No, wait, that sounds more like what someone with a mental disorder would do. That's one of the crazy things about lots of atheists: They're whole movement is supposed to be about being logical and reasonable, yet they tend to rail against religion is a very mindless way that doesn't seem to serve any more purpose than a tantrum. Perhaps I just don't understand their strong faith in not having faith.

Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.

Science and reason liberate us from the shackles of superstition by offering us a framework for understanding our shared humanity. Ultimately, we all have the capacity to treasure life and enrich the world in incalculable ways.

Satre found atheism 'cruel', Camus 'dreadful', and Nietzsche 'maddening'. Atheists who consistently try to live without God tend to commit suicide or go insane. Those who are inconsistent live on the ethical or aesthetic shadow of Christian truth while they deny the reality that made the shadow.

Science proposes something and then does everything it can to disprove it. Religion is not like that. It proposes something and does everything it can to keep it from being disproved.

[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.

Screw guilt -- I could have sex with 10 men and it wouldn't bother me. I'm an atheist!

Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing "Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.