Best 1717 quotes in «atheist quotes» category

When I was a young man, my mother said to me, 'You can't be a communist without being a militant atheist.' So I had to be a militant atheist because I wanted to be a communist.

When I was growing up I was an atheist, then an agnostic, and then I had a good eight or ten years of being quite a serious Christian.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

When the atheist is told that God is unknowable, he may interpret this claim in one of two ways. He may suppose, first, that the theist has acquired knowledge of a being that, by his own admission, cannot possibly be known; or, second, he may assume that the theist simply does not know what he is talking about.

When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.

When we go to war I will not ask the White Racist next to me what is he Christian or Atheist? I will only expect him or her to kill the enemy as I will.

When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

When you turn the discussion onto talk of religion, you will soon start to reveal a whole range of views ranging from the ardent supporter to the ardent atheist.

Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

Why am I an atheist? I ask you: Why is anybody not an atheist? Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated. I resent anyone pushing their religion on me. I don't push my atheism on anybody else. Live and let live. Not many people practice that when it comes to religion.

Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends.

Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?

Why am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don't find them believable.

Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

Whether we are Christians or Muslims or nationalists or agnostics or atheists, we must first learn to forget our differences. If we have differences, let us differ in the closet; when we come out in front, let us not have anything to argue about until we get finished arguing with the man. If the late President Kennedy could get together with Khrushchev and exchange some wheat, we certainly have more in common with each other than Kennedy and Khrushchev had with each other.

Who are beneficiaries of the Court's protection? Members of various minorities including criminals, atheists, homosexuals, flag burners, illegal immigrants (including terrorists), convicts, and pornographers.

Whoever considers the study of anatomy, I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man's body, and coherence of his parts, being so strange and paradoxical, that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of nature.

Who needs Satan when you have a God like this?

Why should we believe in a god, that doesnt believe in us?

Why isn't there a book about someone losing their faith and it being a beautiful experience?

Why should an atheist pay more taxes so that a church which he despises should pay no taxes? That's a fair question. How can the apologists for the church exemption answer it?

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

With all his sincerity and devotion, the authentic, absolute atheist is after all only an abortive saint, and at the same time, a mistaken revolutionist.

Without cultural indoctrination, all of us would be atheists. Or, more specifically, while many may dream up their own gods as did our ancestors, they would certainly not be ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish’ or ‘Muslim’ or any other established religion. That’s because, without the texts and churches and familial instruction, there are no independent evidences that any specific religion is true. Outside of the Bible, how would one hear of Jesus? The same goes for every established religion.

Without God, life is everything.

With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.

Without religion, man is an atheist, woman is a monster. As daughter, sister, wife and mother, she holds in her hands, under God, the destinies of humanity. In the hours of gloom and sorrow we look to her for sympathy and comfort. Where shall she find strength for trial, comfort for sorrow, save in that gospel which has given a new meaning to the name of "mother," since it rested on the lips of the child Jesus?

With soap, baptism is a good thing.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

With the near-death or clinical near-death phenomenon some people who are brought back from 'death' have reported being alive the entire time they were 'dead.' This phenomenon occurs among people with a wide diversity of religious belief and no religious belief at all - from atheists to Zen Buddhists.

Yes, I think I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as atheist some people will say, Don't you mean agnostic? I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one...etc., etc. It's easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal and that it's an opinion I hold seriously.

Yet the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God-especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side-is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?' "Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.

You ask people, do you pray to [a person or] God. If you say yes to that, you're religious by, presumably, anybody's standards of your conduct. And it's the yes to that question that applies to 40% of scientists. So, there're plenty of atheists who are scientists or not scientists. There maybe a conflict but many people in this country coexist in both worlds.

Women priests. Great, great. Now there's priests of both sexes I don't listen to.

Worry is really just a form of atheism. Every time you worry, you're acting like an atheist. You're saying, "It all depends on me." That's just not in the Bible.

Yes, believers and non-believers and skeptics can all live together and get along. But there cannot be an imperialistic imposition of religion by the state or by the church. All people must be equal--believers, skeptics, disbelievers, atheists, and those who chose religion. Unless we are all deemed equal, and unless the morality of disbelief is deemed the equivalent of the morality of belief, we will simply be tolerated, and that is not the American way.

You believe in a book that has sticks turning into snakes, and you say we are the ones that need help?

You can always tell who went to catholic school, because they're atheists.

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can't Make Him Think.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

You couldn't say 'I had orders.' You couldn't say 'It's not fair.' No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. [...] Not 'Thou Shalt Not'. Say 'I Will Not'.

You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe

You can't fool all of the people all of the time. But it isn't necessary.

You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.